Intuit

QuickBooks won by serving owners who were jury-rigging Quicken to keep books. Small businesses stretched Quicken to do their bookkeeping. QuickBooks offered half the functionality at twice the price and became the global leader.

It was aimed at owners who wanted their books handled without jargon. The book's lesson is to size a market by counting nonconsumers and workarounds, not just rivals' sales: "They choose to hire nothing, rather than something that does the job poorly."

Intuit stopped ranking TurboTax feature requests and defined the end state as 'taxes are done'. TurboTax teams had been debating around 150 requested features. Once the goal was 'taxes are done', Intuit prefilled W-2 data in one interview chapter in 2015 and completion rates rose noticeably.

The approach is to take small steps that remove customer work and measure completion. The book describes working without a defined end state this way: "It's like navigating without a compass."

Forcing QuickBooks trial users to call raised revenue but added friction. Intuit tested requiring QuickBooks trial users to call to register for upsells. Revenue rose, but users hit busy phone lines and salespeople.

Intuit now builds per-product metrics such as time saved, so that it measures how well the job gets done and not only revenue and efficiency.