James Helms

A career in brand design, creative direction, and experience strategy led me to Intuit as it was undergoing a massive shift from from desktop product to cloud platform. And more recently, from accountant as customer to strategic partner.

I established a design practice in Plano, recruiting amazing, diverse design talent who’ve grown to become design, product, marketing and customer experience leaders. I established Design Week with the mission to activate design thinking and doing. I sponsor our Innovation Catalysts, Intuit’s community of Design Thinking ninjas, trained to coach customer empathy through observation, broadening and narrowing techniques to find, define and attack big problems worth solving, and rapid prototyping and concept iteration – so Intuit continues to innovate like a start-up.

I offer a design lens to our strategy, putting the needs of our accountant partners and their clients at the center of our priorities. Shifting our emphasis from delivering products that serve professionals to designing services that enable pro-to-client relationships.

I continue to be inspired by emerging talent, art and science, travel and culture, technology and business. And I believe design – a need well-defined and elegantly met – can make a difference, anywhere, every day.