The outcome

The headline numbers are nice, but what I love is the everyday impact. People saved two to three minutes per workflow, which really adds up at tax-season scale, and one customer figured it could save them up to $5,000 a year.

The problem

The pandemic made a long-standing gap impossible to ignore. 71% of our tax-pro customers told us eSignature was their number one feature request. They were either chasing physical signatures, which just wasn't realistic with everyone at home, or paying for clunky third-party tools that broke their workflow and introduced errors.

Then the CRA relaxed its rules around digital signatures and the window opened. We had one tax season to build something that actually worked.

My leadership role

I led design from the first problem-discovery conversation all the way to launch, working across teams in Canada, the UK, and the US against a hard tax-season deadline. I ran the alignment workshops, set up co-creation sessions with developers during our global engineering days, and kept a 350-screen, 12-prototype process coherent and moving.

Three countries, a tight timeline, and rules that kept shifting under us. We still launched on schedule.

The process

We ran a triple-diamond process. We started wide with discovery (internal research, competitive analysis, and in-depth interviews), narrowed in on a solution worth building, then iterated fast with prototyping and constant customer testing.

That came to 350+ screen designs and a dozen-plus prototypes, and we were consistently hitting a 9/10 customer love score before we shipped.

Scope and constraints

A tight tax-season timeline, teams across three countries, and rules that were still evolving. We used Innovation Week and our global engineering days to build trust across teams quickly, and we pulled stakeholders in early so there were far fewer surprises at launch.

The problem

Tax pros need software that keeps up with every CRA compliance change, handles the weird edge cases, and never slows down a high-volume, high-stakes workflow.

My leadership role

I owned the design vision and strategy for the Canadian market and worked hand in hand with the UK team. That covered a lot of ground: early discovery, running workshops, prototyping, customer testing, design QA, and partnering with marketing and sales on launches.

I also pushed hard on design quality across the team. We set up critique rhythms and design standards that raised the bar for the whole accountant ecosystem, not just our corner of it.

Features shipped

• Forms Expert: a full suite of forms, worksheets, and information slips.
• OnePay: a pay-as-you-file model for new users.
• Family returns and pension splitting: linking family members into one return view.
• T3 Trust support: full coverage for trust returns.
• Pro Tax Labs: an in-product channel for feedback and co-creation with customers.

Family returns and pension splitting

For households, every person was filed as a separate return. That meant re-keying the same address and shared info every time, and moving credits like tuition, medical, and donations between spouses and dependents by hand. It was slow, and it was easy to get wrong.

So I designed a flow that links a spouse or dependent into one family return, then optimises the shared credits across the household for the highest combined refund. It's all managed from a single connected view.

Enhanced fields: before and after

Here's the kind of quality bar we set as a team. These are the most-used T2 calculation fields, reworked for clearer inputs, inline validation, and consistent steppers.

The problem

Putting together a compilation statement had always been a fragmented, time-consuming slog for accountants, stitched across a handful of disconnected tools that were often complicated and expensive.

My role

I led design from the very first concept through to international expansion, talking with over 300 users across Canada and the UK during discovery and validation. I ran weekly customer sessions (three or four people every single week, through every phase), follow-me-home studies, and co-creation workshops with engineering and product.

The process

We started with in-depth interviews, a big survey, and observational research, actually watching accountants build financial statements in their own environments. That groundwork gave us the confidence to move fast once we got to prototyping, and we kept iterating until we had something customers were calling transformative.

The payoff: 10x adoption in the UK and a 2x jump in Canada inside the first year.

The problem

Our loyal base of accountants had been telling us the same thing for years: the product looked dated. And it wasn't only about looks. The inconsistency was a real usability and compliance risk, and the accessibility gaps were genuine.

My role

I led both the strategy and the execution. We started with accessibility standards and the icon system as our foundation, then worked outward through the most-used forms and workflows. I leaned on the Intuit Design System's accessibility components and layered desktop-specific patterns on top.

The before-and-after says it best. A dated, inconsistent icon library turned into a modern, accessible, coherent system.

Updating without losing your place

ProFile customers work on live tax returns for hours at a stretch, so a forced update at the wrong moment means lost work, and lost trust. I designed a background updater that flags new versions right in the toolbar, installs them quietly while the accountant keeps working, and confirms the current version when it's finished. No interruptions to a return in progress.