US sales tax has 12,000+ jurisdictions, each with unique rates, rules, and filing requirements. PwC wanted to turn a consulting-led tax advisory into a scalable software product — a hypothesis many inside the firm doubted. I led product design from first sketch to shipped platform. The product was acquired by Avalara, which was purchased by Vista Equity Partners for $8.4B in due course.
Can 12,000 tax jurisdictions be absorbed into a product simple enough to replace a consultant?
Design lead from first sketch to shipped platform; managed a five-person UX team; 100+ contextual inquiry sessions with finance teams.
Acquired by Avalara, with design cited as a key factor — later part of Vista Equity Partners’ $8.4B purchase.
Every business selling across state lines faces the same nightmare: 12,000+ tax jurisdictions, each with different rates, different rules for what's taxable, and different filing deadlines. A company with customers in 30 states might owe sales tax in all 30, each calculated differently, each filed on a different schedule. Most businesses were managing this with spreadsheets, outside counsel, and prayer.
PwC saw the opportunity: transform their consulting-led tax advisory into a self-service software product. But they had never shipped a product before — they were a services firm trying to become a software company. The tax expertise was deep. The product design capability was zero.
I was brought in to lead design from a blank canvas: no existing product, no design team, no design system. Just a room full of tax experts and a thesis that this problem could be solved with software.
“After 100+ contextual inquiry sessions, the pattern was clear: finance professionals didn't need more tax data. They needed to see — at a glance — where they had exposure, how much it was, and what to do about it. The job to be done was feeling compliant, not crunching numbers.”
The core design challenge was progressive disclosure at scale: how do you make a domain with 12,000 jurisdictions, dozens of nexus types, and constantly changing rates feel manageable to a finance professional who is not a tax specialist? The answer was to organize everything around the user's actual job — being compliant — not around the tax system's internal logic.
An interactive US map that showed, at a glance, where a business had tax obligations — color-coded by status: filing, not filing, exposure risk. Users could drill from national view down to state, county, and municipality. This one screen replaced weeks of manual research.
Step-by-step flows that broke complex tax decisions into manageable tasks. Contextual help embedded PwC's tax expertise directly in the interface. Real-time validation caught compliance errors before they happened. Intelligent defaults reduced input burden by drawing on historical patterns.
Drag-and-drop field mapping that recognized common tax data formats across 65+ financial systems. Clear visual hierarchy separated required fields from optional data. Preview of resulting calculations before commitment — so finance teams could validate before they filed.
A single view of tax obligations across all jurisdictions — estimated exposure, filing status, upcoming deadlines. The dashboard reframed the experience from “am I in trouble?” to “here's exactly where I stand.” Audit-ready documentation generated automatically.
The firm wanted an “ask an expert” chat inside the product. It would have quietly re-created the dependency the product existed to remove. Shipping without it forced the interface to be sufficient on its own.
Twelve thousand jurisdictions were the database, not the interface. We refused a browse-everything architecture in favor of exposure-first: where you owe, how much, what to do. Completeness lost the argument to clarity.
Power users asked to edit determination rules per jurisdiction. We declined — a compliance product that lets customers quietly break compliance is a liability engine. Overrides required documented justification instead.
TaxVerse was acquired by Avalara, the category leader in tax compliance infrastructure. Avalara was subsequently purchased by Vista Equity Partners for $8.4B. Product design quality and user experience were cited as key factors in the acquisition decision.
75% reduction in time spent on tax determination for typical client scenarios. User satisfaction scores increased 28 points post-implementation. The design approach was established as a model for future PwC digital products.
The design system I built scaled from 3 to 15 products within 18 months. Time-to-market for new tax domain products accelerated 40%. Consistent experience across the expanding tax solution ecosystem.
Built and led a team of 5 UX designers and strategists from scratch. Established design as a strategic function within PwC's New Ventures practice — not just visual execution, but a driver of product-market fit and acquisition value.
“The hardest part wasn't the tax complexity — it was convincing a services firm that a product could replace a consultant. Once finance teams saw their exposure on a map instead of in a 40-page report, the argument was over.”
The evidence suggests otherwise. Happy to compare notes.
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