What Intuit learned by making mistakes.
Thanks to Seb, who is now back online and working for Socialtext. Sorry for the length of this quote. I was trying to pick out the parts that home-based entrepreneurs (rather than corporate employees) might find most useful.
CHI 2006: Scott Cook (Intuit). The CHI conference is in my hometown this week, and Socialtext is graciously sending me downtown to learn some stuff. Intuit founder Scott Cook opened the conference. Here are my notes from his talk.
Speaker intro (paraphrased): In 1984 Scott Cook founded Intuit, which makes the famously successful Quicken software and is among the first companies to have a public wiki, the Tax Almanac.
Scott Cook: Here's the story of how we moved from Quicken to QuickBooks. We had less than half the features and were selling at twice the price of the market leaders. The advertising was terrible. Our first ad, I wrote. It was a catastrophe. Second was an ad firm, which produced probably the worst ad in history. Exposed to a million readers. We got 4 responses.
That's the brilliant launch of QuickBooks in 92. Here's how it happened. In one monthe we got to 70% market share. What explains this? It wasn't the advertising. It was something we discovered along the way. We used to make a home consumer product. We surveyed our users, and 40% said they were using our product "in an office". We surveyed again. Same results. We actually called those people.
What we discovered was that most people hate debit/credit accounting. Everyone else who made accounting software had debits and credits. What we did was build the first accounting software without debits/credits.
Success starts with humility. "Empathy is not just about walking in anothr's shoes... first you must remove your own shoes." (There's a variant of that quote, "Never criticize a man till you've walked a mile in his shoes. That way, when you criticize him, you're a mile away and you have his shoes.")
What business operates in over 100 countries, has grown 10,000% since 1970, serves 500 million people, volume > $1 trillion annually? Dee Hock's VISA. Hock says, "The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture."
Get face-to-face with your customers. In their office, in their home. Find out what's happening.
The Intuit process is: (1) Involve UX, (2) Find the Customer Problem, (3) Define the requirement, (4) Build.
Follow the customers while they work. All of us at Intuit do this. Executives do this. We post pictures and reports in the office when we come back. Drucker's Seven Sources of Innovation: the most reliable is The Unexpected. That's what you see when you follow the customers.
Raid had perfected a slow-action formula. The idea was to leave a slight trail, that bugs would get some on themselves and it would not kill them instantly, so they could make it back to the nest and kill the other bugs. They observed that users would not leave a slight trail to the nest: they would drown the one bug in front of them before it could make it back to the nest. So they diluted in a lot of water so it was hard to kill the bug and so the stench wasn't overpowering. Sales up 50%, in an old, established market. And the bugs now survive the flood and can bring the product back to bring down the nest.
QuickBooks Point of Sale. We didn't think it could work. Users needed to get too much hardware. Despite my resistance, we made a version with hardware. The version with the hardware is twice the price of the other, but it's selling twice more than the other.
The best we can hope to bat is .500. If you're getting better than that, you're not swinging for the fences. Even Barry bonds, steroids or not, is not getting that. We need to celebrate failure. Failures are shitty but they let us learn. Here is me hugging the guy who won the Greatest Failure award. There was a learning from what he did. His failed effort produced the learning that young users don't care about taxes, but they do care about the refund.
1. Invention comes from mindset change.
2. Mindset change comes from seeing differently.
3. Savor surprises... as learnings.
4. Focus managers on a customer metric.
5. Nurture and protect invention teams. Optimize for these teams.
Q. Do you agree that short-to-medium-term innovation can be customer-driven, but not long-term? Can you go too far in customer focus? A. I think you can't go too far in customer focus, but you can have wrong directions. Some orgs are addicted to surveys, but surveys actually reflect your current mindset. The best insights don't come from quantitative data. As regards the long-term. I agree that customers do not foresee the future. Use the consumer to understand the problem that you are solving. Then it's your job to build it. Of course consumers would never have asked for computers in their homes. Do you remember typewriters, when you made a mistake, it was hell? This was clearly a problem, one that computers can solve really well. Tag: chi2006
[Seb's Open Research]
11:54:05 AM 
|
