 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Rajee Arasu. She is the CTO of Development at Intuit. And also by Mariana Tessel. She is the Chief Product Officer at Intuit. So thank you both for joining us. You got the title wrong. Oh no! What, what did you do? Please correct me. It's SVP. SVP. SVP of our organization is called CTO Dev. And I manage the platform and infrastructure services for our... Great, so now we've got that under control. So tell me a little bit about your background. We'll start with you, Rajee, about how you got into this business. I have been about 27 years in the consumer and retail space. And a ton of background are on e-commerce and payments. This is actually my first job, sort of focusing on platform and core services for the company. A huge responsibility. My job is not just to provide and delightful services for my, both my internal and external customers, but to really make sure that we are really thinking about the future and the capabilities that they're building for the future. So I'm super excited about my role at Intuit. How about you, Mariana? First of all, thanks for having me here. And I have to confess, this is my first time at the Grace Hopper Conference. That's wonderful, that's great. And I'm completely blown away from the wonderful people here and the representation and the energy. So I'm now a fan. So I just want to say that, you know, I, my background has always been engineering. I've done multiple engineering roles. I actually, before this, I spent a lot of time in systems and infrastructure. And I really get a kick right now of out of using some of the products I've built into actually using them in other products and seeing how customers are using it. So that's an interesting kind of journey and interesting to see kind of full picture of kind of the industry. Both of you, and we are here at Grace Hopper, which is the celebration of women in computing. And both of you are passionate about, about creating a more inclusive engineering culture. Can you talk about why, why this is a passion project of yours? And then also what you're doing to help that happen. Raji? I think, I mean, Grace Hopper, this is my seventh year in the conference. And I love it. So you're a veteran. She's a virgin. You're a veteran. I'm like boy, absolutely. And I think it's such a joy because it not only, I have started to recognize some familiar faces. It's a fantastic opportunity for us to network with women in technology and talk about actually what's core is not just the issue around fixing the numbers, but actually we talk about capabilities and building what's really important for a craft. And so I'm actually excited about that. The more and more I see, we have about 112 people attending from Intuit and a ton of men as well participating in that. But a lot of people are going to be talking about things that are very core to us, like data engineering, data science, architecture, services-oriented journey and all of that, which is awesome because I think that's what people want to hear, the work that we do, and they want to understand what would be like to work at Intuit. So there's a ton of opportunity for companies and for individuals who work there to really show what they do every day and really connect in a very authentic way and show off their work more than actually be really talking about the Uber problem that many of us do care about that as well. But I see down here, especially where we are sitting, everybody's connecting on what they work, what is the work that I'm going to do or what's the stuff that actually interests me, which I think is pretty cool. During the keynote, Melinda Gates had a very quotable quote and she said, not every idea is wrapped in a hoodie, not every good idea is wrapped in a hoodie and this is really bemoaning the programmer culture. Is that message getting through, do you think, to young women in the sense of, this is not all the sea of white dudes? You know, I think it is, but there's still work to do both for women that enter the field as well as women that been here for a while and there's still plenty of opportunity. So the culture is definitely, at least I mean, I'll have to tell you that, again, being a bit in the industry now and gaining a bit of a perspective, just the fact that it's been talked about and the fact that there's more energy towards solving it is already a great win. And to your question before, if I can jump on that as well. This whole idea of diversity in the workplace, there's nothing, I don't know, there's much to say there beyond what's already said about how it's good for businesses, how the customers of many of the, I know definitely for us in the small businesses, a lot of our customers are diverse and we want to have diverse people build product for our customers, right? So all of these are true, it makes sense for the business, but I can tell you from my own lens and my own kind of perspective and experience, women are just awesome and they make outstanding engineers, outstanding leaders and every time I have a group that has all sorts of people, again, all kind of diversity, it's just a stronger group. So some of it, I love to have a diverse team, selflessly because it's an awesome team and that's kind of what I think we should all be pursuing, just be awesome, not just diverse. So you're passionate about getting more women into this industry, keeping them, retaining them in the industry, but tell me a little bit about the tech, I mean because that was obviously your first love and that's why you do what you do. So tell me about what you're working on that's really exciting to you and into it. I think, as I look at my past, one of the things that always excited me is to work on complex stuff that actually makes a difference in the world and it started fairly early on in my career where I started to, when I worked at eBay, it was about actually connecting to our customers and sellers and having that sort of a social impact. Moving on to Stubbub, it was a lot about actually entertainment and how do you really get people to the game and that perfect evening they were looking for and then moving on to Intuit, it's about making that financial freedom possible for many of our customers. And I think when I look at that, for Intuit there's a huge opportunity which we are all actively working on is to start looking at our data and be able to create some delightful customer experiences for our people and to really give them more time and more money at the end of the day. And I think, and that sort of confidence in our own products about the decisions we make for them and the expertise that we provide. And so as part of that, a lot of that can only come alive with technology. So when we start to look at that, the, you know, there's a huge focus within the company on building great tools for our developers so they can move faster. There's a huge focus on trying to do AI and machine learning on our data and looking at what we can do to personalize our experiences for our customers and reduce friction in the flow. There's a ton of work that's being done there. And I also think that we, we're very excited about our journey to the cloud and having gone through a whole services, you know, oriented architecture, re-architecture that we have been embarked on for many years. So I think really, really there's a ton of good work that's happening inside with all towards the focus of servicing the customer. So there's a ton of conversations that we have around customer empathy and then all of the technology towards making the lives of our customers better from a financial perspective. So this- And giving them back more time and money, as you said. Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. If I can add to that, like our mission as a company is to power prosperity around the world. And, you know, and that's like a great mission. But as Raju was saying, it's even awesome when you get to connect technology to a mission that is really inspiring like this and is really something we put in practice. You know, I'll talk specifically in one of my products, QuickBooks Online QBO. You know, we have a lot of the problems that involve the challenges. We should call it a problem. Challenges that many of the SaaS companies are facing in terms of scale, in terms of velocity. How are we doing DevOps in the most modern way? What's our CI CD pipeline look like? How do we use, we have all this great data. How do we use the right data? Because obviously we're on a respect privacy. How do we use the right data to giving even more value to our, getting more value to our customers? How do we apply machine learning and AI and you know, et cetera to make it even more interesting because we have some touch with financial data. There's a lot of view on security and what we do there. So lots of problems to solve in that are deep technical problems. Lots of modern technology. Some that other that we have to look at but really interesting set of challenges from all the way to, it's close to the infrastructure, all the way to the UI and some really cool things that we've been there. I think that's a really great point in the fact that as you're women technologists, so you face issues of biases and sexism in the industry but as technologists, as human technologists, you face questions about am I looking at the right data? Is this data secure? Am I doing enough around privacy? Do you think that this conference does enough to acknowledge both sides of this coin in the sense that you are technical leaders in your field and you are here at a tech conference but then you're also here to rally around this issue of getting more women and retaining more women in the industry? What do you think? I think when I am in the booths here, I sense it. I sense that we're talking about the real problems around technology, the conversations around the specialties that are required in data science or maybe architecture, maybe engineering, I mean any parts of that, we do have those conversations. I think at the keynotes and maybe at the higher level, it's a lot more about developing women and addressing the problem and probably building leadership. So there's probably two flavors that you find in this conference, which I think cater to different sets of women and some about staying in the field and not sort of dealing with the problems that we have. So I think it does, but I think it'd be awesome to have a panel where we have very differing points of view on a technology and having a really good debate about that, which would be really cool. I think if we add something like that, I don't know if it's in our curriculum. I am definitely not aware of everything in our curriculum, but it'd be cool to have a panel like that, which is debate, yeah. I want to wrap up here, but I want to ask, what is your best advice for aspiring women in this field? And it could be someone who's just starting her computer science journey in college or it could be someone who maybe is feeling as though, do I stay in this field? I don't know if this is for me. What would you say to that young woman? You know, again, maybe that's something that she heard before, but I would say, you know, go for it, stick with it, be ready to fall down and come back up and be ready, be open-minded, know that you can learn anything and you know, but stick with it, just stay. Stick with it, it's hard and breezy. I love that, I mean, I want to definitely second Mariana saying, don't be afraid of failures, take it on and use that as an opportunity to convert that into success in the next opportunity that you have. I think the part that I would also say is for tech, being a leader in tech and staying true to it, you've got to have a learning mindset. Every single day you come in, you've got to learn new skills, you have to be open to change and constant change and if you learn and every one of us has different ways to learn, you know, some of us learn through conversations, some of us to learn through reading papers, whatever that might be, but if you do that, you will stay as a credible and relevant leader for the longer run. The growth mindset. Absolutely. Well, Raji Mariana, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you for having us. I'm Rebecca Knight here at the Grace Hopper Conference. We will have more just after this.