Intuit

I enjoyed working with the Mint mobile team. Despite all the changes in management and the changes in direction, this team stuck together and worked hard for the customer and for each other. They were also very passionate about the mobile space and wanted to ensure that Mint was the best mobile finance app out there.

The core of the team was intact for almost 2+ years and was a blend of new faces and experienced individuals. Everyone on the team was friendly, warm, welcoming, and treated you with respect. The team regularly went out to lunch together, hung out after work, and even went on trips together. In short, it was a family.

More impressive than how they treated each other was how passionate they were about their craft. The team worked hard to create a product that was top-notch and cutting-edge. On many occasions, Apple and Google featured the app as a result of their hard work and dedication. The Android engineers regularly went to the Google Play Store and responded directly to customers. More importantly, when we saw a trend for an issue on the Play Store, we would fix it and ship it.

Despite the changes in management, the team was able to ship several new features and have fun in the process. While senior management was trying to get their story straight, the PM really pushed for improvements to benefit the customer.

Sadly, this all came to an end recently, as 11 of the original 12 engineers on the team have left in the last 3 months out of frustration.

The only thing that keeps me here is my belief in Brad Smith and the work-life balance. It is sad, however, that I show up to work after 9 and leave well before 5.

Each of the 4 years that I worked at Mint (Intuit), they changed the long-term strategy and told us that we could ignore our old priorities. Each time we started our new strategy, we quickly had to change priorities back to the original priorities because we weren't meeting our goals/numbers.

More frustrating than the constant change in strategy is the middle management. Their sole goal in life is to ensure that you're doing what you're told. They always disregard your feedback and consistently want to pursue their own agenda. If you don't agree with them, they will phase you out, as many of my colleagues were. Code Reuse, Code Coverage, and Unit Tests are their #1 priority and receive their attention on a regular basis.

You will hear them talk about innovation and new features, but it's all talk. To help foster innovation, they schedule innovation jams or hack days. Everyone is a winner at the innovation jam or hack day, but the customer is the loser because nothing actually gets shipped. There have only been 3 or 4 major features shipped in the 4 years that I have been here. What's worse than no new features is not fixing bugs either. Go look at the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Many, many users complain about being logged out, or their bank connection is lost, or their transactions are not accurate. We brought this up to middle management and senior management, but were told that connectivity is not an area of focus for us. That doesn't even make sense; how can Mint work if you can't connect a bank?

The true problem with Mint is that Intuit does not want to invest in them as a Personal Finance Solution. They rarely ever talk about Mint at Intuit. When there are company-wide meetings, Mint is rarely mentioned. The same is true for Quicken, and they finally decided to sell Quicken. I'm sure that Mint will experience the same fate.

In Summary:

• Constant changes in long-term strategy only to go back to the original strategy.
• Middle management only cares about their initiatives and does not care about the customer and the individual teams.
• They talk about new features that ship nothing and worse, don't tend to the other issues.
• Mint will never really be a part of the long-term strategy at Intuit.

Slim down middle management and focus on what Intuit talks about: lean, test, and iterate.