Through flagship products TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint, Intuit is a financial platform company that gives everyone the opportunity to prosper.
Intuit’s foundations began with a thought 36 years ago: there must be a better way.
Innovating in San Diego since the mid-1980s, scientific programmer Michael A. Chipman believed software could help make taxes easier, and formed ChipSoft. Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, Scott Cook watched his wife struggle to balance the family checkbook, and began thinking of possible tech solutions.
Cook, and partner Tom Proulx, created personal finance software Quicken and formed Intuit, Inc., which would later acquire ChipSoft.
Today, over three decades later, Intuit serves over 50 million customers with 19 offices in eight countries. Intuit’s 1,500 San Diego employees primarily work on TurboTax, Turbo, and Mint.
One secret to Intuit’s success is their focus on thoughtful approaches. Customer Driven Innovation (CDI) encourages employees to seek the intersection between important unsolved customer problems that they can solve well, and opportunities to build unique, durable solutions.
Design for Delight (D4D) helps Intuit employees practice empathy for customer pain points. Employees are trained to get creative in thinking of possible solutions, and then use rapid experimentation to land on a solution.
Both approaches stress falling in love with customer problems rather than employee solutions.
Intuit empowers its technologists to make an impact by hosting regular by-engineer-for-engineer events: hackathons, workshops, and meetups, including San Diego JavaScript, San Diego’s largest tech meetup.
Twice a year, engineers participate in Global Engineering Days, a week when they can choose their coding adventure and work on a customer problem that inspires them.
Intuit is also an enthusiastic participant in the open source community, where source code is made freely available for edits and reuse.
Intuit encourages engineers to contribute to external open source projects and make projects of their own available for others to contribute to and use. Intuit highlights engineers’ open source projects at opensource.intuit.com.
Another way Intuit encourages innovative approaches is by fostering a diverse workforce. Intuit’s Tech Women @ Intuit (TWI) initiative focuses on attracting, recruiting, retaining, and advancing women.
Programs vary from targeting technologists in various stages of their careers to engaging with middle and high school–aged students. Intuit also supports organizations who help increase and advance girls and women in technical roles, like Girls Who Code and AnitaB.org.
Intuit’s focus on innovation has led to their being consistently named on Fortune’s 100 Best Place to Work and Forbes America’s Best Employers for Diversity.
Intuit also regularly ranks as one of the top places to work in San Diego. One-third of Intuit’s board of directors and 40% of its executive team are women.
For over 30 years, TurboTax products have ranked as the No. 1 bestselling tax software. 98% of QuickBooks customers agree it’s a simpler way to manage their business.
Intuit’s unique culture allows the company to remain nimble and flexible, seeking new solutions to ever-evolving customer problems, and unlocking more and more opportunities for consumers and small businesses to prosper.
