Scott Cook created Intuit in the early 1980s. Cook was a former Product Manager at Proctor & Gamble, and he applied the Product Management techniques he learned in the Consumer Packaged Goods industry to software.
With a strong product management emphasis and product management rigour, he established Intuit. From the beginning, Intuit placed a strong emphasis on the customer experience. Follow Me Home Programs were ahead of their time in the software industry, and just a few companies still execute them now.
Intuit was also a pioneer in customer experience long before it was a phrase. Scott Cook once gave a talk at Mountain View, California’s Computer History Museum. I suppose it was in 2004 or 2005. When Quicken was originally introduced, he stated that it was not the first chequebook software application. There were around 50 of these goods on the market at the time. However, they were all geared toward accountants and financial professionals. Quicken needed to be simple to use for the typical person.
He had his team build the Quicken interface to look and work like a chequebook after seeing a preview of the Apple Lisa interface (a buddy of his at Apple let him sneak in one night to see it). That approach pervades all of Intuit’s products to this day.
However, I must add that it has been tough to find any new true breakthrough items for Intuit in recent years. If you look at their product list, you’ll notice that it’s chock-full of Quickbooks, payroll, and tax-related items. I’m simply mentioning that since it’s an outlier in my understanding of Intuit.