Product Design: A Guided Tax-Filing Product Like TurboTax for Individual Filers

Design a tax-preparation product like TurboTax that walks individuals through preparing and filing their income tax returns. ```hint Start from the shoebox Tax situations vary enormously. Before listing features, pick a kind of filer and think about what they must gather and understand before they can answer even the first question about their return. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Are we designing a new tax product from scratch, or improving TurboTax as it exists today? - Which returns are in scope: US federal and state individual returns only, or business returns and other countries too? - Is the main business goal more filers overall, more paying filers, or more filers coming back the next tax year? - Can the design include paid access to human tax experts, or should it stay fully self-service? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A goal for the product and a chosen filer segment, justified by how painful and how valuable that segment's tax situation is. - The filer's journey from collecting documents to an accepted return, with the specific pain points along it. - Prioritized solutions, including how the product earns trust on accuracy, privacy and price. - Success metrics with guardrails such as rejected returns, amended returns and complaints about upselling. - The main system pieces a PM must reason about: tax rules that change every year, document import, electronic filing, and the traffic peak before the filing deadline. ### Follow-up Questions - A filer learns after filing that the product missed a deduction they qualified for. What should the product do, and how would you measure how often it happens? - How would you decide which features are free and which are paid without eroding trust? - If a free government filing tool became available for simple returns, how would your strategy change?