Intuitive choice

One realizes that India's time in the software product space has come when
companies like Intuit-which owns three of the largest software brands in the
US: QuickBooks, Quicken, and TurboTax-makes a base in Bangalore.

It has done up 22,000 sq ft in Sarjapur to set up a development center, the
company's 14th, but a center that in its full capacity would match all the
previous 13 in the US and Canada.

"We felt that the best way to develop products was to go to cities that
have pockets of talent," says Ranga B Shetty, director, Product
Development. He is looking to hire 300 people in three years, to enable the
center own all product initiatives that are taken on here.

The emphasis is on customer-facing products. "A lot of work that has
happened in India was on infrastructure products-products that are not
actually touched by millions of end users but just by a system administrator.
So, we will be looking at a whole new and different set of technologies for
developing these products," says Shetty.

He and his team have already delivered an important piece of the QuickBooks
family of products, which is now starting to ship.

Intuitive needed to expand product development capabilities and Bangalore
came up as the obvious choice. Shetty refuses to believe it was because of cost
arbitrage. "If cost was an issue, we would have set this up as an
outsourcing model where initiatives would be taken on by other centers as
outsourced pieces of work, and you just do project management. But we have
decided to conceptualize and own the product here. So, it's just because of
the talent pool availability," he says.

So, what kind of people is he looking to hire? Men with the three elements
that make a good product engineer: customer empathy, core software development
skills, and a mindset about good product development practices. Intuit is
looking at quality assurance methodologies as a subset of the overall product
development process, so it is looking at building quality into the product.

Goutam Das in
Bangalore