We’re Hiring a User Experience Designer at Canopy

What does Canopy do and why should the world care?

Kurt: The tax world is a very messy place. Every year there’s over 8 million delinquent tax accounts. Last year over 3.8 million people didn’t pay their taxes on time. This is 162,000 more than 2010. There is over 600 billion dollars that is owed to the IRS every single year. In fact our tax code is so complicated that 56% of tax returns that are prepared by a paid tax professional have errors. This paradigm has created one of the worlds most underserved industries.

To help remedy the growing pain of the tax industry, we’re creating a new class of software products that is laser focused on creating a painless, delightful, and authentic experience for tax professionals and the clients they serve. Canopy is a refreshing voice in an industry that has been begging for innovation and change. However, that change doesn’t come easily. The challenge that we face is: How do we deliver the best experience for such an intricately complex system?

We’re building a sophisticated suite of software products that add utility to several adjacent pain points that practitioners and their clients face. Every product we build focuses on accuracy, collaboration, and automation. The response we’ve received so far from the accounting and tax world has been overwhelming.

Today, we offer a platform that facilitates client management and tax resolution (the tax collection process). Not too long ago, clients were still expected to divulge thousands of pieces of data on paper. It took hours to complete and return the information that your tax practitioner needed to even start analyzing possible outcomes. With Canopy, clients are guided through an automated survey experience that is able to tailor and adapt the questions asked of the client, based on relevance and applicability. As soon as clients have breezed through the automated on boarding experience, the accountant is immediately able to review analytics that present all of the possible outcomes straight to their desktop. Basically, this one small portion of our application has ensured perpetual data integrity, saved the client hours of free time, and increased the margins of the tax practitioner exponentially.

We’re extremely about passionate making the client experience better and more collaborative, and allowing professionals to leverage their newly found free time to grow their practices.

So if I join Canopy tomorrow, where will we be in 5 years?

Kurt: As we grow we want to become the most demanded product for all things tax. We want to make the lives of all tax practitioners and their clients easier, so much so that Canopy is demanded in every tax interaction. We want to reshape the way that accountants and tax professionals think about taxes. We have a lot of work to do, and an enormous amount of opportunity in front of us.

Tell me about the User Experience Designer role and what you expect from a new hire.

Nate: We’re moving extremely fast as a company. We’re looking for a user experience designer that can keep up with that speed, and still be able to keep a watchful eye on the most intricate details in the user experience. We’re looking for someone that understands what makes products truly great. The perfect candidate would be able to own a project from concept to launch. We need someone that is extremely passionate about quality and precision. This point might seem trite, but our team wears a lot of hats. Because of that we need a designer that understands all angles of design at a visceral level. They should be able to craft delightful interactions and systems for our users, but still have a passion and aptitude for beautiful visual design. The right candidate is a great communicator and collaborator.

Something that’s also really important to us is finding someone that isn’t afraid to make mistakes, and then learn from them as soon as they can. They should have a strong desire to make decisions, and be eager to be accountable for them if they mess up. It’s a part of life. We’re doing something wrong as an organization if we’re always walking on egg shells.

Awesome! What sort of problems will I be solving when I join your team?

Nate: Client collaboration for tax professionals is a unique problem set. We need to ensure that clients are appraised of the right things at the right time. Tax professionals struggle to obtain and keep accurate records. They’re forced into a back and forth paradigm between the client and the IRS. The problem that we need to solve is around equipping professionals with right amount of information, while tailoring an elegant and simple experience for their clients. It’s like a culinary dish: we need the right amount of automation, saturated with simplicity and clarity, with a dash of pleasant beauty.

The perfect designer will be able to come on board, and autonomously craft tailored experiences for these problems that clients and their tax professionals face. They’ll be passionate about making interactions that are normally complex and rife with jargon, into something human and engaging. In this industry we are always extremely conscious and sensitive to adoption. Most of the professionals we work with are used to native windows desktop applications. The experiences we create here need to be easily learnable, but still be innovative and modern.

What is it REALLY like to work at Canopy

Kurt: Culturally speaking, everyone here has a voice. No one has a monopoly on all the right answers, which is why we hire really smart people. That creates a really unique synergy in our team. It removes the politics, and ensures that we’re doing the right things and empathizing with our end users.

On Monday morning every week, we have a standup with the entire team. Every other day we do individual team standups — we try and keep those short and valuable. Most of us will step out for lunch, then come back and wrap up with a competitive foosball game.

Because we’re moving really fast, we work really hard to keep our roadmap and work in the right priority. We’re constantly iterating our products, and validating assumptions we’ve made with our customers as early as possible. Canopy is a typical fast paced startup, so we keep our feedback as short as possible. There’s a lot of collaboration that happens in our team.