Measure What Matters

by John Doerr

It was a stressful, exciting time. The organization was pivoting in several directions at once: from desktop software to cloud-based software, from a closed platform to one that was open to thousands of third-party apps, from a North American company to a global company. As we leaned into our long-term strategy to become an integrated ecosystem, we gradually changed from a house of brands (TurboTax, Quicken, QuickBooks) to the branded house of Intuit. In the storm of any disruption, IT will bear the brunt of in-house frustrations. Partly it’s because the operation tends to be opaque. Any thirty-plus-year-old company accumulates layers of complex technology—especially a technology company. In IT, we’re always juggling the needs of internal partners with the demands of our end users. We bridge technology and business outcomes. Maybe toughest of all, we must balance the task of making systems work perfectly today (as our people expect) with our mandate to invest in the future. For example: Intuit used to have nine different billing systems to serve our array of products, and each of them had special challenges. When you’re putting out fires every day, it’s hard to build a next-generation billing technology.