Values That Underpin Tech Leaders at Intuit
by Natasha Christou Digital Marketing ConsultantWritten by Kayur Desai, Group Manager, Sales
and Marketing for Emerging Markets at Intuit QuickBooks
A day in the life as a tech leader
at Intuit is certainly a varied role, however at the heart are principles that
drive our ambition and achieving our goals.
Core business strategy focus and culture
Leadership is an important role in
all business — determining the course of action and
designating responsibilities among
teams. Particularly, as a tech leader, it’s important to focus
on the core business strategy
while upholding a company culture that is both innovative and
collaborative.
Our strategy primarily embodies
focusing the power of many to drive the prosperity of one. Here at Intuit,
providers of software for accountants, our reputation helps in attracting and
retaining the best talent in the industry from across the world, cooperating as
one to constantly improve our platform. With a strong, diverse team willing and
ready to help each other, along with our global network of partners, we gain
real world insights from the 50 million customers using our platform. These
insights are used to then be delivered back to the customer in the form of an
enhanced product experience.
A strategy I’ve adopted to help
support both our people and company culture is putting aside
time for each of us to share a
personal high and low, encouraging the team to open up and get to know each
other on a personal level. Being a global team, it’s important to integrate us
as one and create a sense of belonging in the company. Our team members are
seen as
individuals, so it’s key to make
meetings and the workday as enjoyable as possible.
Improving customer service to deliver delight
Our co-founder,
Scott Cook, said: “Be dramatically willing to focus on the customer at all
costs, even at the cost of obsoleting yourself.” This concept is vital in the
ever-evolving world of tech. Our number one strategy, Design for Delight (D4D),
is to help our teams be at the forefront in development and to go over and
above to meet our customers’ expectations. We put this concept into practice to
evoke positive emotion throughout the customer experience by producing software
and products that dramatically improve our customers’ lives alongside the below
three principals.
Deep
customer empathy: This allows us to gain a deeper
understanding of our customer, what their pain points are, why, and how they
are currently doing something — and it gives us the inspiration to innovate and
come up with solutions to change their lives, so much so that they can’t
imagine going back to the old way of doing things.
Go
broad to go narrow:
It takes many ideas to get to one great idea. When brainstorming, it is usually
more productive and beneficial to go for quantity first, then narrow these down
to the best one.
Rapid
experiments with customers: Rapid experiments help us make
better decisions based on actual user behaviours. These decisions are based on
facts and experiments that help us gain insight before development to help our
teams align with the customer.
With
this in mind, we roll out the following process with our customers:
- Find the most important unsolved problem for the customer and
focus on this.
- Spend time observing customers. Be on their premises and see
what they do and how they use our product or service.
- Once we know our customer’s problem, we find a solution.
- Work towards an ideal solution for the customer.
Leveraging our tech
We are continuously developing and improving our tech
to support local accountants, bookkeepers, and small and medium enterprise
owners. By applying our D4D strategy, we have noted specific trends for businesses
in South Africa and consequently modified our QuickBooks product to assist with
these trends.
For example, late payments are one of the biggest
challenges in the country — automation from cloud accounting
software for small businesses plays a vital role in invoicing, and can
assist in tracking paid and unpaid invoicing, and sending follow-ups for unpaid
invoices so business owners don’t have to.
Another trend is that business owners are using
mobile messaging services such as WhatsApp to send invoices — this is a great
way to communicate with clients and suppliers for matters that require a fast
response.
Intuit
QuickBooks makes it easier for small business owners to manage their finances
and stay on track rather than on the back foot. Our software enables them to
track sales, keep track of stock, create and send invoices at the click of a
button, as well as know exactly how their business is doing, anytime, anywhere.
Work-life balance is key
With the
fast-paced lifestyle of a tech leader in a leading global company, it is just
as important to find a good work-life balance. I always ensure that I find time
to spend with my family, for example, taking my son to soccer and watching him
practice, as well as making sure I have time to exercise. We are lucky that
Intuit is very family oriented and the company understands the importance of
having time to destress, rewind, and making sure we are revitalised to tackle a
new day of empowering our
teams to power prosperity for our customers.
-ENDS-
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Created on Jul 2nd 2020 08:36. Viewed 253 times.