Our team conducted 120+ interviews with various different people that could be potential users of our service including immigrants to the U.S., gig workers that use CPAs and qualify for specific tax deductions, and finally 50+ CPAs that were looking for some client management solution during the busy tax season. For outreach, we used cold emails and cold calls, warm lead intros, LinkedIn intros, and in-person visits.

The purpose of conducting multiple interviews was to identify and verify user pain, as a solution offered that either doesn't sufficiently address the user's needs or isn't an actual need that needs to be addressed will not grow successfully. I organized all of the interviews we conducted as a team into an user empathy map to clearly understand the target user perspective.

This design brainstorm made it clear that in terms of user pain and feasibility, a product to help busy CPAs manage clients without active intervention was the most desirable, so my following designs were all aimed at solving this problem.