Diego Rodriguez of Intuit: Building design culture into big business

Episode 30 of the Design Better Podcast

Diego Rodriguez has had a remarkable career at the intersection of design, business, and education. He has served as Global Managing Director of design firm IDEO, founding faculty member of Stanford’s d.school, and is currently Executive Vice President, Chief Product and Design Officer at Intuit. In this episode, we discuss how design can influence broader business goals. Diego shares Intuit’s unique approach to product design, and the need to build a certain level of trust and empathy with customers when designing financial products.

Takeaways:

• How to build design into the culture of an organization

• How Intuit acts on its mission to Design for Delight

• How design thinking brings a diversity of perspectives to the design process 

Bio

Diego Rodriguez is Executive Vice President, Chief Product and Design Officer at Intuit. He guides the design and delivery of Intuit’s ecosystem experiences and works with its product management and design communities to forge best practices and deliver seamless, end-to-end customer journeys.

Before Intuit, Diego was a Partner at IDEO. As Global Managing Director, he led the creation of IDEO’s growth ventures, including IDEO U, CoLab, and Creative Difference. Prior to this, Diego was the Managing Director of IDEO Bay Area and also founded and scaled a new IDEO discipline called Business Design, which has since become a core part of the firm’s offering. 

A founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (aka “the d.school”), Diego is committed to educating future innovators. He is currently a Professor of the Practice at Boise State University and a member of the Harvard University Board of Overseers. He was previously a Visiting Scientist at the MIT Media Lab and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.