Savor the Surprises: Insights from Intuit

As an entrepreneur or product innovator, it can be all too easy to have tunnel vision on what you think you know. Grinding to push new features, make the product faster/cheaper, and deliver happiness to established customers may seem like the proper approach to growing market share.

However, this focus on incremental improvement can make it difficult to recognize or respond to disruptive innovations that may initially be hiding in plain sight. In a Stanford e-corner episode, Scott Cook (co-founder of Intuit) highlighted an early surprise he had when customers kept filling out a survey ‘wrong’ – with 50% saying they were using the software in an office.

Quicken 5.0

That didn’t make sense to Scott since Intuit was built for personal/home use and there were existing solutions for businesses. The missing piece though, was that the software for businesses was highly complex and was built for accountants. The niche Scott stumbled upon was small businesses that didn’t have a CPA on staff but still needed to keep the company financials in order.

Taking a queue from ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’, Scott soon realized that he had a loyal customer base that was underserved by incumbent small business accounting software. His software was simpler and less expensive and was ‘good enough’ to solve the unmet need of mainstream small businesses. While the large incumbents had more capital and existing relationships in the market, they weren’t able to compete effectively with Intuit because simplifying a complex product is much harder than adding features to a simple one. 

There’s a real skill in being open to surprises. You have to be willing to listen and accept that how you understood the world may have been slightly wrong. It’s a mindset you can hone over time, by falling in love with problems vs solutions and having empathy for your users. Keep in mind that while ChatGPT is certainly impressive, it’s not good at surprises (yet). 

Have you heard of other companies that used surprises to grow and take on market share? Does your company go beyond saying they are customer obsessed and shows deep empathy for users?

PS. - Note that Intuit continues to show customer obsession based on their operating values, blogs, and my experience with their products and top-tier product design team (aka - Womo Iyegha).