EP18: Building customer obsessed products and culture, with Mari Baker, Silicon Valley veteran who was one of the first 30 employees and SVP at Intuit

Paradigm Shift

Mari has held a variety of incredible roles in Silicon Valley as a product veteran, company builder, and now board member. Mari started her career in startups. She was one of the first 30 people at Intuit and helped grow the company grow over 10 years into a public company with thousands of employees.

At Intuit, Mari went from being a Product Manager for Quicken to SVP and got to work closely with industry legends like Scott Cook and Bill Campbell to shape Intuit’s products and culture. Intuit of course is well known for having one of the most customer centric product cultures and has successfully navigated multiple technology and platform shifts— from Command Line to GUI, PC to Web, and Web to Mobile. Mari shares some incredible lessons and insights from the early days that shaped Intuits product culture.

We also talk to Mari about her more recent work serving on the boards of Stanford, and Blue Shield of California. We talk about how University boards work, Mari’s role in founding the Stanford Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab to tackle the under-representation of women in our industry, and opportunities for innovation in the healthcare space.

This is an incredibly wide-ranging conversation where we cover so many interest topics spanning Mari’s incredible career as a product builder, company builder and board member.

In this episode we discuss:

1. Starting out in Silicon Valley and being early at Intuit
   • What was the valley like at the start of the PC revolution?
   • Intuit’s first product was Quicken (for personal finance), what was the original insight?
   • What made you join Intuit when it was a small startup?
   • How big was Intuit when you got there and when you left?
2. How Intuit has built customer obsessed products across multiple decades
   • Intuit was known to be extremely customer focus, how did y’all approach that in the early days and build the product culture?
   • How did Quicken (personal finance) lead to Quickbooks (SMB accounting)?
   • How did Mari approach marketing at a time when people were new to computers and software?
3. Working with Scott Cook and Bill Campbell to shape Intuit products and culture
   • How did Scott Cook approach product management during early days of software?
   • How did Intuit build its customer centric culture?
   • You got to work closely with Bill Campbell. What were his superpowers that helped him become such a legendary leader?
4. Serving on the Board of Trustees at Stanford and setting up the Stanford Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab
   • What does the Board of Trustees role at Stanford entail?
   • What led you to setting up the Stanford Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab?
5. Serving on the board of Blue Shield of California which is a non-profit insurer with 4.5m members and $21b in revenue
   • Where do you see the biggest opportunities for technology to transform healthcare especially in a post Covid world?
   • What’s your advice for healthcare founders trying to figure out trade-offs between B2B vs B2C business models?
6. Closing questions
   • Who is the most talented person Mari has ever worked with and why
   • What’s something you believe that would surprise most people
   • Who are some of Mari’s heroes that she admires
   • What superpowers does Mari lean on day to day

Links

• Follow Mari on Linkedin
• Stanford Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab

Hit subscribe to keep up with new episodes!

• Follow Ashish and Zane on Twitter for summaries