One week in the fall of 2024, two Intuit engineers took a break from their day-to-day work to tackle a problem that had been on the development back burner for a while.
Staff Software Engineer Andrew Wasicek and Senior Software Engineer Michael Kukar are on Intuit’s tax content engineering team, which codifies tax law into Intuit’s platform for TurboTax. As part of this work, they partner with tax programmers like Scott Lyons to translate tax logic into code for TurboTax.
“It’s such a cool thing that two weeks a year, you get to spend time on pretty much whatever you want.”
Michael Kukar, Intuit
But for years, they noticed that tax programmers like Scott spent considerable time collaborating across multiple sources and stakeholders to ensure a version of the product contained the exact necessary changes at the right time.
This was a complex task, considering the sheer volume of tax law changes and the number of tax experts making almost daily modifications.
So, Wasicek and Kukar built an AI-powered tool that synthesized code repository history and task tickets to display succinct overviews of TurboTax releases, helping their colleagues make faster, more confident decisions.
The work was not part of a quarterly plan, but a project they took on as part of Intuit’s Global Engineering Days (GED), a five-day event hosted twice a year that invites engineers, product managers, and designers to break from their regular duties and build tools and features of their choosing—a new idea for propelling business growth, addressing customer pain points, or streamlining work for each other.
“We didn’t know that it would have some of the benefits it did,” Wasicek said of their project. “That’s one of the things I value most about Global Engineering Days. It cultivates an exploratory environment.”
Intuit runs its Global Engineering Days twice a year and grounds them in real customer problems that have a massive potential impact. For Intuit that means focusing on solutions to help people feel less overwhelmed and alone when it comes to money, because expert financial help is not always accessible or affordable, and finances are not intuitive. It’s also more bottom-up: five days with no meetings, no assigned work, and no top-down mandates. Leaders join as mentors, but the ideas come directly from employees.
Some Intuit employees use the time to learn something completely new. Others tackle passion projects that solve customer problems that haven’t been prioritized yet. Most end up doing both.
In recent years, GED projects have led to hundreds of new product features and internal tools that improved how teams work.
One 2024 project introduced natural language processing to dynamically translate TurboTax into Spanish, while another made it easier for iPhone users to track business mileage and deductions by displaying trip data directly on the lock screen. The year prior, teams explored solutions ranging from accuracy measurement tools to recommendation engines and automated test case generation.
According to Starr Pagharion, Staff Marketing Manager at Intuit, Global Engineering Days grew out of Intuit’s design thinking roots, and have become a fixture of how teams work across the company.
“We call it Design for Delight,” Pagharion said. “It’s integrated into our culture, in the sense that everything we do stems from a customer problem and how we can use rapid experimentation to solve it for them.”
The theme of this year’s GED was “creating magical done-for-you experiences” and brought together over 8,000 Intuit technologists, product managers, and designers across Intuit’s global locations, including Canada, the United States, and India. Sixty-seven percent of the projects involved a GenAI or agentic AI component, inspired by the theme. By the end of the week, over 2,800 project prototypes were presented by over 900 teams globally.
The weeklong event allows teams to think about projects that might not be part of the scope of the year. The event is not mandatory, but it’s something that employees look forward to. Many teams and projects are set before the event even begins.
Throughout the week, there’s dedicated time for ideation and rapid prototyping. Teams can participate in engagement activities and check-ins with technical advisors, employees who have completed GED projects before, and leaders who can weigh in on the approach. At the end of the week, teams showcase their work and prototypes at a gallery walk.
Leadership is fully bought in, too. Managers actively support their teams in clearing workloads and shifting priorities. “The week is really meant to energize our engineering community and help unlock a lot of those roadblocks of thinking and encourage collaboration,” Pagharion added.
Wasicek and Kukar have seen several of their GED projects shipped to product. At the start of each GED, their goal is to learn something new. But more often than not, their solutions end up solving real problems.
“I think that’s what makes GED special,” said Kukar. “Sometimes we’re just there to pound out a feature that we think might help 20 people do their jobs a little better.”
That was the mindset behind their recent tax content project.
Wasicek said GED gave his team the time and space to explore technologies they normally wouldn’t use. By stepping outside their usual tech stack, the team discovered a solution that has already helped hundreds of colleagues.
“It’s such a cool thing that two weeks a year, you get to spend time on pretty much whatever you want,” said Kukar. “You build that skill set and confidence, so when you see something in a future project, you feel comfortable taking those chances and taking those risks. I think it’s a testament to the culture here.”
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All photos provided by Intuit.