Innovation culture and engineering culture to foster innovation

1. Govinda Sambamurthy
Group Engineering Manager, QuickBooks Online Advanced
Intuit
December 17 2019
Innovation Culture At
Your Workplace

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Passionate about setting up high performing teams

3. “Customers will never
love a company until
the employees love it
first.”
Simon Sinek

4. Tenets of Innovation Culture
● Customer Empathy
● Innovative Practices
● Engineering Culture
● Operational Excellence
● Extreme Ownership

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Customer Empathy - KYC
Call Center Agents
Customer
Influencer
(Accountant)
Developers

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Partnership vs Competition
Microsoft partnership model

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The Role of a Triad
Where ?
How ?
What are we promising?

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Innovative Practices

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1. Modern Engineering Practices
a. Continuous Delivery, Continuous automation, Leverage Cloud
i. Micro front end architecture and service oriented architecture on Modern
SaaS & release anytime
ii. Push for continuous delivery
iii. Full functional automation: All tests running in the pipeline (build on to
existing, for new code)
b. Feature Flags: Code protected by feature flags. Switch on/off features as needed
c. Instrumentation: Code instrumented to have right measurement
d. Rapid experimentation: A/B testing and experimentation
2. Autonomous enterprise team
a. Tech that enables us to deliver to our customers with as minimal dependencies as
possible with velocity
b. Add extensions/variability
c. Refactor and reignite
Engineering Culture

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○ Be Intentional about team Culture - principled, but adaptive
○ Best In Class - Hire the Best of the talent
○ Have fun working together
○ Flat organization structure
○ Two In a Box Model
○ Broken Window Syndrome
○ Left Shift
Culture

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○ Meritocracy -be intentional about whom you reward
○ Servant Leadership
○ Respect Diversity
○ Credibility - Thou shalt not preach what you can’t practise!
○ Employee engagement is a journey, not a score
○ Transparency is the currency of trust
○ In God we trust, everyone else brings data
○ Never hesitate to take tough decisions - they will pay off in the long run
Top Commandments

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○ Every incident or defect in production is a broken promise to our customer commitment.
○ Do we know our customer issues even before they call in?
○ ilities….
■ measuring set of metrics like availability, latency and failed customer interactions
Operational Excellence

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Extreme Ownership
It may not be your fault; but its still your
problem

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