At Intuit, we recognize the importance of providing small businesses with innovative solutions that empower them to succeed in today’s dynamic and highly competitive marketplace. We believe that the ability to customize solutions for niche needs is essential, which is why we strive to deliver a ‘Better Together’ platform that caters to developers building QuickBooks Online Apps. With this in mind, we’re excited to introduce the newest member of the product team, Riya Gayasen.
Meet Riya!
As a senior product manager for developer experiences at Intuit, Riya brings a wealth of experience from the technology industry.
Riya spent nearly 9 years of her 11-year career building financial technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) products. She started her career as an engineer at Oracle India where she built banking apps for retail consumers. Her first stint as Head of Product was at a startup in Mumbai that operated like Uber for home cleaning. After moving to the US, Riya worked at Oracle, spearheading the end-to-end development of their CRM Mobile App, building AI products for Oracle’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Suites, and finally leading the Developer Experience team at Oracle NetSuite. After that, Riya moved to PayPal where she led multiple Developer Experience initiatives for PayPal developers.
We interviewed Riya to dig deeper into her background and how that led to her new role at Intuit.
What sparked your interest in helping small businesses?
When I was an MBA Student at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, I got a chance to interview more than 100 small businesses as part of an Entrepreneurship course. I realized two things. One, starting and running a business is a surefire way to climb up the economic ladder, and two, starting and running your own business is astronomically hard. I saw that while business owners wanted to keep improving their products, there were a lot of stressful distractions around bookkeeping and preventing an audit by the IRS. From then on, it’s been my dream to build products that reduce that friction and let business owners focus on what they do best: building and selling their products. That’s the reason I became interested in Intuit.
What made you interested in the Developer Experience space?
I started my career as an Android and iOS developer. Being in the developer experience space for Intuit’s Small Business Self-Employed Group (SBSEG) allows me to combine my experience as a developer with my passion for helping small business owners. At Intuit, we value ‘Better Together’. For me, this means bringing all of my experiences together toward being better together as a team.
With Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI coming in, I see a huge opportunity to utilize this new technology to help developers be more productive, make their lives easier, and enable them to build more useful apps.
Your new role at Intuit puts you in a great position to help developers build QuickBooks Online Apps and help the small businesses using those apps. What are your specific responsibilities and your priorities in your first year?
In this role, I’m responsible for enhancing the experience of developers building apps for QuickBooks Online. For my first year, it means ensuring that we provide developers with a ‘Better Together’ system where building a new app, understanding our APIs, and releasing apps integrated with QuickBooks is as easy as a walk in the park.
This year I’m focused on building a QuickBooks Online developer portal that provides comprehensive documentation and resources for developers with a user-friendly experience for the entire journey of building and releasing apps. This portal will be a one-stop shop for developers to access everything they need to build and publish their apps on the QuickBooks Online platform. I will also work closely with our developer community to understand their needs and priorities and ensure we’re continually improving the developer experience. Ultimately, my goal is to help developers build amazing apps that are used by millions of small businesses around the world and help those small businesses run their operations more efficiently and effectively.
How will you measure the success of your efforts in enhancing the developer experience and building a developer portal?
The success of my efforts will be measured in a few different ways. I will be measuring developer adoption and satisfaction using a Product Recommendation Score (PRS) associated with our developer portal and tools. I will be tracking the number of apps being built and published on the QuickBooks Online platform, as well as the engagement and usage of those apps among small businesses. Additionally, I will be monitoring key business metrics such as revenue and customer retention to ensure that we are delivering value to our developer community and small businesses. Overall, our success will be based on our ability to make it easy and rewarding for developers to build great apps, and on our ability to help small businesses succeed in their goals.
As our developer community members design unique, innovative third-party applications that work seamlessly with QuickBooks, do you have any advice for them?
Yes! My advice is to take advantage of the resources available on the QuickBooks Online developer portal. This comprehensive platform provides all the tools and documentation developers need to build third-party applications that seamlessly integrate with QuickBooks. By familiarizing yourself with the portal’s features and best practices, you can streamline your development and ensure your app is optimized for QuickBooks users. I’d also recommend connecting with the QuickBooks developer community to get insights and feedback on your app and staying up to date with the latest platform updates and trends.
What excites you the most about the future at Intuit?
First and foremost, I’m excited about the opportunity to use emerging technologies like AI and machine learning to help small businesses and developers be more productive and efficient. By leveraging these technologies, we can empower small businesses to make smarter decisions and automate many of their day-to-day tasks, freeing up more time to focus on building and growing their businesses.
I’m also excited about the increasing role that developers are playing in the QuickBooks ecosystem. As more third-party applications are built on the QuickBooks platform, we’re seeing a growing community of developers who are passionate about building innovative, high-quality apps. I’m excited to see what these developers will create in the future and how their apps will help small businesses succeed.
