Intuit treats a follow-me-home as watching, not an interview

A founder who is good at sitting with customers does not, by that fact, leave the company the same habit. The habit has to be a sequence other people can run, or it leaves with the person who had it.

Intuit's note, updated on 13 March 2025 and written by the Intuit Blog team, is the company's account of that attempt. Every employee, it says, is expected to think like an entrepreneur, and creating, inventing and improving customers' lives is everyone's job. The method is to turn the individual ability of the founder, Scott Cook, into organisational capabilities that activate all employees.

It calls the method Design for Delight, a set of principles: Deep Customer Empathy, Go Broad to Go Narrow and Rapid Experimentation. This note covers only the first, and says the second comes later. The goal is to "fall in love with the customer's problem, not a solution." Sasan Goodarzi, its CEO, is quoted: "In order to win, we must be far more customer-obsessed." Empathy here means shared understanding, gained by watching people, their behaviour, their patterns and their surroundings, including what hurts and what blocks the goal.

The first step is a customer follow-me-home. Go to where the problem happens, so the team sees behaviour rather than second-hand talk. The page says to embrace and savour the surprise, and to spend 30 to 90 minutes with each customer. Observe first. Ask them to show you second. Only then ask something like "Why did you choose to do it that way?" A follow-me-home, it says, is not an interview.

The example is a QuickBooks Online team learning how customers send invoices. Find a customer through Intuit Studios, people you know or anyone in that group. Visit them, watch, ask why and thank them. Debrief immediately, even on the way back.

The second step is a deep probing interview, kept separate on purpose. The visit shows what people do. The interview is for why, and it belongs to a behaviour that just happened: a trial started, a product dropped, a subscription cancelled. Hold it close to that moment, ideally within minutes or hours. Do not advise, and do not sell. The aim is to understand the behaviour, not to change it. Plan on 45 to 60 minutes. The first answer may not be the real reason, so ask again until the pain and the goal are actually stated.

The third step is a customer problem statement, written before anyone solves anything. If the team has not agreed the problem, the page says, it will struggle to work as a team. Write several statements from problems you have seen, not from speculation, one for each problem, in concrete words. Then pick one. It must be the customer's problem, not Intuit's, and it must not smuggle in a solution. The template covers who the customer is, what they are trying to do, the barrier, the root and the emotion. The problem a team commits to can become the benefit it later tries to deliver.

The fourth step is an ideal state: a future in which the problem is solved so fully that the outcome seems almost impossible. The page uses Khan Academy's aim of "providing a completely free education to every single person on earth." Write a few from the customer's side and keep the one that would move the team. Name the future, the biggest benefit and the feeling. Drafting should take 15 to 30 minutes.

The visit fails its purpose if the debrief never becomes a problem the group will stand behind, or if that sentence names the product they already meant to build. The order is the observation, then the agreement, then a future almost out of reach. The first conversation is not a pitch.

A design thinking session is a place to run that order on one live job, with the people who meet the customer and the person who would sponsor a build reading the same problem statement before anyone proposes a fix.