Scott Cook, Joe Hernandez, Bharath Kadaba and Carol Howe of Intuit, Creating a Culture of Experimentation: Ideas and Best Practices @ The Lean Startup Conference 12/3/12

1. Creating a Culture of Experimentation:
Ideas and Best Practices
Scott Cook
Bharath Kadaba
Joe Hernandez
Carol Howe

2. Leaders Champion a Grand Challenge
Create new businesses that
improve the financial lives
of Indians
150M+ farmers Help improve the financial
lives of Indian farmers who
Contribute 25% of GDP are struggling to make ends
meet
60% of population
dependent on agriculture

3. Small empowered team chooses “uncomfortably” narrow
problem to solve for farmers…
Problem: Who should I sell the
**Fasal**
Okra
produce to in order to realize the
“best” price?
Padra 95-105
Agent 9765590632
Baroda 00-115
Agent 9354240167
Solution: Personalized market
price information and connection
to buyer via daily text messages

4. Team adopts experiments as a way to make all decisions
Fake-O-Backend
Manually sent daily market prices via text
messages – test in market within days!
• 20+ Major Experiments
• Overcame many “death threats”
from management by staying lean
• Always passing impossible toll
gates!

5. Customer
Benefit 1.2M Active farmers
+20%
farm income
2010 2011 2012

6. Leaders install experimentation culture and systems
…to remove speed bumps in experimenters’ way
New tools so teams can run
many experiments without
Legal talking to Legal at all
• Mindset  Behavior
• Democratize Action
• Becomes How You Work

7. Leaders install experimentation culture and systems
…to remove speed bumps in experimenters’ way
Prototype
New tools so teams can run
many experiments without
• 5- 30K max # of testers for 2 months
Legal talking to Legal at all
• Testers understand they are
participating in research
• Prototype does not actually complete
transactions or collect user data
• Our data stewardship principles apply  Behavior
• Mindset
• Collect only the info necessary to conduct test
• Democratize Action
• We do not collect credit card info
• Becomes How You Work
• Participants learn about pilot via
communication to the gen public (and not
targeted to any gov’t employees or agencies)
• Testers may be given small token, if
applicable, for their time
• Complete patent brainstorm before sharing
publicly

8. Leaders pull insights from successes and failures
Amazing
I woke up about an hour ago. Drank
some coffee, talked on the phone and
filed my taxes. Way to make filing no
big deal at all, TurboTax.
-– I like games.com, 1/20.2012
SnapTax
Unbelievably Easy
A five year old could do your taxes for
you. Or a monkey. You choose
- gsteve81, 2/12/2012
Great App
So easy, so fast, might sound odd but this is
one of my favorite apps that I only get to
use once a year.
– Jamie Cox, 2/23.2012
Freaking Amazing!!!!!
Wife and I completely shocked at the ease and
simplicity of the app! We usually cringe at tax
time but this app made us not want to get a
divorce preparing our taxes. Highly
recommend for singles and married alike!
– study76, 2/17/2012

9. Document capture app for TurboTax Online

10. Document capture app for TurboTax Online
Start-to-Finish Tax Preparation App for Simple Filers