Frank Rodriguez
© Frank Rodriguez 2007-2026

Intuit

One Intuit

Partner Portal

— PLATFORM

Desktop


— DISCIPLINES

Information-Architecture

Product Design

Prototyping


— TOOLS

Figma

FigJam


— TECH

Salesforce

Intuit, Inc.

A financial software company serving over 100 million customers with products including QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Intuit Enterprise Suite.


One Intuit Partner Portal

A unified partner relationship management platform designed to

support Accountant VARs and Tech VARs in selling, implementing, and

supporting Intuit Enterprise Suite (IES) on Intuit’s behalf.


Business Targets

1.6K FY26 target contracts through the wholesale channel

$3M+ FY26 revenue target through the Partner Channel

Role

Lead Product Designer: Partner Portal Workstream

  • Information Architecture: Mapped navigation, sign-up, and profile management across all partner types. Delivered a full IA for the portal covering the partner lifecycle from signup through support.
  • Prototypes & Wireframes: E2E portal experience and partner sign-up flow
  • High-Fidelity Design: Invoices, Subscriptions, Opportunities, deal registration
  • Stakeholder Presentations: Framed research findings as four explicit go/no-go decisions for leadership. Presented portal paradigms to Aprio as a validation vehicle for wholesale accountant design concepts.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Identity: A portal that cannot distinguish which kind of partner it is talking to routes everyone incorrectly, no matter how well the downstream flows are built.
  • Consequence: Wholesale vs. Revenue Share, presented as a radio button, was the highest-risk moment in the flow. The consequences had to be visible before the choice was made.

Scale: Partners had built personal relationships to compensate for the absence of a structured support system.


INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

The IA was the first deliverable and the most consequential. Before wireframes, before screens, the portal needed a structural decision: what is the organizing principle, and does it hold as the product grows?


Partner type became the principle. Not product catalog. Not deal stage. Partner type. Every navigation section, every workflow branch, every default view flows from that single decision. An accountant and a VAR log into the same portal and see different things because the IA resolves their identities at the entry point, not mid-task.


The sitemap was built to be extended, not replaced. New partner tiers, new program types, and new billing models can be added without restructuring what already exists. The decisions made in July 2025 created the conditions for a product that can scale without a redesign.

That is the standard for foundational IA work: it should read like a document that anticipated the future, not one that described the present.


Ex: Information Architecture User-type

THE PROBLEM

Two partner types shared product offerings but operated from different mental models. Accountant VARs led with client relationships. Tech VARs led with product SKUs. The portal treated them as interchangeable. Every friction point downstream traced back to that unresolved question: who are you, and what does that mean for everything you are about to do?

VALIDATION

Information architecture delivered July 27.

Wireframes delivered August 15.


Presented to Aprio in Atlanta on August 28, a 2.5-hour working session with the most sophisticated partner firm in the study. Four go/no-go decisions were brought to leadership with design tied to each outcome.


WHY THIS MATTERS

AI products fail the same way when they do not resolve user identity at the right moment. A system that treats all users as equivalent routes the right output to the wrong person. The question is identical: does the system know who it is talking to before it routes them anywhere? In AI products, a wrong first response often means a closed window and a user who does not come back. That is not a design preference. It is the architecture.