How a week to pursue passion projects leads to innovative solutions

“Let’s make every day like Global Engineering Days!”

That was a common sentiment we heard from many of our 6,000+ technologists during Intuit’s fall Global Engineering Days (GED) event, showing the passion, joy, and enthusiasm that GED inspires.  

Twice a year – in the spring and in the fall – Intuit gives our global engineering community a week to set aside their scheduled work and spend time diving into creative projects they’re particularly passionate about. It’s a week of uninterrupted time and space for engineers to work together across sites and teams to expand their skills and ensure Intuit continues to deliver on its promise to power prosperity for millions of customers.

Out of this World: A look at GED 2022

This fall’s event was intergalactic-themed, and our teams worked on projects that were ready to blast off and solve our customers’ most pressing financial problems. 

GED is a reflection of Intuit’s culture of empowering teams to drive end-to-end outcomes and work autonomously— with speed and velocity. Many of our technologists have shared that it’s the most exciting time of the year for them as they have the chance to focus solely on passion projects—problems they’re eager to fix, and features or tools they’ve dreamed of developing to enhance our global financial technology platform.

The goal is to empower our best and brightest tech talent to choose their own innovation adventure, take ownership of their professional growth, and harness data-driven decision making to drive the best possible customer outcomes and experiences.

However, GED is not a hackathon or contest. There are no winners aside from the teams innovating and the customers benefiting from it. And it’s not a theoretical exercise—many of the breakthroughs driven by GED are directly integrated into our platform and used by customers globally.

The real-world impact of GED

A few past GED projects that our teams have worked on that are now available for customers include extracting, uploading and auto-filling tax data in TurboTax Desktop; the capability for eligible QuickBooks customers to buy, sell and hold bitcoin; and scaling our AI-powered autocomplete technology internationally to all US and global QuickBooks Live and QuickBooks Online Accountant Transaction Collaboration customers to reduce repetitive data entry by supporting both right-to-left and left-to-right languages. These GED projects help us impact our customers’ lives in a real-world way. 

Web 3 and GED

New to this GED, Intuit launched its first decentralized app—a Web 3 marketplace for internal research and experimentation—that gave our teams firsthand experience with blockchain, smart contracts, and crypto tokens. The marketplace started as a project during this spring’s GED. Teams were able to earn Intuit’s internal crypto tokens and be able to purchase a limited-edition NFT, just for being part of GED. While the tokens have no actual monetary value and the marketplace is only a sandboxed environment, it provided our technologists an opportunity to experience and experiment with new technologies.

This fall’s GED—the first since 2019 to include an in-person component—the teams were even more diversified in their location and team composition. Teams were collaborating from across organizations, across functions and across our locations. Many teams even took a hybrid approach where some members coded on-site and some participated virtually. 

GED is enabling our global technologist community to take big swings and solve complex customer problems. Many focused on helping customers with their day-to-day use of our products, getting more money or getting their money faster, helping our experts be more productive, automating work to increase velocity, improving the quality and access to data, making our products and platform smarter by using AI, using open source tools to modernize our code bases, and much more.

“I was again blown away by the innovation, the thought leadership, and the amount that teams were able to accomplish in a short time,” said Marianna Tessel, chief technology officer at Intuit.

And most of all, our teams had plenty of fun. Different locations had daily team and individual competitions, a VR experience, and even a 360-degree photo booth! 

To experience first-hand how GED supercharges an already great tech environment, join us on our journey to build a technology platform that powers prosperity around the world and visit www.intuit.com/careers/.