At the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration (#ghc19), me and my colleague, Staff Software Engineer Rocio Montes, presented “Better Together: InnerSource Journey”. In the presentation that centered around Intuit as a case study, we shared what we learned and how we approached the global challenge of transforming the engineering community from “code owners” to “code stewards.” After the talk, I reflected on the GHC experience in a blog. In an article, I coined the phrase “Culture is Queen,” because I realized that everything driving was about transformation at the core of how Intuit works, how we learn, and how we come together to solve problems for our customers.
Why did I choose to equate Culture with Queen? In every company or community you join, the culture that is designed, declared, and adopted is central to every team member’s experience. When you create a culture that is value-driven, purposeful, inclusive, and respectful of each person’s role and intent, you create a sense of belonging. And, yes, you can measure this … whether it’s talent retention, an increase in productivity. or an increase in customer loyalty. I chose the word “Queen” because in the game of Chess, the most flexible and powerful position is not the King. It is the Queen.
The term “customer obsessed” is more than a catchphrase at Intuit. It’s a way of life. Founder Scott Cook started Intuit to make managing a checkbook easier for this wife, and his vision inspired Intuit’s #1 secret weapon, Design for Delight (D4D). In a nutshell, D4D is the act of falling in love with our customers’ problems — digging deep into the root of their problem and the emotion connected to it — and not the team’s solution. The result? Real solutions that truly delight our customers.
D4D, however, is only possible if those providing the solutions are inspired to explore, innovate, and grow. Understanding that fact, I’ve worked with the guidance of Intuit Chief Architect Alex Balazs and senior professional development leaders across the Intuit Tech ecosystem to establish a purpose-and-values driven Tech Culture.
Vision and purpose of Intuit’s Tech Culture
From the start, we viewed Tech Culture as a product, and like our customer-facing product development, we applied the tenets of D4D: Deep Customer Empathy (in this case, Deep Engineer Empathy), Going Broad to Go Narrow (we’re constantly iterating), and Rapid Experiments (within our tech community).
The first step of D4D meant we needed to really know our engineers. To do so, we traveled to Intuit offices around the world, listening to engineer thoughts on what might hinder our vision and about how we can make a global impact. We learned the following:
- The best ways to invest in our technologists.
- How to attract diverse talent who are excited about Intuit’s values and ways of working.
- What our technologists want and need in order to feel a sense of community and pride, as well as for them to be able to develop well-written, well-documented code.
We call this Beautiful Code, which allows Intuit to help power prosperity for our customers. Beautiful Code is also an ongoing journey.
Enabling Beautiful Code and investing in our technologists
To enable Beautiful Code, Intuit is investing in InnerSource, the use of open source software development patterns and practices. Instead of limiting exposure to their manager or team, engineers share their work with a wide audience. It’s a community-focused concept — one that allows developers to build on each other’s work and to create what Alex calls “something bigger than ourselves.”
The “something bigger” is why Intuit is dedicated to open source. It allows engineers to collaborate with other engineers, helping customers and their businesses succeed while simultaneously allowing the engineers to learn new skills and build their reputations.
Learning new skills and building reputations is possible through Intuit’s global work environment, including a number of events designed to teach, inspire, and celebrate our technologists, and to foster a diverse, inclusive, and innovative open source community. Two examples are Global Engineering Days and TechCon.
Global Engineering Days is a chance to focus solely on areas of passion — a bug they are eager to fix, a feature they’ve wanted to add, a tool we need to integrate, a flow that needs fixing. In essence, it’s a time to connect with the global community, solve big customer problems, and write Beautiful Code.
TechCon is an internal Intuit event run by technologists for technologists. Speakers, new content, and face-to-face time with peers is always on the agenda, as well as learning, sharing, inspiring, and becoming inspired. Its purpose is to inspire, but it’s also about investing in the craft.
In addition, Intuit engineers can:
- Enjoy communities of practice, including Tech Community Champions, Capability Innovation Circles, Learning Communities, Architecture Community, Tech Women at Intuit, and more.
- Listen to Tech Heroes, a podcast that highlights and celebrates technologists.
- Join Intuit’s Tech Stories Webinars: here’s the next one.
- Check out our in-depth blogs on Medium.
Intuit’s Tech Culture inspires difference-making solutions
Intuit is creating a Tech Culture that inspires passion and creativity by providing the tools, resources, and support they need to be strong, independent innovators within a diverse, inclusive community. We continue to scale tech culture initiatives via global partnerships (e.g. Stack Overflow Site leads who serve as leaders and point-of-contact for their site’s community of practice) and to produce customer-obsessed engineers through D4D, Design for Delight — a design thinking framework created by Intuit Founder, Scott Cook.
We’re also hard at work supporting critical initiatives, such as Intuit Aid Assist that we developed during a four week program called Project INgage in partnership with Intuit’s Tech Futures team. This program offers free, easy-to-use estimators to help you understand which relief programs make the most sense for your business. During these unprecedented times, we want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to support you and your business.
And, the truth is, we don’t have to work too hard to inspire people who are already passionate about what they do.
As Alex says, “Developers are idealistic by nature. We want to create elegant solutions that make a real difference in the world. That passion makes it possible for us to solve big problems and inspires us to continually push the boundaries of possibility and do tomorrow what we couldn’t do today.”
For those interested in learning more about Intuit’s Engineering Culture, Intuit’s Nimisha Shrivastava explains why she loves being an Intuit developer, and Sushma Rathnam examines Intuit’s best practices for companies who want to foster and scale a diverse engineering organization.
Originally published at https://socialac.medium.com on November 2, 2020.
