TED Recap Part 1: Scott Cook on Intuit’s Dev Strategy

In the final hours of TED India, I stumbled around, exhausted from my closing performance and 36 sleepless hours.

I was guided by what was left of my 4 day adrenaline rush to the final TED lunch buffet.  It’s a testament to the TED speakers that people stayed awake after lunch (with a few notable exceptions - I’m looking at you, Shekhar Kapur), since we were regularly eating the equivalent of the $4.99 India Palace “Here’s a lead ball in your stomach!” special.

Before Scott Cook walked by, Eve Ensler ate lunch across from us. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of Indian men who walked up and thanked her for the Vagina Monologues.  Or maybe they were thanking her for vaginas in general…not sure.

That’s when TED speaker and Intuit CEO Scott Cook walked up and told me that he liked our closing piece.

“Uh, nice job on the Mint acquisition.  That was an incredible move.”

“Thanks, so where do you perform?”

Nice!  Scott Cook thinks I’m an amateur stand-up comedian. 

“Usually in front of a laptop.  I run a software development firm.”

We then sat down to talk sourcing strategies, joined by Rupesh Shah (head of development at Intuit Bangalore) and Leila Chirayath Janah (CEO of Samasource, a sourcing nonprofit that employs over 500 former refugees around the world).

Particularly in India, I’m not accustomed to corporate CEOs engaging in real conversation.  When they do sit with you, they figure that the 20 minutes spent exaggerating accomplishments they had little to do with qualifies as “mentoring”.  It’s obnoxious.

Scott pulled out a notebook & pen and asked us what we had learned about development in India over the past decade.  I talked to him about look for no and text-based communication.  He and Rupesh told us about involving engineers in product development for the Indian market. 

The conversation was surprisingly frank.  Intuit has 300 developers in Bangalore.  About 2/3 of them develop products for the Indian market.  The engineers are responsible for determining market needs, handling functional specifications, and of course, implementation.  Scott readily acknowledges that this is a work in progress - the vast majority of Indian developers need to be taught to think entrepreneurially (something I’m not even sure you can teach).

The remaining 1/3 of engineers are tasked with developing products for the US market.  Scott and his team are ambitious with this team.  The Indian engineers are responsible for customer interviews, requirements gathering, and product conceptualization.  Again, Scott readily admits this is a work in progress, but I’m impressed with their resolve to make it happen.  Product creation is the peak of the value chain, and it’s something that dedicated sourcing practices like Monsoon its  peers have done marginally at best.