Did you ever happen to deliver a well-performing model that no one ended-up using? Did you happen to work a long period on delivering end-to-end solutions just to find out your model output is not useful for its consumers? We can avoid wasting our time and effort if we understand what our customer actually needs. Design Thinking is a method for creative problem-solving that has been broadly adopted by world-class design firms like IDEO and many of the world’s leading brands like Apple, Google, Samsung, and GE.

One of the focus of design thinking is rapidly experimenting and prototyping your product in multiple phases of development to ensure full alignment between customer needs and model’s stakeholders. In this round table, we will briefly introduce a few of the principles & methods for customer-driven innovation as they applied in Intuit – including conducting ‘follow me home’s, setting up customer benefit metrics, performing multiple experiments beyond AB testing and designing rapid experiments for fast, valuable feedback. We will brainstorm & share the best practices to ensure our work as data scientists is aligned with the customer’s needs, discuss the potential trade-offs, and deep dive into the various ways in which we can ensure optimal customer’s delight.