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Testing your ideas against reality can be challenging. Not everything will go as planned. It’s about keeping an open mind, having a clear hypothesis and running multiple tests to see if you have enough directional evidence to keep going.
This is the How I Tested That Podcast, where David J Bland connects with entrepreneurs and innovators who had the courage to test their ideas with real people, in the market, with sometimes surprising results.
Join us as we explore the ups and downs of experimentation… together.
David J Bland (00:01.132)
Welcome to the podcast, Aaron.
Aaron Eden (00:02.99)
Thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here.
David J Bland (00:05.292)
Yeah, I was thinking about when I first came about your work, it had to be around probably 2012, maybe or 2013. And I was learning a lot about Intuit and Design for Delight and Innovation Catalyst program. And I was invited down to Mountain View to go through one of those Design for Delight workshops with a bunch of peers. It was one of those rare occasions where Intuit invited, or maybe it wasn't rare, but Intuit invited.
external people to come down and kind of go and experience it. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. And, you know, I just kept sort of like following your work. And then eventually, you know, you and I have been kind of at the same events over the years. And when I think I was thinking about inviting people on this podcast, like I have to get Aaron on here because you have so many amazing stories about experimentation that it would be amazing to get you to share some of those stories with our listeners today.
Aaron Eden (00:57.966)
Yeah, I have a terrible experimentation addiction. So yeah, I know it's been awesome to play in a lot of the same areas and seeing how your work has evolved over the years and the impact that both of us have been able to have. So being here with you today is really exciting.
David J Bland (01:23.145)
Yeah, I'm so excited about it. I think people may not even know, but if you read the Testing Business Ideas book, you know, I do reference into it in there, right? And I'm also referencing specifically things like A Day in the Life, where we go into ethnographic research and how do we do that without biasing people and all the great stuff you all have been working on. So maybe we start there with maybe some of your background and your history and how you kind of got excited about experimentation. And let's just see where it goes from there.
Aaron Eden (01:38.99)
Mm -hmm.
Aaron Eden (01:52.91)
Yeah, sure. Happy to share. So around that time, I think 2010 -ish, somewhere in that ballpark, was when I first became an innovation catalyst for Intuit. There were probably 30, 40, 50 of us at that point in time across the company. And I was actually, I was on one of the data warehousing teams at that point in time. And,
I had this really frustrating experience where I...
I had this I had this TurboTax team The team was called snap tax I had the snap tax team come to me and say like hey Aaron We need this report so that we can see the performance of our new app that we're building. Yeah, great So take the requirements do my job Help them figure out what we should include in the report come back, you know a few days a week later, whatever it was Share the details with a report with them and they're like, yeah, this is great But like we need these other changes made I'm like, okay
Okay, it hasn't been very long, but like, all right, so I go back and tweak the settings, come back again, and they're like, yeah, this is great, but like, we've got more changes we need. And I'm like, what is going on over here? Like, the rest of the business, they come and give me requirements, I build what they need, and like...
were stable for months or years before needing to change them. And this is now three changes in weeks. And they're like, well, this is a brand new product. We don't actually know what we're doing yet. We're trying to figure this out. We thought that we needed these metrics because it would help us see what's going on. But it turns out people aren't engaging around that thing. And we need a completely different set of metrics. Like, my god, OK, so this is different. this is different than the rest of
Aaron Eden (03:46.784)
TurboTax, like this is something new, I need to treat it differently. And so I ended up building kind of a very flexible reporting platform for them that allowed them to basically tweak the metrics on their side and like I didn't have to deal with all the change back and forth. The other sort of business side of that story is at the beginning of Eric Ries' Lean Startup book around SnapTax, how that team applied rapid experimentation and lean startup methods to basically turn
that into a successful business for Intuit where you could snap a picture of your W -2s and have it generate your tax returns.
And so like, I don't know, that was my first real like understanding of like, this is, you know, this needs to be this, when you have a situation with lots of uncertainty, it actually needs to be treated differently. I was able to solve it from an IT perspective. But then some of my colleagues and I launched a program inside of Intuit based on those same lean startup techniques, applying the rapid experimentation that Intuit was already
already part of the design for delight methodology, but really kind of the lean startup movement kind of took it to a whole nother level. And so we ended up launching a program inside Intuit called 100 Startups in 100 Days, which was absolutely massive.
And then shortly after that, I decided to set off on my own and teach other companies how to do that. And so I spent about seven years doing innovation consulting for lots of large organizations around the globe. And about three years ago,
Aaron Eden (05:35.694)
I ended up backing into it again for the third time. So they call someone who leaves and comes back a boomerang. They refer to me as a frisbee. I just get sort of tossed around. But anyway, so I love the company. It's got a great culture. I wouldn't be back there a third time if it wasn't incredible. So yeah, that's the kind of short and condensed version of how I got into this crazy experimentation world.
David J Bland (06:06.304)
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I think Eric Ries was the reason I ended up in one of the workshops at Intuit because he recommended I come down and go through it, which I'm so grateful that he did. And I was thinking about so many different things in that story you were sharing. Maybe we could just pause on a couple elements of it. One would be.
Aaron Eden (06:15.374)
Hmm.
Aaron Eden (06:27.246)
Sure.
David J Bland (06:29.663)
Two key terms actually, innovation catalysts and design for delight. So if you had to educate our listeners and what those programs are, because they may not all be aware of them, what's your elevator pitch on what those two mean added into it?
Aaron Eden (06:34.19)
Cool.
Aaron Eden (06:44.11)
Yeah, so Intuit talks about design for delight as sort of its secret sauce for innovation and for product. You know, it was really sort of...
How do you put it? It was sort of created, slash spearheaded by one of our founders, Scott Cook. He would tell these stories of sitting at the kitchen table and observing his wife Sydney.
manually sort of working through the checkbook, right? And like that customer empathy and that observation of, in that case, his customer was his wife, but like that observation is what led to QuickBooks, I'm sorry, Quicken. And then, you know, years later...
the Quicken teams continue to be frustrated that business users were using Quicken and kept asking for features that weren't on the roadmap and these other kinds of things. And so they use the same techniques to go and learn and realize that like, wait, we need a business focused version of this, which ended up becoming QuickBooks. So anyway, so Design for Delight, it's got deep roots in design thinking or human centered design or kind of whatever label, all big companies do this.
where they've got to take something that exists and make it their own. It's got to have their own label and that kind of stuff, which is how design thinking came about. And then in, I think, like 2009, 2008, somewhere in that ballpark...
Aaron Eden (08:21.478)
Scott championed a program called the Innovation Catalyst, which was basically to have coaches and facilitators, sort of, you know, Design for Delight practitioners, trained up in how to sort of spread this across the organization. And so there's some great...
There's some great HPR articles from that period of time around the impact that the Innovation Catalyst had and what was going on there. Yeah, so that's D4D and Innovation Catalysts.
David J Bland (09:02.01)
Thank you. I know sometimes we get these terms, but not all of our listeners do. And I thought for D4D, I think I met some like, IDEO people actually there that were adding to it when I was...
when I was going through that program and it was like, we're taking design thinking and lean startup and agile and we're kind of blending it together in a way that makes sense for Intuit. And you're right, that is so common across different companies I coach and I'm sure you've coached as well where they take these principles, but then they make it more applicable to their situation. Rather, if you're like a B2B hardware company or your B2C software, right, the tactics look a little different. With Innovation Catalyst, I still refer people that I coach today as...
Aaron Eden (09:33.198)
Yeah.
David J Bland (09:43.097)
hey, this is an amazing way to start democratizing this inside your org and starting to make progress on it. And so with that program, I feel as if, was that more of a bottom up or top down or both? Maybe you could give us a little more like nuance to that.
Aaron Eden (09:47.118)
Yeah.
Aaron Eden (09:57.198)
Yeah, it's a little, it was a little bit of both. Yeah. So the, I mean, the intention, the intention was for it to enable grassroots innovation across into it. so while the program was sort of initially champion a little bit more tops down, at least based on my knowledge of it, I could be wrong, but, but, but sort of champion tops down, but it, but it was intended to be grassroots. And so like, as an example, when I became an innovation catalyst, I actually had been.
I had been listening to Phil McKinney's podcast.
Aaron Eden (10:34.958)
was Beyond Innovation, Killer Innovation, the Killer Innovations podcast. He was the previous CTO at HP. And so he had been applying a bunch of these techniques inside HP. And I was on the same data warehousing team that I was telling you about before. And...
I convinced one of our directors to let me run an innovation session with her team. So it was like a brainstorming and narrowing kind of thing. Like in what ways might we, my God, I can't talk. In what ways might we.
use our data in new ways that we hadn't considered or tackle something new, right? So it was like, come up with these outside the box ideas. So the director was, let me go ahead and do that, gave me a day with her team. I facilitated the session. It generally went pretty well. At the end of the session, she says, hey, Aaron, I think you'd make a really good innovation catalyst. I'm like, what is that? I've never heard of that. She goes, well, it's this program where you commit 10 % of your time to helping others apply.
ID4D and sort of spread it across the company, you know, that's kind of what you were just doing and I think you'd do a really good job of that. I'm like, great, how do I get to do that? She goes, well, it's nomination only, but I'm an innovation catalyst, I'll nominate you. And so I'm grateful that she said something afterward, because I probably would have been like, I was already nervous. I probably would have been ridiculously nervous if I knew that there was a whole lot more on the line. But it was that, it was like, how do we as innovation catalysts identify?
identify people that are already thinking and behaving this way and then empower them to go and do more, empower them to go and drive change in their department with their team, outside of that, et cetera.
David J Bland (12:24.019)
I love the nomination bit. I like that. I like that dynamic. And so my understanding of this program and you lived it, so you have a much better understanding than I do, was it was more of a, I don't wanna say it was a part -time, but it was a percentage of your time dedicated to going through training and helping facilitate things, but you also still are doing your, whatever your role is inside into it. Is that correct? Okay.
Aaron Eden (12:41.198)
Mm -hmm.
Aaron Eden (12:47.31)
Correct. Yeah, it's 10%. Yep, you're using 10 % of your time to help others apply D4D.
David J Bland (12:54.578)
So using about 10 % of your time, but there's a, it's almost like, would you call it a community of practice or there's some kind of glue that holds that together in a way, or what would you, how would you characterize that?
Aaron Eden (13:03.95)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the Innovation Catalyst community. Yeah, I think you got that right. It's, there was, you know, literally it was led by like two people. Like, I think the folks that you met when you were out there, like, I'm guessing at that point in time was probably Suzanne and Wendy, like the two of them. And they basically, you know, drove the whole program. It was starting to expand a little bit. There was a handful of others, but yeah, and even today, that sort of central innovation team is,
is still four, five, six people. So the core team has kept a similar size. The number of innovation catalysts has expanded and contracted over the course of the last whatever that is, 15 years. So it has its natural sort of ebbs and flows.
David J Bland (13:53.84)
Yeah, I like that. But I like you're making it work for Intuit, right? You're taking an approach that works for you all. I'm wondering, what are some of the stories you could share from experimentation? And we could start there and maybe fast forward to more present time. But what are some of the things that kind of went well? What are some things that didn't go well? What are some of, if a company is listening and saying, wow, I want to try that at my company.
Aaron Eden (14:00.334)
Mm -hmm.
Aaron Eden (14:08.43)
Yeah.
Aaron Eden (14:21.326)
Yeah.
David J Bland (14:21.519)
What kind of success stories could you share or missteps along the way?
Aaron Eden (14:27.022)
Yeah, I think the, you know, where we were headed before about companies sort of taking it and making it their own, I think is really important. And the thing that's important underneath that is really understanding and honoring what the current culture of the organization is and kind of where you want to go with that culture, right? So like, as an example, in the early days of Design for Delight,
There was, we would talk about the three principles of D4D. We would talk about going broad to go narrow, which is brainstorming and narrowing. We would talk about rapid experimentation with customers. And we would talk about deep customer empathy as the three sort of key principles of design for delay.
there was a very strong process aversion inside Intuit at that time. So using the word process would cause a whole bunch of people to go like, no, I don't want to follow the D for D process, even though really what you're doing when you design a design thinking session is that you're creating a process of putting those tools together and saying like, over the course of the next day, while we do this session together, we want to try to get to this outcome. And here are the steps we're going to take. Yes, you've got to be flexible and it might
might change as you're doing it, et cetera, but you're following a process. So anyway, so the point is there is that in that case, Intuit as a company culture generally was fairly process -averse. And so by labeling it as principles and sort of reinforcing that and coaching the innovation catalyst to not talk about it as process because of what had been learned was super valuable.
The other thing that came up when we were running the Lean Start -In events, the 100 Start -Ups in 100 days inside of Intuit, one of the interesting thing, actually let me take a step backwards. A lot of what, if you're trying to apply this in your organization, a lot of what you have to figure out initially is really a marketing problem.
Aaron Eden (16:43.726)
It's all about how do you get people to engage and come spend time with you long enough to try to shift their behaviors in these specific ways, right? You're trying to make cultural and behavioral change inside the organization. You want people to do more of the design thinking stuff, more of the D4D stuff when it applies, and less of the existing way of working, right? You're trying to shift those behaviors. Anyway, so it was interesting because like,
you know I told you that the D for D principle is rapid experimentation with customers but the on the lean startup side of things you're talking about MVPs you're talking about risk leap of faith assumptions you're talking about you know these other these other things that actually were not really part of rapid experimentation with customers inside of Intuit.
And because Intuit had sort of made D4D our own, you could go out in the world and you could see all these things about design thinking and human centered design. And so like me as an innovation catalyst being hungry to like learn all of these things, I realized like six months in like, this is the same as design thinking. I can go learn all these other things that Intuit's not teaching and I can expand my skills. And like, I got my hand smacked a couple of times by some of the leadership team because they're like,
like, why are you talking about this as design thinking? Or why are you talking about it as human -centered design? It's designed for delight. And I'm like, I'm trying to expose people to the fact that there's more that they can actually take in. And these are all things that are valuable. And it was sort of like going against the grain with their marketing. The other thing that happened with the Lean Startup components was we were talking about running experiments and doing experiment loops and testing assumptions and these kinds of things.
And similarly, they're like, why aren't you talking about this as rapid experiments with customers? Like, this is just rapid experiments with customers. You need to be calling it that. And so similarly, there's this sort of tension that happens in trying to make it your own.
Aaron Eden (18:56.206)
and making sure that you don't get pigeonholed into, like there's a lot of different, there's amazing things happening out in the world that you can learn from, and if you stay focused on just the corporate part, like what our company specific one is, you might be pigeonholing yourself. So anyway, so, I don't know, those are a couple lessons learned from, specifically around sort of cultural transformation and how you, you know.
how you adapt the approach and the methodology, right? We were incorporating the Lean Startup stuff into the existing Intuit D4D and we were trying to figure out what is that for us?
David J Bland (19:35.433)
Yeah, I think a marketing angle is the correct way to view this as how do you socialize this inside the company and how do you put your language to it and all of that. So I agree. There's not just a one size fits all approach for that. So I remember walking through into it and it felt almost like a science fair. There were all these different kiosks and different businesses.
Aaron Eden (19:43.598)
Yep.
Aaron Eden (19:59.918)
Yeah.
David J Bland (20:04.009)
that were in various stages of, from an idea to product market fit. I don't know if I had met a new business line at Intuit that really had achieved product market fit yet with this science fair. And as I walked through, I realized, wow, these are real tangible businesses or aspire to be anyway, that are using these blends of different processes together. So,
Aaron Eden (20:16.302)
Mm -hmm.
Aaron Eden (20:24.014)
Yeah.
David J Bland (20:30.601)
I think beyond the ones that are included in books and such, I mean, can you point to any examples where you thought, wow, yeah, this is something that like came out of this process that we're really proud of, or yeah, this is something that, hey, you know what, we didn't have traction, we killed it, and we celebrated that and moved on. I think we can't assume that all those new ideas are gonna succeed because in my experience, I mean, somewhere between eight or nine.
Aaron Eden (20:34.03)
Mm -hmm.
Aaron Eden (20:44.334)
Yeah.
Aaron Eden (20:48.046)
Yeah.
David J Bland (20:56.201)
out of 10 fail. So that's a scare of our listeners, but it's a high failure rate usually on these things. So I'm just curious, like what kind of stories have come out of that, you know, that are like, yeah, that's actually a business that's thriving today.
Aaron Eden (20:57.422)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
totally.
Aaron Eden (21:07.31)
Yeah. Well, so the SnapTax story that I was telling before, that ended up becoming sort of a consistent feature of TurboTax, of being able to scan your returns and those kinds of things. With the current AI trends and that kind of stuff, those types of capabilities have gotten significantly better than they were back then. That was very cutting edge at that point in time. And so...
you know, that story basically effectively that became a feature in the existing product suite, which you could call that a win. Not its own standalone product, but certainly valuable insights and learnings for the business for it to be successful. One that comes to mind on the failure side of things, we had this, so the science fair you were talking about before I think was the new business initiatives team. And so,
They had probably 10, 15 different teams all exploring new opportunities at various different times. Horizon 3 is what we would call it, the Horizon 3 innovations, the stuff that's like three, five years out before we might see anything from it. There was one that we called Quick Receipts. And the idea was that if you think about...
If you think about being a business owner or an individual, in both of those situations, to get to either...
Keeping tabs on your finances on sort of an ongoing basis or filing your taxes at the end of the year, sort of the underlying behavior that could make all of that easier is capturing your receipts for everything at the moment that it happens. And so we had this idea for quick receipts, which was like, if you've got a receipt, you could just snap a picture of it. It's your digital shoe box for capturing receipts. We had gone and started striking up partnerships with like grocery stores.
Aaron Eden (23:06.816)
stores so that you could have your receipts automatically imported from those grocery stores and don't have to always snap pictures and like you know all these all these ways to like help you digitally capture capture receipts but
we couldn't ever break through the behavior of getting people to actually consistently snap pictures of their receipts. So the leap of faith assumptions that customers will take pictures of the receipts ended up being false. And so we had prematurely built out all of this integration infrastructure to integrate with these, I think it was smart and final, a bunch of these different grocery stores and other places. And we couldn't get customers to upload the receipts. And so it ended up after.
After a bunch of trying, it ended up dying. In hindsight, it probably could have been tested over the course of a few days to a week, all focused on that key behavior. How do you get customers to actually take pictures of the receipts? And getting more specific, like.
what target customer segment will take pictures of their receipts, and is that a big enough group to make this worth doing. And so anyway, so a couple stories from back in the day. One thing to help you along, the marketing angle is a good angle to use to circle back to the future.
David J Bland (24:33.897)
I appreciate that. I think the story I like about SnapTax is so many companies would view that as a threat to the core business and say, no, this new thing will cannibalize our existing business. So we have to kill it right away. And I think it's not an either or, you know, it's often, wow, we could actually grow our share potentially by having this as a part of something we do now. And I wish more leaders would help facilitate that.
Aaron Eden (24:45.582)
Yeah.
Aaron Eden (24:58.158)
Exactly.
Aaron Eden (25:03.662)
Yeah.
David J Bland (25:03.913)
Because I do think it's so hard to find a new idea that's going to work and has traction, it has a repeatable business model. And then once you find it, if it's viewed as a threat, it's really tough to find ownership for it inside of a company. And so I love that it's now part of the existing offering. So I do think I wish more people would broaden their horizons a bit and not view things as threats, because how are you going to innovate if you view everything?
Aaron Eden (25:17.87)
Exactly.
David J Bland (25:33.673)
you're creating new as a threat. I remember this story from Brad Smith. So I'm a huge Brad Smith fan, fellow West Virginia native, I have to say, shout out to all the Mountaineers on the listening here. He mentioned this story of early days where you all were testing with small business owners. And in the conversations with them, it was, yes, we're going to behave this way. If you had this functionality, we're very meticulous.
Aaron Eden (25:35.854)
Yeah, exactly right.
David J Bland (26:03.305)
If we're going to run payroll or something like that, we're going to fill out all these fields and everything's going to be good and trust us. We have this all under control. And then you all did an A -B test, I believe. And the majority of those same small business owners chose the actual opposite of what they said they would do. And so people use this, I find, as a reason not to talk to customers. It's like, well, they say they're going to behave one way. And then when we test it, they behave the other way. So why are we talking to them? Why don't we just test?
Aaron Eden (26:16.654)
Thank you.
Yep.
Aaron Eden (26:30.83)
Right.
David J Bland (26:33.001)
Like what are your experiences with that? And how do you approach, because I firmly believe you should still talk to your customers, but how do you approach those situations where customers maybe project how they would behave, but in reality behave in a different way?
Aaron Eden (26:47.182)
So going back to the marketing, what you're doing is you're understanding what does the customer actually aspire to do, right? Maybe they don't actually do that thing. When you go and run the experiment, they don't exhibit the behavior, but they said that they would. So they aspire to do that thing, right? Or you're tapping into the emotions that they're feeling around that area. They know that they should be doing it. They want to do it.
inspired, however you want to frame that, but that's what they want. And so in that example, leveraging what you're learning there, I think, is really powerful. There was a QuickBooks team that I was supporting that was trying to figure out, this was.
This was shortly after the economy crashed in 07, or yeah, 07, 08, 09, whatever that was in that ballpark, right? So like early 2010s, we were out talking to small business owners and trying to figure out like how these things had impacted their businesses, what was going on for them. And...
The way that we did it was we gave them a pile of magazines and we gave them a period of time. We asked them to basically cut out a bunch of pictures that described what their life was like, what was going on in their business, what was going on for them. And so similar to the science fair thing you were talking about before, we kind of had the science fair with customers around the room with these dioramas up with their magazine stuff and whatever. And we would walk around and basically ask them to explain it so we could learn from them.
And this one business owner started talking about, you know, all of them were generally in a difficult situation. The economy had been tough, their businesses were getting hammered from it, et cetera, et cetera. And this one business owner is walking us through their diorama and...
Aaron Eden (28:48.43)
And we noticed that there was like this picture of a coffee cup up in the corner. And they hadn't said anything about it while we were doing the presentation. We're like, hey, what's the coffee cup for? It was like, my god, I'm so glad that you reminded me to talk about that. That coffee cup represents the last week.
All I've had is coffee for breakfast every day because I do not have the funds to go and spend money on getting anything else. And I'm so busy with my work that I don't have time to actually go and do other things. Like trying to dig myself out of this hole is so difficult that that's all I have time for. And like we knew that customers were in a difficult spot, but like...
Like, I don't know about you, but I could feel, like, as I was telling that story, I could feel the emotion of like, holy crap, what is this person dealing with? If you hear a statistic of like, yeah, 80 % of customers are having a really difficult time with their business, yes, that's, you go like, wow, we need to do something about that, but it doesn't hit you in the chest like hearing that coffee cup story. So anyway, so back to your question, like,
Those details and understanding the customer deeply is important for being able to connect with them, important for being able to craft your marketing message, important. Doing this work is really hard. When nine out of 10 of these business opportunities are failing, you're going to have lots of situations as a team that's working on it that are going to be really difficult and really stressful. And being able to tap back into, remember the customer telling us about the coffee cup?
That's now my reason to continue to push forward and try to figure out how to make this idea work so that I can solve that problem for the customer and so like so the the fact that you can't just ask them what they want I think is is a little bit of a red herring and and that really you need both you need to understand them deeply and in an emotional level and Then be able to test for their behaviors and figure out how to pull those things together So that you can create a business that's viable
David J Bland (31:02.739)
Yeah, I think this premise of deep customer empathy plus rapid experimentation, like you can't just experiment quickly in all directions. It's being tied to understanding and deeply understanding the customer is key, especially with anything desirability and even viability willingness to pay. So I wanna push forward a little bit. So we've talked a lot about all this amazing stuff you've worked on in the past. What kind of things are you getting pulled in today with regards to experimentation and this, like,
Aaron Eden (31:31.246)
Yeah.
David J Bland (31:32.693)
wave of AI that's coming across us, it seems like every industry at the moment, like what are you seeing experimentation looking like today in your work?
Aaron Eden (31:42.126)
Yeah, it's been interesting. So I've been back at Intuit about three and a half years now. So I actually went back during the pandemic. And every company's culture shifts over time.
We have lots of new leadership. The market is different. The needs of the customers are different. I'm not talking about the culture being different as a bad thing. It is what it is, right? And so as an innovation catalyst, I also co -lead the local Tucson Innovation Catalyst Group. So back to the community of practice, the Tucson community.
What I've seen over the last few years is very different than sort of the old days of Design for Delight that you and I were just reminiscing about. In that...
You know, as I would talk to innovation catalysts in Tucson to try to figure out like what's going well for them, you know, where are they applying it? What impact are they able to drive and those kinds of things? I was getting some stories, but about positive impact, but I was also getting a lot of stories about like, I'm too busy or the business priorities are taking over or like my boss doesn't support me or I can't find the time or I'm sorry, this other thing came up, right?
And so like the three of us that co -lead the Invasion Catalyst Tucson group have been...
Aaron Eden (33:26.286)
eating our own dog food, drinking our own champagne, whatever, to try to figure out how do we reignite this? How do we help people find time in their daily work to be able to innovate? What does that look like today with the current culture of the company? And so over the course of the last year, we have what we call posse sessions, which is like the Tucson Innovation Catalyst Posse gets together once a month. We'll have a brown bag lunch.
lunch or maybe we'll go out for a happy hour or we'll do some sort of mini workshop or we'll bring in a guest speaker, whatever, something to keep the community engaged. So we do those. We also do training of new innovation catalysts. Anyway, but what we had been finding was that like,
participation was still really low. Like, okay, so what are we doing wrong? So we start doing more posting on Slack. We start doing more email notifications. We start doing more pinging people one on one to try to solve the, okay, it's a marketing problem. We're putting the D4D message in front of employees and in front of leaders, and it's not resonating. And so we're...
literally having very little turnout and getting very disappointed that, my god, the Innovation Catalyst Group is going to die. This is terrible. There's a small number of us that are doing good stuff with it and a whole bunch of other people that are too busy to actually apply what they've learned. And so.
You know, the message inside Intuit today is about velocity. It's about like how do we move quickly and in the right direction? Our new CEO, Sasan.
Aaron Eden (35:33.198)
His message is all about velocity. How do we move quickly? How do we move in the right direction? How do we reduce barriers? How do we make decisions quickly? How do we get people to take extreme ownership? These behaviors are the things that the leadership are talking about right now. They're not talking about, are you innovating effectively? Are you finding new opportunities? Are you, you know, are you spending 10 % of your time to do other stuff? It's like, no, are you delivering, delivering, delivering? And so that's where the company is right now.
The other message that's very strong is on the AI front. It's how are we enabling AI, integrating AI into our products and enabling our customers. Literally every time Sasan presents during shareholder meetings, he talks about the fact that we're running three.
30 billion plus ML predictions per day for customers. And that's a metric that he reports out every time he gets in front of shareholders. So hearing those over and over again, our key assumption in trying to sort of like resurrect what's happening with the innovation catalyst in Tucson was,
we can find a message that will get people to actually come and engage and participate. And that we can get them to commit time to working differently, right? And so the traditional design for delight, like come learn how to brainstorm or come run some experiments or figure out how to innovate more effectively, they weren't, it wasn't landing anymore. And so what the team and I did is we basically,
tried to incorporate all of that velocity in AI language. And like the 100 startups in 100 days of ages ago said, great, let's create an internal competition that's three days long, because I want to see will people actually commit real time to this. And we positioned it as we called the event Speed. And.
Aaron Eden (37:45.23)
ChatGPT helped us come up with that acronym. It was an acronym. Strategizing, planning, evaluating, executing, and delivering. So, anyway, so the event was called Speed, and it was like, hey, come learn how to apply AI and velocity skill sets and tools in order to deliver on your work more effectively, right? So it was...
about creating the new shiny product or those kinds of things. It was like, no, we're going to help you deliver more effectively. We also have a group inside of Intuit now called the Thrive Group, which is basically a team that's driving lean management across the organization. And so we did this in partnership with the Thrive team because all of what you're doing in lean is really about execution, right? And if this is about execution, then we need to teach people, like, hey, depending on the type of project you're working on,
in some situations you want to apply the lean tools and in other situations you want to apply the D for D tools and we need people to understand when those apply and when they don't.
Anyway, so our first experiment was basically to go and post in a bunch of different Slack channels about this three day competition and email some of the groups that we knew about. We printed some little flyers and put them up on the walls at the various sites. The goal was 10 teams in Tucson, 10 teams in San Diego.
And we were going to basically run it as two workshops simultaneously. So not like directly connected where you're on video the whole time, but like we'd connect at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. So it felt like something really big, but they're really kind of two separately facilitated workshops. Anyway, so that was the initial assumption and kind of what we set up for the experiment was to go sort of.
Aaron Eden (39:48.462)
you know, broadly post this in a bunch of different places and then see how many people would RSVP for the event. So I'll pause there in case you want, you want to go into details on any of that leading up to that.
David J Bland (39:59.439)
I mean, I love what I'm hearing. I know culture does change in companies over time, especially with leadership changing as well. And I think you said something really insightful there, which is we're not necessarily trying to just push the same message over and over again and market it when it's not resonating. Where are we now? What's the culture look like now? How do we still help people but do it in a way that matches where we're headed?
Aaron Eden (40:06.766)
Yeah.
David J Bland (40:26.159)
So, no, I'm following along. So, you ran those two workshops? And so, that was really recently then. So, but.
Aaron Eden (40:27.138)
Exactly. Cool.
Yes, a couple weeks ago actually. That's why I thought it would be a good story to share because it's very recent.
David J Bland (40:42.543)
Yeah, and so maybe tell us what you can share anyway about what that was like. Do you feel like the energy is changing a bit? Do you feel as if people are more engaged?
Aaron Eden (40:53.006)
Yeah, so we ended up having...
I think all said and done, 90 people sign up. So we basically had room for about 100 people, right? So we had 90 people RSVP for the event. We created a little bit of a high bar for them to participate. They had to attend a one hour info session leading up to it. And they had some pre -work that they had to do. They basically needed to come to the event with a pre -formed team and a pre -formed idea or project that they were going to work on during the event. That would be a good use of them learning the AI.
tools and a good use of them applying these velocity mindsets. And so...
You know, with any event, you have people sort of drop off at the last minute. Something comes up and they can't make it, et cetera. You know, that's what free does. So a handful of people dropped off. But all said and done, we ended up with nine teams in Tucson and six teams in San Diego. So 15 out of 20. I think it was pretty solid. Those 75 people committed three days of time working on a project that they were excited about.
We had six senior executives, like SVP and C -level executives that agreed to basically sponsor the event.
Aaron Eden (42:19.534)
They came as what we called speed stewards, which isn't to judge the quality of the ideas, but to judge are the teams applying the velocity behaviors? Are they applying the AI tools? Are they driving business impact? And so the speed stewards came in at the end of each day to basically like provide feedback that teams would pitch to them and they would provide feedback and guidance and support and challenge them to be bolder, et cetera, et cetera, kind of create that safe space for the teams to be successful. Each team had a
had an innovation catalyst coach or a thrive lean business partner coach. And then we also had three or four AI experts from across the company kind of come in and be present to help teams as they applied some of the AI tools on their projects and those kinds of things. The...
I'm trying to think about how I can frame this in a way that doesn't give way into its secrets. Across the 15 teams...
there are potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of opportunities in what they brought in projects. All of that won't be delivered and we don't know exactly how much will actually be delivered yet. It's only been a few weeks. But the opportunity size based on that event is significantly more than the time and money invested in creating the event. It was...
food, a nice dinner, all of us out, some little swag, like some little squishy rocket ships with Intuit logos on it and that kind of, so not an expensive event, right? The time was actually the biggest expense, but the actual financial cost was very little. So if even one of those opportunities out of the 15 gets delivered on in any meaningful way, you'll have a very
Aaron Eden (44:18.144)
significant positive ROI on spending that time. The other thing that's been really interesting over the last few weeks is I continue to have people grab me in the hallway and say things like, hey, can I get a copy of the slides from XYZ section? Like, my team really wants to apply that and like, I want to go share it with my team. Or like, hey, there's this situation for this other team.
they can't do three full days, but like, is there a shorter version of what we did that maybe we could apply? I'm like, well yeah, I ran some smaller experiments beforehand to see kind of like how some of these topics would resonate. And like there's a three hour version you could go and take people through that I took a bunch of people through that worked. Actually, I should have raised that earlier that I did run some smaller experiments before the 15 teams, because if that had been the first one, they'd be a little bit too big. But anyway, yeah, so all in all, like,
The feedback from the event was amazing, super positive from the participants as well as leadership. There's potential for positive ROI with it and a lot of follow -up activity and excitement, which I think are all good early signals. Our key assumption of, hey, will the velocity and AI messaging actually get people to engage? The answer was yes.
And literally, as I was prepping the coaches for the event, I got a couple questions along the way of, hey, how come there's not a slide talking about D4D? How come there's not a slide talking about it being our secret sauce? How come we're not talking about the lean management system as this is a transformational system that we're trying to apply across the organization?
You know, what I said to them is like...
Aaron Eden (46:17.55)
I don't care whether we say any of those words while we're together. We're trying to drive impact. We're trying to get people to work differently. And we've seen leading up to this that those messages aren't resonating for some reason. And so yes, we all know that this is what we're applying and this is what we're teaching. We are doing rapid experimentation. We are doing root cause analysis. We are doing process mapping. That is what we're doing. We're not deviating from that. But we don't need to talk about it.
to make that the primary message. The primary message is we're here to support you and help you drive more business impact. That's what we're here for. Anyway, it's been a crazy couple months getting to that point, but I think it's looking like it's gonna be a win.
David J Bland (47:11.738)
Yeah, I think it's amazing. I think a couple of things I love about it. One is using real ideas. I'm always a fan of that. You know, I feel that's how we learn is we have a real opportunity and we're applying some techniques and processes to it. And that way it really sticks much better than just working on case studies. So I love almost all my work is working on real ideas, coaching people. And even if it doesn't yield a successful business for a team,
they can take what they've learned and apply it in future opportunities. And I see that time and time again in companies where we might have a team and this first idea failed, but then they take that same sort of mindset into another opportunity and eventually find success. And I think that is huge. I mean, you're helping shift mindset. You're giving them career skills and things that they can use. And we're not tied to the failure of the thing, right? We're not tied to the failure of, because...
Aaron Eden (47:54.254)
next one.
David J Bland (48:08.471)
not all these are going to work and we just need to own up to that. So I love I love that combination that you're using.
Aaron Eden (48:14.478)
Yeah, there was one sort of baby assumption that was in there getting past the marketing messaging. Once I had a bunch of people signed up, I'm like, OK, I think as long as they don't all back out, I think that assumption will end up being proven true. Still got to figure out why, but I think we're good. But the other sort of follow on assumption after that point was really around the AI tools and can.
My dream is that we actually have an AI coach inside of Intuit that can coach anybody on any of these tools, whether it's the Thrive stuff or the D4D stuff or whatever, but that you've got an AI coach, not to replace our innovation catalysts, but so that we can now scale across the entire organization. There's only a few hundred of us to cover 15 ,000 employees. Anyway, so,
Yeah, so we created an AI assistant for the event that basically had all of the knowledge of the entire event, all of the tools and frameworks, how to apply the tools and frameworks. And basically participants could use that during the workshop to help them along the way. They still had their innovation catalyst coach there with them, but it was supporting. And it was really interesting because the key assumption in that case was that people would actually use it.
So I gave them a printed participant guide. It was like 50 pages long, something like that. Basically made a book for them with all of this material. But that's what the AI assistant was trained on. And so I was measuring how much do they actually use the AI assistant versus picking up the participant guide, try to see. And it was interesting. They're like, it was interesting.
it was pretty split. It was like about half the time they'd grab the guide and about half the time they'd grab the AI assistant. Because it was in the middle of a workshop, a lot of it was driven by my behavior. So I'd say like, such and such thing of the participant guide that's on your tables, it's here. And so people would grab it. But lots of situations where during the event, it was sort of a little bit of a choose your own adventure in that I would give some theoretical content in the morning, but the majority of the time,
Aaron Eden (50:35.984)
of the day was for teams to actually work on that project. Five, six hours out of the day was for them to work on that project. They had their coach there with them to help them. But really during those windows was when I saw the highest utilization of the AI assistant. And then it's been really interesting after the event also continuing to see a lot of utilization of it. And so like...
Anyway, we'll see what that ends up looking like on the long term, but we were able to also not only teach people how to apply the AI tools in their work and on those projects, but innovate a little bit around how we sort of scale ourselves as innovation catalysts.
David J Bland (51:19.218)
Yeah, it's amazing. I think using AI as an extra coach or an extra team member, that's certainly something I've been playing with as well with my material. And again, it doesn't replace, but it's there to augment. It's there to kind of support. And so I think there is a nugget there of we've got to figure out how to take this and apply it, obviously, in a safe and secure way. But I do think you're onto something with that. So I'm really curious how that all fast forward as well. I just wanted to thank you so much for sharing all these stories. I mean, I can make this episode much, much, much more
much longer. I'm curious, like, so there are a bunch of people listening that are they're like, hmm, I kind of, there's a nugget here I want to take and try out in my organization, or there's something here that I think I could help drive culture change. What's the best way of them to find you and reach out to you?
Aaron Eden (51:50.094)
I love this stuff.
Aaron Eden (52:08.398)
Yeah, I'm easy to find on most of the social networks. Aaron Eden on LinkedIn, Aaron Eden on Twitter, Aaron Eden on Facebook. So any of those are pretty easy. Yeah, and happy to help, happy to share stories, whatever the case may be. Yeah, please do reach out.
David J Bland (52:29.358)
Thanks so much, Aaron. I really appreciate you spending time with us today, sharing all these great stories about how this changes over time, how culture impacts all this, how to use the marketing, how to experiment your way through helping folks apply this. So I just want to thank you so much for your time.
Aaron Eden (52:45.07)
Thank you, David. I appreciate it.