Jana Eggers
General manager , Innovation Lab, Intuit
Jana Eggers knows her customer. She also knows that innovative products can only succeed in the marketplace if they meet a customer’s real needs. As head of Intuit’s Innovation Lab [iLab], Eggers and her team take on projects considered too risky for a business unit’s focus and researches them through what she calls a ‘completely customer-focused’ process.
Actually, Eggers leads three business organizations for Intuit. When she isn’t driving the innovation process, she is general manager of QuickBase and Customer Manager – two young, strategically important business units.
How does she manage it all? “Some days it’s about survival,” she says, laughing.
How did Eggers find herself with so much responsibility? It began in college where she pursued a degree in mathematics and computer science. “I didn’t tell my family until my junior year that I was majoring in math. They wanted to know, ‘What do people do with a math degree?’”
What Eggers did with her degree was put it to work in research, technical and business roles at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Princeton Transportation Consulting Group, Lycos Inc., Sabre Inc., Apps.com and Basis Technology Corp. And then, along came Intuit.
Imagine Customers Who Clamor for Participation
“At Intuit, ideas flow in from all corners of the company, usually directly from customers,” reports Eggers. At any one point, Eggers says, a business unit might have 7 to 10 big ideas they want to go after. iLab vets out those ideas deemed too risky by the business units but might reap big rewards if given the opportunity.
“We actively push for those high-risk projects that business units rightfully don’t pursue,” says Eggers. “Our motto is ‘we fail so you don’t have too.’ If we succeed, the business-units take over, if we fail, the failure is ours, not theirs.”
For the Lab to find success, Eggers had to create a repeatable process for exploring ideas, iteratively developing them as products and transitioning them back to the business units. Along the way, all learning, successful or otherwise, is shared with the entire company.
According to Eggers, an innovation process should follow the triumvirate of customer, company and employee. “We treat our business units like one of our customers,” she says. “It’s important they respect our experience and trust our outcomes; they should feel like a client.” As a result, Eggers says that business units and their customers ‘clamor for participation’ in an iLab project.
Through intense partnership and collaboration, the iLab and Intuit’s business units have jointly conducted customer visits, direction design, prototype design, and product roadmap creation. “In the beginning, iLab was considered just a resource for the business units,” Eggers says. “Now I’m hearing things like ‘I really need you,’ or ‘I have to have you for this project’.”
Clearly, her innovation strategy is working. Earlier this year, Quickbase was selected as Best Business Software Product or Service by the Software and Information Industry Association.
Eggers describes herself as an ‘old programmer’ who went to ‘the dark side’, a.k.a. the business side, after leaving research science. She straddles both sides with both a passion and respect for technology. “At the end of the day though, I love knowing our customers well,” she says. “I love being able to punctuate my conversations with examples drawn from real people, with real problems solved, and real problems not yet solved.”
