What is a passion project?
Passion projects are projects people pursue for creative fulfillment. These side projects tend to fall outside a worker’s everyday duties and are all about indulging personal passions and bringing big ideas to life.
Major tech companies are increasingly encouraging their workforces to pursue passion projects to spark innovation and inspire their employees. The idea is to encourage workers to explore their wildest ideas without judgment or boundaries. Providing the opportunity to pursue passion projects keeps teams happy and engaged while fostering outside-the-box thinking and problem-solving.
7 great passion project ideas
Here are some passion project examples to help you brainstorm one to start in your school or company:
- Develop a feature or tool you’ve always dreamed of creating.
- Code an app to support a cause you’re passionate about (like environmental sustainability or women’s safety).
- Organize a fundraiser to support a local charity or organization associated with your passion.
- Start a recycling project if you’re passionate about the environment and sustainability.
- Launch a school or work campus garden to promote gardening and healthy eating.
- Start a club rooted to a particular cause or passion at school or your workplace.
- Learn a new skill and teach it to your team or coworkers.
- Take on a group project to paint a mural or beautify an area in your local community.
- Initiate a social media campaign to raise awareness for your favorite cause or organization.
Tips on how to start a passion project
Intuit supports engineers’ passion for pursuing their dream projects and improving the products our customers use every day. If you’re ready to explore your interests and improve your company’s social impact but aren’t sure of the first step, here are some tips on how to start a passion project.
Brainstorm or reflect
Examine your interests. Consider your hobbies, causes you support, and things you’ve always wanted to accomplish. Are there any causes you’re incredibly passionate about? A work-related challenge you’ve always wanted to fix? A product you’ve always wanted to develop?
Compile a list of your ideas. If you have trouble brainstorming, think about activities you lose track of time while doing because you’re so engaged in them. That’s a good place to start.
Do your research
Look at current trends. Are there any events happening that stand out locally or around the world? Once you identify some opportunities, see if there are any projects or events you can create around these trends or issues. Environmental awareness is a popular example of this. If you’re passionate about it, you could start a recycling program or conduct a park cleanup in your area.
Work as a team
Community and collaboration are essential parts of what a passion project means. Seek out peers, family members, or friends who share your interests. While researching, you may also come across businesses or nonprofits already launching projects around your passion. These are great opportunities for networking and collaboration. Ultimately, we all go further together.
Find out what or who needs your help
Living in your local community (or working at your current job) daily gives you perspective into what might be missing. See if there are any holes or gaps you can fill with your passion project. This could be as simple as building a garden or hosting a food drive or as complex as providing mental health resources for your local community population or workplace department.
Passion project example: A look at Global Engineering Days (GED)
GED reflects Intuit’s culture of empowering teams to drive end-to-end outcomes and work autonomously—with speed and velocity. The goal is to empower our best and brightest tech talent to choose their own innovation adventure, take ownership of their professional growth, and harness data-driven decision-making to drive the best possible customer outcomes and experiences.
However, GED is not a hackathon or contest. Twice a year—in the spring and in the fall—Intuit gives our global engineering community a week to set aside their scheduled work and spend time diving into creative projects they’re particularly passionate about. It’s a week of uninterrupted time and space for engineers to work together across sites and teams to expand their skills and ensure Intuit continues to deliver on its promise to power prosperity for millions of customers.
Aside from the teams innovating and the customers benefiting, there are no winners. And it’s not a theoretical exercise—many of the breakthroughs driven by GED are directly integrated into our platform and used by customers globally.
The real-world impact of GED
A few past GED projects that our teams have worked on that are now available for customers include:
- Extracting, uploading, and auto-filling tax data in TurboTax Desktop.
- The capability for eligible QuickBooks customers to buy, sell, and hold bitcoin.
- Scaling our AI-powered autocomplete technology internationally to all US and global QuickBooks Live and QuickBooks Online Accountant Transaction Collaboration customers (to reduce repetitive data entry by supporting right-to-left and left-to-right languages).
These GED projects help us impact our customers’ lives in real-world ways. They also showcase the innovation and progress that results when bright minds team up in a fun environment with endless possibilities.
Web 3 and GED
GED paved the way for Intuit to launch its first decentralized app—a Web 3 marketplace for internal research and experimentation—that gave our teams firsthand experience with blockchain, smart contracts, and crypto tokens. The marketplace started as a GED project. Teams could earn Intuit’s internal crypto tokens and purchase a limited-edition NFT just for being part of GED.
While the tokens have no actual monetary value and the marketplace is only a sandboxed environment, it enabled our technologists to experience and experiment with new technologies.
The importance of passion projects
A passion project can be more than an opportunity to create change through something you love. People coming together to have fun and do what brings them joy can result in real progress and innovation, as the GED summit proves.
Intuit takes our mission of powering prosperity for everyone seriously. For us, prosperity means more than just financial resources. We hope you take these passion project ideas and tips and use them to create something truly inspiring. Touching others with your gifts is what makes life truly fulfilling. And, at that point, you’re living prosperously.
To experience firsthand how GED and passion projects supercharge an already great tech environment, visit our Careers page and join us on our journey to build a technology platform that powers prosperity around the world.