TurboTax — James Barraza

01 — Context

Mobile, at the scale of millions

TurboTax serves millions of customers across web and mobile, where every flow has to work for people from very different financial situations — and where even small friction compounds quickly at this scale.

I worked on the TurboTax mobile app and on the Data-In team, which spanned two related problems: getting customer tax data into the product seamlessly (W-2s, 1099s, brokerage imports), and using that data to personalize the experience so each customer felt the product understood their situation.

"Less typing, more knowing."

02 — Approach

Data-In: import & personalize

On Data-In, the goal was to remove as much manual work as possible while making the resulting experience feel tailored. That meant designing flows where customers connected accounts and uploaded documents quickly, and then designing how that information translated into a personalized journey — dashboards, recommendations, and explanations that adapted to each customer's situation.

I partnered daily across product, engineering, analytics, QA, and marketing to ship designs that held up against real usage at scale, and advanced the mobile design system with modular components, documentation, and usage guidance so the team could ship new features faster and more consistently.

data-in / personalization

// personalize the experience to each customer // blank slate, every screen import: W-2 · 1099 · brokerage → tailored dashboard → adaptive recommendations // less typing, more knowing

03 — Previously

Consumer Vision 2020

Before joining the mobile team, I spent the summer of 2017 on a small tiger team at the Intuit San Diego campus focused on the future of finance. Over two weeks, we delivered a vision for the year 2020 — culminating in the Virtual Expert Network, an end-to-end concept for how Intuit could connect customers to human experts on demand.

We mapped both the customer mindset and the experience of the expert partners that would join an extended network. The artifacts and prototypes we produced shaped the company’s mission and product direction in the years that followed.

04 — Outcome

Impact

[Add a concrete outcome for either the mobile / Data-In work or the VEN vision — e.g. import success rate, personalization adoption, a metric from the mobile app, or how the VEN vision shaped a shipped product.]

Even one hard number lands hard here.