Every year Intuit hires a group of talented designers recently out of school. In 2013 that I was in that group. In 2014 I led their week of functional training and put them on a real project outside the classroom.

This is the story of how I got four young Intuit designers to solve for a non-profit in a week.

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The challenge

New hires in Intuit’s Rotation Development program receive four weeks of training. Much of this is in a basic conference room with speaker after speaker. The fourth week is the functional training week, and I volunteered to create a more interesting week than I had experienced.

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My approach

Design never exists in a vacuum, and designers never like staying in the classroom. So I partnered with a local environmental stewardship non-profit to create an app concept for them in a week long charttte.

The designers had a kickoff meeting with the non-profit’s board and key field workers. They then spent the day observing the field workers in the parks and leading tours.

Over the next few days they went broad then narrow on possible solutions to a number of problems observed in the field.

On the final day they presented a focused solution on their favored problem to a group of lead and principle designers at Intuit.

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The impact

The two teams of two each delivered one app concept to the non-profit that could help improve key parts of their organization. While we didn’t have capacity to build any working software, the non-profit could easily take the concepts to a dev partner and build out the tools.

The designers got to start off their Intuit experience with a fun, meaningful project.