Community, Culture, and Q&A
The Intuit Tech Culture team learned lessons in community management while bringing Stack Overflow Teams to engineers. Looking to the example of developers sharing knowledge in Q&A forums, we hope sharing our strategies and experiences helps others taking on similar initiatives.
On Intuit’s Tech Culture team, we believe culture is Queen. As part of Intuit’s Architecture and Platform Strategy Group, any initiative our team takes on is closely linked to our culture. In the words of Intuit Tech Evangelist Aliza Carpio, “When you create a culture that is value-driven, purposeful, inclusive, and respectful of each person’s role and intent, you create a sense of belonging.”
Our team treats Intuit’s tech culture as a product, and resources it as such, to build an environment where engineers are empowered, deliver with speed, work in a unified way and have fun! In the spirit of empowering technologists, Intuit CTO Marianna Tessel keeps communication lines open. In June 2019, an engineer asked: “Can we have an Intuit-wide Q&A tech forum like Stack Overflow? A tech forum would allow developers to help each other overcome common hurdles more quickly, especially when dealing with in-house technologies.” This question kicked off a change management journey, complete with opportunities for learning and growth.
Given our focus on building culture by encouraging common ways of working and creating shared experiences, the Tech Culture team was asked to help answer this question. We began by mapping the uses and purposes of existing tools, and identifying gaps. We found engineers had trouble finding answers they needed to deliver with speed and that Slack support channels were riddled with repetitive questions. We generated user profiles, starting with customer problem statements (i.e., “I am an engineer and I am trying to…”). Laying this groundwork took time, but allowed us to be clear about what we needed and how we wanted to present a new tool.
While our team had lots of experience — ranging from engineering to XD to event planning — community management was a new discipline for us. Although developing culture and community are interrelated, consistent, hands-on care and monitoring of online fora is a unique skillset. With guidance from partners at Stack Overflow, we started studying, turning to guides like Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community. We learned strategies to make processes as simple as possible, foster inclusivity and create sustainable governance. During our research, we discovered the All Things Open conference, and a few Intuit engineers attended. Throughout this process, we applied what we learned to our launch plan.
Based on principles of community management, we knew our small team couldn’t go it alone; we relied on enthusiastic volunteers to get our Stack Overflow instance off the ground. We recruited moderators and subject matter experts to help seed the site with relevant content, since as Stack Overflow advises, “No one wants to show up to a new place, only to find out that there’s nothing there for them.” As we recruited experts, we began to realize that we’d need ways to scale with a tool serving nearly 5000 technologists at 16 global development sites. We developed an additional volunteer role, Stack Overflow Site Lead (or SOS Lead). One SOS Lead at each global development site acts as a hybrid; equal parts moderator and community manager. SOS Leads evangelize the tool in their local commentaries and assist colleagues with questions.
With our Q&A site seeded and volunteer corps signed on, we were ready to launch. Developing a launch strategy sat more comfortably in our team’s wheelhouse. While we wanted to kick things off with a big party, that was one of many plans thrown off the rails by 2020. Instead, we engaged technologists with user training and office hours, staggered to optimize for different time zones. We emphasized the importance of self-service and knowledge sharing in creating a company where developers can innovate and solve problems with speed. We created fun and excitement by using and sharing custom Zoom backgrounds and awarding digital badges for volunteer intranet profiles.
Since launch, we’ve seen questions in some Slack channels decrease by 20–30%. “This couldn’t have come at a better time for our team,” said an engineer who manages a support channel. With a successful launch and incorporation of a knowledge sharing mindset into our company culture, we’re on to our next initiative. But we know how continued investment in the community is vital; we recently handed over day-to-day oversight of the tool to a dedicated community manager. For our team, bringing in this tool helped us grow as professionals. Whatever tool we’re building, or initiative we’re driving, the community management skills we’ve sharpened will help us leverage the power of community to succeed, just as developers in our own Q&A tool help one another move fast and thrive.
Want to know more about Intuit’s use of Stack Overflow? Check out the Stack Overflow case study: How Intuit embraced lean collaboration.
Julia Falkowski is a Senior Content Designer, working on tech culture in Intuit’s Architecture and Platform Strategy group.
