Intuit’s Global Engineering Days (GED)—a five-day event that brings together technologists, product managers, and designers from all Intuit locations around the globe—has long been a cornerstone of our innovation culture. The October 2024 GED broke all previous participation records, as employees created cross-functional teams to work on more than 2,500 projects of their own choosing.
The theme of this GED was “One team. One dream. Our time to build.” It’s a nod to Intuit’s builder culture, where our technologists co-create with cross-functional partners and exhibit extreme ownership in the end-to-end product development lifecycle. To that end, product managers and designers were invited to participate for the first time.
Close to 7,500 participants across 13 Intuit locations in the US, Canada, Israel, and India took a break from their day-to-day work to pitch their ideas, collaborate, design, code, experiment, and ultimately solve problems in our products for our customers, as well as in our platform for our developers. At the end of the week, 800 teams showcased their work at “gallery walks” hosted at each location.
“The teams are building solutions for our customers like never before, and it’s the most exciting time in my 25 years here to be at Intuit!” –Alex Balazs, Intuit CTO
Turning ideas into reality
Over the years, hundreds of GED projects across multiple disciplines have made their way into our products as new features or into our development environment as productivity-enhancing tools. They’ve also provided early explorations into technologies we later adopted. This latest batch of innovative projects and experiments looks especially promising. Some use agentic AI to automate marketing campaigns, execute tasks on behalf of human experts, and clean up code for internal development teams. Others use generative AI to provide even richer personalized financial recommendations and insights, help customers quickly identify the ideal human expert for their tax situation, and automate interactions between small and mid-market businesses and their customers.
The benefits of diving into GED
In addition to the benefits to customers and our technologists, GED offers tremendous opportunities for participants to learn new technologies and tools. The week before GED, they were able to bone up for the event by attending any of 15 different workshops, covering topics ranging from GenAI (prompt writing, building UI for GenAI experiences, mapping GenAI to customer problems), to rapid experimentation with customers, to operational excellence. And on top of that, GED is really fun!
The participants said it best in their feedback on the event:
It’s a joy to spend a week working outside of commitments while still contributing to customer needs.
I love seeing what can be accomplished in such a short period of time. It’s truly amazing.
I love that we can explore and learn new things.
Teams have three months after GED to wrap up their projects and, for many of them, ship to production. Just in time to start thinking about what they’ll work on at the next GED in April 2025.
In the meantime, our global team of technologists continues to build and develop AI-native solutions for consumers and businesses like it’s GED every day, as Intuit delivers seamless, connected ‘done-for-you’ experiences that help customers make more money with less work.