How Intuit uses Plasmic to go to market in half the time during tax season

Each year, Intuit experiences a surge in traffic around tax filing season, providing a critical window to conduct iterative customer experiments. The faster the teams can ship, the faster they can improve the experience for users and achieve goals

50%

Less time to create pages

100%

More experiments launched

50%

Less time to implement pages

Challenge

Each year, Intuit experiences a surge in traffic around tax filing season, providing a critical window to conduct iterative customer experiments. The faster teams can design, implement, and deploy new content, messaging, and features, the faster the company can improve the experience for its users and achieve its business goals. Our partners in Intuit's Marketing Technology team launch dozens of experiments each quarter on the marketing website to drive more conversions. This includes the product selection pages for Intuit's flagship TurboTax product, seen by millions every day. The team uses a homegrown CMS platform to deliver these experiments.

Prior to Plasmic, Intuit faced the following challenges:

  • Only a fixed set of CMS layout templates and building blocks are supported. Experiments strive to think outside the box, often calling for very new and different user experiences.
  • All the building blocks are implemented entirely in code by software engineers.
  • The number of experimentation iterations per tax season was bottlenecked by engineering velocity, not traffic and user segmentation.

"We only have a window of 6-8 weeks leading up to a tax season peak to launch experiments, where we launch, get confidence in results, and roll it into the baseline. With everything from small tweaks to big swings, Plasmic helps us more than double what we can do within this short window. We were able to find significant conversion rate lift with Plasmic."
Nate Winn
Product Manager
Intuit

Goals

To accelerate experimentation, the team is focusing on the following key areas:

1

Democratize implementation

Enable non-developers, such as designers and marketers, to implement new content and variations quickly.

2

Double the number of experiments conducted per season

Reduce the cost of implementation to drastically increase the number of experiments running in A/B tests.

3

Incremental adoption

Work within the existing tech stack and allow teammates to start with limited surfaces, without requiring a full re-implementation or port of existing work.

4

A scalable approach

Allow many teams to build experiments in parallel without conflicting with each other, scaling with business needs.

The Plasmic approach

James Armenta, the lead engineer defining a new process of rapid experimentation and innovation, evaluated a number of options — from evolving their existing CMS platform, to other page-building solutions. He needed something that could easily plug into Intuit's existing tech stack, while enabling non-engineers users to create rich visual content quickly.

With Plasmic, Intuit found a solution that helps with:

  • WYSIWYG page and component builder: Plasmic Studio makes it easy for anyone to visually create new pages and content, shipping to production with high design fidelity and speed.
  • Accelerate A/B testing: Plasmic projects can be easily cloned, tweaked, and immediately deployed to a user segment with minimal developer involvement.
  • Seamless integration: Plasmic flexibly integrates into any codebase, making it easy to leverage existing pipelines and workflows. It even supports bringing your existing components into the drag-and-drop editor.
  • Team empowerment: Plasmic enables teams outside of engineering (e.g. in marketing and design) to implement and own their experiments, without requiring a developer in the critical path. This allowed them to quickly scale their experimentation efforts.

"Plasmic has provided a huge boost for us. Developers can focus on code rather than content, while design teams can build components and content that seamlessly integrates into our existing stack. By enabling these teams to craft their own experiments, Plasmic lets us ship over twice as fast and expedite our learnings."
James Armenta
James Armenta
Intuit