The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [12]
A SEVEN-THOUSAND-PERSON LEAN STARTUP
In 1983, Intuit’s founder, the legendary entrepreneur Scott Cook, had the radical notion (with cofounder Tom Proulx) that personal accounting should happen by computer. Their success was far from inevitable; they faced numerous competitors, an uncertain future, and an initially tiny market. A decade later, the company went public and subsequently fended off well-publicized attacks from larger incumbents, including the software behemoth Microsoft. Partly with the help of famed venture capitalist John Doerr, Intuit became a fully diversified enterprise, a member of the Fortune 1000 that now provides dozens of market-leading products across its major divisions.
This is the kind of entrepreneurial success we’re used to hearing about: a ragtag team of underdogs who eventually achieve fame, acclaim, and significant riches.
Flash-forward to 2002. Cook was frustrated. He had just tabulated ten years of data on all of Intuit’s new product introductions and had concluded that the company was getting a measly return on its massive investments. Simply put, too many of its new products were failing. By traditional standards, Intuit is an extremely well-managed company, but as Scott dug into the root causes of those failures, he came to a difficult conclusion: the prevailing management paradigm he and his company had been practicing was inadequate to the problem of continuous innovation in the modern economy.
By fall 2009, Cook had been working to change Intuit’s management culture for several years. He came across my early work on the Lean Startup and asked me to give a talk at Intuit. In Silicon Valley this is not the kind of invitation you turn down. I admit I was curious. I was still at the beginning of my Lean Startup journey and didn’t have much appreciation for the challenges faced by a Fortune 1000 company like his.
My conversations with Cook and Intuit chief executive officer (CEO) Brad Smith were my initiation into the thinking of modern general managers, who struggle with entrepreneurship every bit as much as do venture capitalists and founders in a garage. To combat these challenges, Scott and Brad are going back to Intuit’s roots. They are working to build entrepreneurship and risk taking into all their divisions.
For example, consider one of Intuit’s flagship products. Because TurboTax does most of its sales around tax season in the United States, it used to have an extremely conservative culture. Over the course of the year, the marketing and product teams would conceive one major initiative that would be rolled out just in time for tax season. Now they test over five hundred different changes in a two-and-a-half-month tax season. They’re running up to seventy different tests per week. The team can make a change live on its website on Thursday, run it over the weekend, read the results on Monday, and come to conclusions starting Tuesday; then they rebuild new tests on Thursday and launch the next set on Thursday night.
As Scott put it, “Boy, the amount of learning they get is just immense now. And what it does is develop entrepreneurs, because when you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell. Out of a hundred good ideas, you’ve got to sell your idea. So you build up a society of politicians and salespeople. When you have five hundred tests you’re running, then everybody’s ideas can run. And then you create entrepreneurs who