What makes a strong innovation culture?

Michael Kalika
Chief Architect, Intuit Israel
What makes a strong
Innovation Culture?
January 24th, 2022

©2021 Intuit Inc. All rights reserved. 2
Why some companies are
more innovative than others?

Why great talent prefer working
for certain companies?

About me
• Chief Architect of Intuit Israel
• Innovation Catalyst Lead at Intuit
• Vice President of IASA Israel
• Background in development,
operations, and management
• Astronomer and
astrophotographer
• Father of three
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkalika
Michael Kalika
Rishon LeZion, Israel

What we will cover
Customer Obsession
and Design Thinking
Intuit Design
Thinking Journey
Learning From
Failures
Autonomy, Mastery
and Purpose
1
2
3 4

LGBTQ Career Fair
Get to know us!

8
Consumers
Small businesses
Self-employed
Who we serve

Who we are
Founded
14,700
Employees
100M
Customers
1993
IPO
$9.6B
Revenue
21
Locations
1983

Intuit Israel
Great place to work
ranking in Israel:
14 (#1 in the Fintech
category and top 10
in the best companies
for parents in tech)
Arab employees
4%
Intuit Israel
employee count
300+

Our D&I Strategy
1. Set tone at the top
2. Be data driven
3. Improve the talent life cycle
4. Build capability
5. Tell our story
6. Strengthen our culture of belonging and engagement

At Intuit, innovation is everyone’s job
— Brad Smith, Executive Chairman of Intuit's board of directors and former CEO
Intuit Conﬁdential and Proprietary 13

Intuit transformation began in 2004
with adoption of famous
NET PROMOTER SCORE (NPS)

Net Promoter Score
DETRACTORS PASSIVES PROMOTERS
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
0
NPS =
% of
PROMOTERS
% of
DETRACTORS
-
How likely are you, on a scale of
0 to 10 to recommend the
product or service to a colleague
or friend?

NPS Example
http://www.npscalculator.com

In 2007, Intuit faced a tough

The NET PROMOTER
SCORE was stalled

A NEW approach
was required

A brand is no longer what we tell
the consumer it is - it is what
consumers tell each other it is
— Scott Cook, Intuit Founder

Core capabilities: our recipe to execute with excellence
What to solve How to solve
Customer-driven
Innovation (cdi)
Design for
Delight (d4d)
An important,
unsolved
customer
problem
…that we,
and those we
enable, can
solve well
…and build durable
competitive advantage
SUCCESS
IS
HERE
Deep customer
empathy
Go broad to
go narrow
Rapid experiments
with customers
DELIGHT
Deep customer
empathy

A talented design leader
was selected to drive D4D
program
Design Director
KAAREN HANSON

A team of 10 design-thinking coaches
INNOVATION CATALYSTS
was formed

They organized multiple design-thinking forums,
formed D4D framework and established global
INNOVATION CATALYST communities and network
Innovation Catalysts at Intuit commit 10% of
their time to help other employees use D4D
innovation framework on their work, coach,
facilitate and teach others customer
obsession in everything we do.

Customer Obsession
and Design Thinking

Would our
customers
recommend our
products to their
friends?
How do we measure
customer satisfaction
and conformance to
requirements?
What is the
biggest customer
pain?
Who are my
customers?
Our product manager is
the one who tells us about
the customer and the
problem we need to
solve. Do I need to know
anything else?

Design Thinking
Is an iterative process that helps understand users (customers), challenge assumptions, and
redeﬁne problems.
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-is-design-thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular

End customer who
consumes products
or services
External
Who are your customers?
Internal
Front End Engineers
who consume your
APIs or widgets
Data Scientists or
Analysts who need data
from your systems
Internal
Those who consume your work

How do we know our
customer needs?

Follow Me Homes WHY
Our #1 way to get deep customer empathy
Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution
Feel natural customer environment
HOW
Observe, don't interview
"Can you show me how you do it now?"
Don't pitch your idea
Open Ended questions
Savor surprises

Problem Statement
I am:
Citizen who wants to
submit a case for tax
return
I am trying to:
Fill the required
papers and forms
But:
I have to invest a lot of
effort and it takes a lot
of time
Because:
It’s hard to understand the
requirements, a lot of
papers to ﬁll and it’s hard to
collect all information
Which makes me feel:
Scared, slow, frustrated and exhausted.

Ideal State
Which makes me feel:
Happy, efficient and confident
In a perfect world:
Within few clicks and question answers I
could automatically have most of the papers
filled and submitted
The biggest benefit to me is:
It saves my time and I know there are no
mistakes

Problem Explorer
Go broad to go narrow
What’s stopping?
What else?
1. Complex and
frequently changing
tax rules
2. It takes time to collect
all information and fill
forms
Why solve this?
Why else?
Saves time and gives
confidence for citizens
Saves time for Tax
Authorities and gives them a
confidence
Original Problem
(start here)
Tax Return is complex,
time consuming and error
prone
Narrower
Problem
How to implement
automated Tax Return
service based on bank
statements that everyone
trust?
Broader Problem
Insufficient Trust between
Tax Authorities and
citizens

Solution Prioritization
High Value
Low Cost
Low Value
High Cost
Build Buy Ask for Help
Do partially,
trade-offs

Prototyping
Source: http://aaronbrako.com/prototyping
http://wiremock.org
UX and UI API and Backend

FAILURES are
Unavoidable
successful people don't
fear failure but understand
that it's necessary to learn
and grow from
— Robert Kiyosaki

Each problem is
an opportunity
because it can
tell a story about
why and how it
occurred
Philosophy of Root Cause Analysis
It is critical
that everyone
takes a personal
and active
role in
improving
quality
The "true"
problem must
be understood
before action is
taken
Be focused and
open-minded
Must 1
Must 2
Be patient and
quick
Must 3
Be relentless, but
avoid critiques

WHY
Drove fast
5 WHYs
WHY
Late to work
WHY
Woke up late
WHY
Alarm clock
didn’t ring
WHY
Forgot check
if it was set
last night
Problem: Alex made a road accident

Record Times and Customer Impact
Start Time Time to Detect Time to Engage Time to Repair Time to Restore
10-04-2020 07:26:00 PM
12 Minutes
10-04-2020 07:38:00 PM
23 Minutes
10-04-2020 07:49:00 PM
49 Minutes
10-04-2020 08:15:00 PM
51 Minutes
10-04-2020 08:17:00 PM
Products / Modules / Services Impact Details
(# Transactions / Customers impacted / Errors seen)
% Impact
Product XXX Service YYY was unavailable and observed 1,541,719 request failures. 45

Document Action Items
# Corrective Actions Owner / Team Due Date Task Reference
(JIRA or similar)
1 Configure “house on fire alerts” John Smith November 1st 2020 RCA-1234

Share RCA documents across the company

It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and
then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so
they can tell us what to do.
— Steve Jobs

At Intuit, each and every
employee is expected to
think like an entrepreneur,
and it’s everyone’s job to
create, to invent, and to look
for new and better ways to
improve our customers’ lives.

Unstructured Time
Being innovation
catalyst
10% unstructured time to work on own initiatives like
Participating in
Capability Innovation
Circle program and
joining initiatives in
other teams or
business units
Work on a special
passion initiatives

It’s a week outside the race of
scrum where technologists are
free to work on a special passion
project, something fun,
something that might not
normally be a priority.
Global Engineering Days

While Global Engineering Days offers an
opportunity for employees to drive their own
innovation, it only happens twice annually,
making it not agile

Capability Innovation Circles
Capability Innovation Circles (CIC) unite
engineers together to work on projects
they believe will add value to Capabilities
I am mobile app engineer who has recently
learned web application engineering. I am
trying to ﬁnd a project where I could use my
new knowledge but I can’t because my team
doesn’t work with web. That makes me feel
unachieved, unsatisﬁed and unhappy.
We are a product development team who
has a great idea how test applications at
scale. We are trying to experiment with the
idea, but we are missing resources because
we are a new team. That makes us feel
slow, not innovative and unhappy.

Key Takeaways
Be Customer Obsessed and encourage Design Thinking
Use Go broad to go narrow technique
Do Follow Me Homes with your customers
Learn from Failures and share Lessons Learnt
Practice Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose in your teams
1
2
5
4
3

Thank you!
Questions?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkalika
Chief Architect, Intuit Israel
Innovation Catalyst
Slides:
https://bit.ly/3qCUGE8

What makes a strong innovation culture?

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (19)

Similar to What makes a strong innovation culture?

Similar to What makes a strong innovation culture? (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

What makes a strong innovation culture?