A strategic bet, made in sixty days, thriving for years. One design system serving every Intuit customer, pitched as a new hire, executed across three vehicles.
Four cornerstone products. TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. Four independent design systems. One under utilized platform. The same component, built four times. Engineering hours duplicated. Ship dates slipping because teams couldn't share work.
My starting position: zero reports, zero management authority, zero existing relationships, zero political capital. The one thing I had was a sixty day window before the door closed.
The business read: one investment that accelerates every product team, not four parallel bets competing for the same resources. Twelve branches of work. Three of them mine.
Figma revamp, theming framework, IDS adoption. Foundations and patterns was my branch.
Documentation refresh (my branch) was sequenced first to ground the rest.
Socialize and sharing (my branch). The feedback loop into the rest of the program.
Eight VPs across four cornerstones, convinced in sixty days. But the "yes" wasn't an endorsement of a design system. It was ceding control of their BU's design infrastructure to a central team. A governance decision with real resourcing and dependency implications. What it gave me: air cover to execute, permission to convene the BUs, and a mandate I could quote.
Joined Intuit as Principal IC
IDR. Better Together presented
Roadmap accepted
Branch 4 launches
Block. Branch 4 paused
IC to Manager. Team build
Brand rollout live
Front Door ships
Grown on the team after the IC to Manager move.
Senior to Staff promotions on my team.
Sourced through internal mobility.
One full time conversion on the team.
Interns to full time converts.
The new source of truth for IDS. Documentation, tooling, and an AI ready home. Shipped March 2026.
Intuit's new identity is now rolling out to every cornerstone product through IDS. Live across all four since 2025.
Not dead. Folded into Front Door's architecture, where patterns and documentation belong together.
"Vision is a multi year compounding asset. Projects compound year over year only if the strategy underneath them is durable enough to survive the projects you lose."