When: 2025-2026
Role: Senior Product Designer
PM: Limor Mazlin, Melody Chang, Haley Humes
Content: Barbara Gutierrez
Research: Caitlin Nielson
Platform: Mobile Native, Mobile Web, Desktop
Objective:Objective: Led the end-to-end integration of TurboTax offers within Credit Karma. By leveraging member data and AI to deliver a hyper-personalized onboarding sequence—and unifying design, marketing, and legal teams across both brands.
Results: Lorem ipsum
Context
Problem
In tax year 2024...
12M new members started onboarding
4 out of 5 abandoned before starting
The core challenge lies in an intent gap:
CK members arrived with a 'check my score' mindset, but failing to transition that mindset into a tax-filing context.
I shifted the tax year 2025 strategy from a one-size-fits-all funnel to a hyper-personalized onboarding flow.
Additional abandonment drivers
Price is a competitive vulnerability.Users citing price as a barrier are abandoning toward lower-cost competitors — a measurable driver of unit loss.
Competition
Customer Problem
Planning
Going into the season, I had a mandate to build TurboTax's first AI-personalized onboarding experience, but no brief. Nobody had defined what "personalized" meant for a filer, or whether it was even the right lever. What I did have was a known problem: 50% abandonment at the landing page.
Without a brief, I used a simple method to decide what to do next: what do I know, what am I missing, what's the fastest way to close that gap, and what's my actual deadline. I had the abandonment data but not the why, so I ran an unmoderated study , 64 filers split between simple (free-eligible) and complex — fast enough to hit a hard deadline.
Planning steps
Brainstorm provocations
Research plan
Testing scope
Share learnings
Participant verbatim & insights
Two findings shaped the design direction: simple filers needed to see "free" one step away, even out of sequence; complex filers distrusted $0 messaging outright, reading it as too-good-to-be-true above basic complexity.
Hypothesis
If we effectively target and deliver personalized onboarding experience to potentially new Credit Karma members that align with their needs and price sensitivity,
they will perceive greater value in the TurboTax experience
and be more inclined to file to start and complete their taxes with TurboTax.
Success metrics:
Authentication to Start, Start to Complete, Revenue Per Auth
Goal
The goal of this initiative is to unlock rapid experimentation on the welcome screen and surface the most compelling value props to each user.
Stated business target:
Expected FY26 impact for CK2TT: $5.9M incremental revenue and 59K incremental units
Growth Plan
This four-phase plan sequenced the major levers for converting Credit Karma traffic into TurboTax filers — starting with the AI-driven onboarding engine (Solitaire/Recipe K) as the foundational capability, then layering in welcome screen personalization, targeted offer campaigns, and finally structured A/B testing to validate and scale the winning combination.
The phases build on each other: onboarding infrastructure first, then the messaging/content layer on top of it, then the incentive/campaign layer to drive volume, and finally a testing framework to prove out what to scale
