Over the years, research has proved that innovation is the origin of new value creation and developed from customer centricity. This reflects the fact that when Scott Cook founded Intuit, he prioritized one value above all else: customer obsession. It’s about knowing how quickly teams can understand and deliver what the customer wants.
In the last four years, the company’s release velocity increased by 8x. Today, thanks to the GenAI-powered workforce, development teams at Intuit are revolutionizing the way they work internally, underpinned by investments in AI and data.
On top of it, it’s our relentless drive to ask ‘what next?’ and take bold action that keeps us ahead of the game. I joined Intuit in India straight out of college in 2008, and am now a distinguished software engineer leading technology for Intuit Enterprise Suite.
There’s a lot to share through the lens of my decades-long journey at Intuit in India. My experiences and the teams’ contributions in making QuickBooks available to different geographies—all the while driving platform innovation—has changed the world for Intuit developers and customers.
An exciting time, enabling QuickBooks for the world
In 2015, as part of the global expansion for QuickBooks Online, I was assigned the project of transforming the technology to be global ready. While the capabilities that support QuickBooks were primarily designed for U.S. customers, expanding to the UK, Canada, and Australia took several quarters.
It was a concerted effort to prioritize global considerations in the QuickBooks’ design process. I collaborated closely with product managers and development teams across different regions to identify and establish the foundational elements that would make QuickBooks globally adaptable. We structured the approach around three key elements—language proficiency, product customization, and business logic customization. We also defined and combined several configurations to implement region-specific changes in the product.
The turning point for QuickBooks is when we identified recurring patterns in customization processes related to setup, business logic, reporting, and tax compliance. By externalizing these components and establishing a configuration infrastructure, we enabled developers, product managers, and compliance experts to create and manage region-specific configurations. This approach significantly expedited the launch of new regions, and improved the speed of implementing changes in existing markets.
This also led to the global-by-design manifesto that each developer who builds new capabilities needs to follow to ensure that the platform is ready to unlock newer business opportunities. In a span of six months, the first shift in our innovation—variability platform—led to faster rollout of new reporting, compliance, and setup requirements for multiple regions. Additionally, this allowed us to promptly test the product market fit for new countries. We expedited the rollout of changes across eight global regions—and a core enabler for making some of these shifts happen was Intuit architecture.
Zoom in on modernizing the Intuit architecture
Over the past few years, modernizing the Intuit architecture has become important for product development teams across the company. I’ve been fortunate to witness and participate in the company’s AI-driven expert platform journey. Our services transformation began with converting siloed capabilities into a service-oriented foundational architecture, allowing for simple registration, discovery, and integration of services into the system—and democratization of data, which led to the development of personalized smart products for our customers, while increasing productivity for internal data consumers.
The Intuit City Map provides a hierarchical structure of capabilities tailored for customer value. It makes it easier for developers to identify capabilities in a way that is scalable and customizable, and from which the business also derives value. They significantly accelerate the speed of innovation.
The idea is to eliminate clones. It serves teams to have independent access, enabling faster and more autonomous performance. We have a central service registry that serves as an all-encompassing hub for developers to access the required capabilities easily and efficiently—simplifying their experience. Today, they are able to make requests, such as invoicing or reporting, by simply onboarding, discovering the capability they require, and delivering value.
An equally important part of what the teams are building is self-serve—a clear outcome of the developer platform. It’s not just about building a capability and making it available but ensuring that it is easily consumable by other teams.
I look at it as a pyramid. We develop a capability, and then mature it to accelerate its value. While the initial phase of building capabilities takes time, enhancing self-service options can help teams understand the maturity of those capabilities. The resulting effect is that teams are exceptionally productive from day one.
I’m especially proud that we won the Scott Cook award in November 2023 for building the reporting capability to enable our customers to make faster business decisions across multiple Intuit products. This is a company-recognized accolade awarded to employees who drive innovation.
On a high-level, the changing requirements of customers across our products indicated a need for more flexible reporting options, including the ability to create custom reports and consolidate all their data in one location. Although we had several reporting solutions available, we developed a new one from scratch that not only meets current needs but is also designed to adapt for future requirements.
It was a challenging process. We had to establish a suitable data infrastructure, select the appropriate horizontally sharded data store, and develop a new engine capable of processing and analyzing data efficiently. It was done to deliver an experience that scales across several form factors and companies with large amounts of data.
We continually worked with our customers to validate what we were building and address their needs. Additionally, each component of the platform was designed in a loosely coupled way so that different product teams could also integrate and leverage the same solution for their products.
As a result, several reporting requests are being served every day by the capability—crunching hundreds of TBs of data across QuickBooks Online, Virtual Expert Platform and Expert Hiring. Every product leverages the self-serve infrastructure to manage data ingestion, curate data models, author reports and insights.
Strategic thinking 2.0
At the heart of Intuit’s self-serve developer portal is to think how teams will utilize and consume capabilities. The idea is to build a recipe, and not a dish.
The questions that I often ask my team:
Can the focus be on building capabilities that are ready to evolve from a customer perspective?
Can we design the capability with a multi-year focus?
Are our capabilities extensible to meet the future needs of our customers ?
What makes a developer platform stand out are its core ingredients. By building APIs and ensuring that they are accessible to more people allows for wider usage and increased value derived from the platform—enhancing overall developer productivity and experience.
Our commitment to precision, with clean data and AI
Our efforts to improve developer experiences with clean data initiatives have paved the way for growth. We leverage capabilities and utilize clean, error-free data, while collaborating with AWS to develop scalable solutions that adapt to our evolving needs.
With that, AI has made our innovations exceptionally robust. An example is Intuit Assist for QuickBooks, a GenAI-powered financial assistant, available on the QuickBooks platform. It provides significant advantages to our customers, offering a “done for you” experience.
Amongst many small businesses, Kim Cross, owner of Zhi Bath & Body, who became an Intuit Assist for QuickBooks customer during the beta launch, says “I was spending the majority of my time doing manual, administrative tasks that didn’t allow me to do what I got in business to do. When I started using QuickBooks Online, I loved how it automatically generated reports for me and helped me track my goals and growth. But the addition of Intuit Assist has truly made an impact on the time and effort I have to spend completing manual tasks like creating estimates and invoices.” That said, devoting our resources to self-serve capabilities to expedite product delivery without compromising on quality always leads us to customer-driven innovations.
All in all, I’ve had the opportunity to look at different tech shifts at Intuit. Today, I’m eager to further chart my course in the company—especially with the recent development of Intuit Enterprise Suite—an exciting frontier for customers.
Here at Intuit, we’re all about taking care of our teams and making sure everyone is part of our journey to the top. Whether you’re fresh out of school or a seasoned engineer, each day brings opportunities for growth, learning, and reaching new heights. Come join us and see for yourself.