CCRP - Week 1 (Wednesday)

Day 3 (Wednesday - 20 August 2008)


We started the morning discussing the Follow Me Home process and then received a presentation on the retail channel sales given by Peter Colwell. The Follow Me Home focused on researching to design for delight. We watched and documented the following:

• artifacts
• surprises
• roadblocks
• stop gaps
• sequences/flow
• task processes
• interactions (tools, computers, etc.)
• terminology, etc.

We then went on a Follow-Me-Home to a desktop QuickBooks user. It was a great experience to listen and watch how the customer actually uses the product. The customer also shared what she dislikes and likes about the product. I was surprised to see how passionate the customer was about the product. QuickBooks is used almost everyday by these users so they are very familiar and vested in the product. The customer we visited had a ton of things she loved about QuickBooks and tons of things she would change.

We went as a group to Sweet Tomato for lunch ... YUM!

We learned some great things and then reported our experience to the group when we returned to the Mountain View campus at the end of the day. After lunch we visited retail locations to see how the products were displayed, see how helpful the sales associates were, and how difficult it would be to find the products. Our group visited Office Depot, Costco, and a Target store. This was also a fantastic exercise and was a great follow-up to Peter's presentation.

CCRP - Week 1 (Tuesday)

Day 2 (Tuesday - 19 August 2008)

Introductions, Menlo Park campus scavenger hunt, creative pipe cleaner contest, more skits, overview of the program, the schedule and activities, and the program objectives. The main key words are listed here:

• Connect with Customers (develop a passion to address customer needs)
• Experience the life of our Customer Support Agents (understand the downstream implications of business decisions)
• Establish a lasting Network of Intuit employees (leverage talent across the company)
• Obtain a unique perspective to post-program roles (so you can be the best you can be)

Result --> As you start your journey towards becoming a great leader on your team, building high quality products that solve our customer needs.

Learned that there are 47 total CCRP participants: 27 Product Developers (PD), 10 Small Business (RDP), 8 Finance & Operations (FRDP), and 2 Finance NGN.

Nancy Smithline, RDP Leader, taught the group about avoiding the comfort zone and staying in the learning zone. She provided a statistic that adults learn 10% in a classroom setting, 20% from peer and social settings, and 70% on the job. Therefore, we should be engaged in learning and never complacent when it comes to being actively engaged in our own development and learning. She counseled that we should be proactive about our own learning.

The three groups executive sponsors and leaders gave presentations on their expectations and counsel to our group. First, Bill Irihe explained that he was increasingly seeking out new talent from recent graduates because of their creativity, ideas, and energy. Steven Aldrich, VP of Strategy & Innovation discussed the importance of the learning zone, the Intuit culture, mindset. He also said not to be afraid to fail. He feels that a lot of bad decisions are made simply because information is not shared. Also, Steven also made it clear that it was okay to know something and to work from consciously incompetent, to consciously competent.

Dave Marenbach, VP of Global Finance & Executive sponsor for FRDP stated that he wanted us to be similar to the historic minstrels by being wanderers, spread the news of what is beyond the immediate functional area walls, share excitement with others day to day. Dave also said Intuit invests in us because of our ideas and energy that we bring. He reminded us to live the learn teach learn principle. He counseled us to join various networks like NGN, get involved, and raise the bar. Idea Jams are important to attend and get involved as much as possible.

Group pictures were taken prior to having lunch with the senior leaders. After lunch we did more skits and group presentations showing our understanding of the activities and purpose of the various weeks ahead in the program. We had a panel Q & A session with our respective programs and had past years participants answer any questions we had.

We had a FRDP Panel with several of the FRDP '07 class. We asked questions (mine a little too deep) which helped us all know what to expect.

We broke up into three teams to build last minute skits to express the Intuit Social, Mobile, Global growth strategy. We then presented these skits in order to Brad Smith, Intuits President and CEO. His presentation was awesome and I wish I could have recorded it but in short these are just a few highlights from his talk.

• Intuit has 70 million user base
• Intuits new customers are different
• Value creation is changing (users is where the value is) and the users are relying less on desktops, laptops, and moving to Mobile and global technologies
• Intuit is focused on providing easy to use connected services through social, mobile, and global
• Intuit needs to create paths not trails
• A leader is one who has the ability to affect change. (1) burning a need to change, (2) vision, (3) road map.
• Movement is about experience (cross functional, cross company, education, etc.)
  Be open and honest. take risks and don't be afraid to fail. He shared his experience of losing $40M in a past company because of a decision he made and the Board of Directors thanked him for being honest and they went on to learn from it and become very profitable.
• Its not about what you know but the questions you ask.
• Love you job, who you work with, and make sure you can pay your bills.

Brad's energy and vision was great to hear about. I am excited to assist this great company triumph in this critical moment in its history.

After work, Shannon and I joined our FRDP group along with David Merenbach, Lucy Beard, & John Mastrorilli at a nice restaurant in Palo Alto where we ate good food and socialized. It was great to hang-out with everyone after a fun filled day. Shannon also enjoyed getting to know all my co-workers and leaders.

Do Something

Here are two great quotes:

1. "Luck favors the man in motion" - unknown author.
2. "Luck is a big part of many successes, so (a) don't get too bummed out when you see a bozo succeed; and (b) luck favors the people who try stuff, not simply think and analyze. As the Chinese say, "One must wait for a long time with your mouth open before a Peking duck flies in your mouth." - Guy Kawasaki (You can find his article here. Its worth reading.)
   

Action point: Don't just think and analyze - DO SOMETHING!

Check this out..

This new tool Mozilla's is working on is amazing. Check it out.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

CCRP - Week 1 (Monday)

Day 1 - Orientation Day (Monday - 18 August 2008)

After some initial paperwork was taken care of we began introductions and a received a brief program overview. Justin Kitch, co-founder of Homestead and Intuit General Manager of the Small Business Web Division (SB-Web) came to welcome us, teach us a little more about Intuit's current strategy, and had an informal Q & A session.

Here are some things I learned from Justin's presentation:

• His company (Homestead) was acquired this past January 2008 and is the most current acquisition Intuit has made


• His background involves going to work at Microsoft in 1994 and subsequently quiting two months later because he hated the culture (he said, "with a lot of jerks and idiots")


• 1998 started Homestead which was hit like other companies with the dot-com crash


• Late 1990's he made Homestead one of the first subscription based software services


• In 2004 Homestead became profitable again after the crash


• Culture of Intuit still moves slower than what it should, difficult to change but is moving in the right direction


• Discussed the connected services strategy, software as a service (SAS), maintaining successful back-office software and increasingly placing more focus on front-office product offerings, etc.

John Schiavone, Technical Training Leader for SBD - PD, the new Intuit branding along with the new brand attributes which are: (1) Honest, (2) Committed, (3) Real, (4) Smart, & (5) Spirited. Additionally, he discussed the importance of writing goals and having clear objectives when talking with our managers. He counseled us to have and know our top five goals and at least one of them should be a personal goal. Intuit leadership reports regularly on goals in these three main areas (1) employee's, (2) customers, & (3) shareholders. John suggested we understand and report to our managers how we have improved in delivering results to these three areas as well. John explained the employee review cycles and other cycles that happen in the company (mid-year performance reviews around February, annual performance review July/August) and suggested that we ask for monthly or at least every other month reviews with our mangers. another helpful suggestion was to have regular weekly drive-bys to explain what your doing and how your improving.

We did a Mountain View campus scavenger hunt to familiarize ourselves and then creatively present to the group our findings. Presentations included pantomimes with narrator, skits, drawings on a dry-erase wall, and more.

After lunch, we received information about the various Intuit benefits and received our security badges. At the conclusion of the day, Lucy Beard announced John Mastrorilli to us as the person who will replace Lucy as the FRDP director. Finally, we reviewed what we learned, discussed the pluses and deltas, and received of preview of the next day's activities. The day was very fun! It was filled with tons of energy and activity. It was also great to have tons of interaction with the various Intuit leaders and the other CCRP new hires.

CCRP Overview

Last week was an amazing first week at Intuit. I hope to blog about it in more length but in short it was filled with a the most energetic and welcoming new hire orientation I have ever been to, senior leader presentations with question and answer sessions, team building activities, business and product challenges, and several fun social events to keep the energy high, communication open, and stomachs full.

Some of my future posts will be used to record some of what I am learning and would like to remember in the future. Also, I will include positive my thoughts and potential program suggestions to make this portion of my learning program even better in years to come. This past week and the following 9 weeks is considered my initial Intuit training and introduction to the company, its products, and customers. This program is called the Customer Connection Rotation Program (CCRP) and I am joined by 48 other talented new hires coming directly out of top universities across the country. At the conclusion of this program each participant will begin their careers in either product development(PD), marketing, or finance positions through-out Intuit.

Business Idea: Goal Post

I have a backlog of business ideas that is 4 pages long. I have decided this maybe a good place to post these ideas. I encourage feedback, assistance if I do a feasibility analysis prior to launching on of these ideas, or if you like an idea go a head and run with it yourself. I would just appreciate it if you let me know if you choose to execute one of my ideas into a profitable business. I won't ask for equity. I'd just like the satisfaction of knowing one of my ideas was profitable.

So here is an idea:

GOAL POST
Several years ago I thought of creating a web application and widget that would allow users to create and post their goals on the web. Then users would provide updates on how they are doing. Other users (personal contacts or other goal minded people) can follow up with you, compete with you, join in your goal, or anything else ... The widget would show your current goal(s) and chart your success. Overtime, you can gain higher status from none-action to doer. One hurdle would be the integrity of the goals because it is all user generated and recorded. If a person were to falsify goal achievement it would be misleading. Users can also share tips with other that may help them achieve their goals. This could act as a benchmarking tool to share best practices and would provide encouragement to others that are working on similar goals showing that what the user has set out to achieve has been done my X number of people.

Revenue model would mainly be advertising revenue. Advertisers trying to sell to specific demographics working on business, sports, school, personal, spiritual, financial, or other goals.

The websites success would be largely dependent on growing a large user base (as it is a positive network externality), developing channel partnerships, and an easy to use site layout.

What do you think?

The Power of Entrepreneurs

I resonate with Scott Cooks message in the following clip.

Great entrepreneurial ventures usually are the ones motivated not only by economic reasons but on the sincere desire to improve the world in which we live. Thanks Scott for communicating a great ability and privilege entrepreneurs have to make a difference with their ideas. Now the tough part: Execution!

Population Growth

The associated press reported recently that, “The world’s population will reach 7 billion in 2012, just 13 years after hitting 6 billion, according to a new Census Bureau projection. By comparison, it took thousands of years of human history before the population hit 1 billion in 1800, and it took 130 years to reach the 2 billion mark.”

-found in The Week July 4-11 2008, Vol. 8 - Issue 368/369, pg. 20.