Fanminder Blog

We’re Live Blogging from the Intuit Entrepreneur Day. We’re sitting in the GM Roundtable hosted by Tayloe Stansbury, CTO.

“I represent the central engineering group, the security group, plus the business units’ use of new technologies. I’m focused on new initiatives, reusable platform software, India development center. Engineering co-reports to me and the General Managers.”

“I joined 15 months ago. My priorities are driving technology refreshes and updating it in areas it’s gotten behind in. Improving engineering productivity, and pushing innovation forward.”

“We want to run live experiments to see what works. The TurboTax season is 2.5 months’ long. We made 100 changes to the user interface based on 5% of the users. We dumped failed experiments and promoted successful experiments. The net consequence was $50M in revenues.”

“Our mobile vision includes the need to support up to 4 platforms – Web, Tablet, Mobile, Desktop. Each is different, have common platforms underneath them. Functionality might be different, ie, can’t view pretty graphs on the phone.”

“A lot of stuff came from BUs coming independently to web or from acquisitions. It’s potentially a problem for scalability and evolvability. We have tech refresh plans for each B.U. locked down. Sometimes it’s a multi-year roadmap, sometimes it’s all up to-date.”

“Central Mobile team did a map of all the mobile functionality and now are sitting with the head of the B.U., which are you building and which aren’t you building?