Scaling Voice of Customer Sprints to Redefine ICP for Intuit ProConnect Tax

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventures Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, Langley Barth.

At Intuit I work on the professional tax side on ProConnect Tax, essentially TurboTax on steroids for CPAs and accounting firms. Intuit is a big platform company best known for QuickBooks, TurboTax, Credit Karma, and MailChimp, and customer obsession sits in our DNA. We operate across B2B and B2C and lean hard on AI solutions to supercharge workflows. Historically our go-to-market efforts were losing traction amid industry shifts. Accountants lag in terms of technology adoption, and we started seeing product-market fit push further up-market than expected. We lacked internal alignment and a deep enough understanding of customers to pivot messaging toward the high-value segment.

The core problem was that we did not actually understand this new high-value cohort. These are bigger, more complicated firms with layered workflows, more stakeholders, and unmet needs that look nothing like the smaller shops we knew cold. Everything else downstream depended on cracking that. Get the cohort right and the ICP definition falls out of it, messaging follows, and you have a real cross-functional strategy spanning product, marketing, and sales. Get it wrong and you are guessing in three directions at once.

The obstacles were real. PMMs already carry heavy ownership, so carving out time for true customer insight often feels impossible. Without a repeatable system, ICP stays a guess, messaging stays shaky, and GTM rests on hope instead of evidence. We also had to navigate seasonality, since accountants are nearly unreachable mid-January through mid-April, overcome the say-do gap, and recruit both customers and prospects at volume.