What is horizon planning?
At Intuit, we aspire
to deliver best-we-can-be results in the current period for employees,
customers and shareholders, while building the foundation for a stronger future
– a concept we call “True North.” Horizon planning is a key set of principles
we employ to balance our short- and long-term investments.
Our horizon planning
principles are based on Geoffrey Moore’s Harvard Business Review article, “To Succeed in the Long Term, Focus on the Middle Term.”
We use these principles to divide our offering portfolio into three stages:
- Horizon 1 – Our established offerings that deliver most of our current revenue, such as like QuickBooks and TurboTax.
- Horizon 2 – Our fast-growing emerging offerings, such as like Intuit Online Payroll and GoPayment.
- Horizon 3 – Our experiments that form our pipeline of potential new businesses. Visit Intuit Labs to check out some of our latest experiments).
Measuring Offering Performance
A common mistake
companies make is measuring the progress of all their offerings using standard
business metrics – like revenue, profit and customer acquisition – no matter
what stage those offerings are in. Horizon planning helps us avoid that mistake
by providing guidance on what our expectations should be from offerings at each
stage in their maturity.
H1 offerings aspire to
deliver delightful shareholder results – top- and bottom-line growth – while
continuing to innovate and create efficiencies that are reinvested to
accelerate customer and revenue growth.
H2 offerings aspire to
deliver delightful market results – gaining market share and growing customer
and revenue growth much faster than our company’s average growth. H2 offerings
focus on scaling up the business with a trajectory towards profitability.
H3 offerings aspire to
deliver delightful “love metrics” – a validation that the H3 team has found an
important problem and has created an offering that delightfully solves it. Our
love metrics include delivering a measurable customer benefit, gaining active
use and positive word-of-mouth (typically a high Net Promoter Score). H3 teams start their journey by
delivering love metrics from one anchor customer and eventually expanding to a
cohort of customers. Scaling the business doesn’t start until the offering
graduates to H2.
H3 teams are also
tasked with developing a compelling business model hypothesis and validating
that the offering provides enough value that some customer, which may or may
not be the user, is willing to pay for it.
Assigning Leaders to Offerings
We also know that
offerings require different leadership skills based on their life stage.
Horizon planning helps Intuit be more thoughtful in whom we assign to different
teams.
H3s are for leaders
who thrive on ambiguity and enjoy the frequent pivoting that’s part of the
exploration. H3 teams are typically very small – no bigger than two pizzas can
feed – and team members frequently wear multiple hats.
H2s are for leaders
who can manage what is often chaotic meteoric growth while focusing on a
critical few growth levers among the many options that are available. The H2
team is larger than the H3 team, and team members play more specialized roles.
H1s are for leaders
who excel at managing large organizations with well-run processes. H1 offerings
typically consist of several two-pizza teams, each playing a specialized role
that must be coordinated with the rest of the organization to deliver a
consistently great customer experience.
By setting the right
expectations of our offerings and the people who lead them, we’ve been able to
nurture a culture of innovation while still delivering the bottom-line results
needed to fuel the company.