Name: Vijay Anand
Vijay is Senior Vice President at Intuit responsible for Global Development Centers and based in Intuit’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. In this role, Vijay engages with all global product development sites and guides them on the strategies for the future aimed at delivering Intuit’s mission to power prosperity around the world. Vijay also leads Intuit’s Tech Culture initiative with the objective of transforming Intuit into a world-class technology company and is the executive sponsor for the Women in Tech.
During his 10-year tenure, Vijay is credited with building Intuit’s India Development Center in Bangalore where over 1000+ talented employees deliver game-changing innovations across Quickbooks, TurboTax, and Mint and delight millions of customers around the world. Vijay has extended Intuit’s global presence with a new global development center in Israel that is accelerating our journey on AI, Machine Learning, and Information Security. Back in 2010, Vijay created a set of tenets called the Global Engineering Principles based on his experiences building successful global product teams. These principles coupled with Vijay’s servant leadership style of management have been the foundation for Intuit’s success in attracting the best talent in the world’s talent hotspots and keeping them highly engaged. As a result, Intuit is consistently ranked as one of India’s Best Companies to Work For by the Great Place to Work Institute and The Economic Times including the #1 ranking in 2017. Intuit is also recognized as an industry leader in India when it comes to Diversity and Inclusion as well as the Most Innovative in the Industry.
For his work at Intuit, Vijay received the Bill Campbell Coach’s Award in 2017 and the CEO Leadership Award in 2013. Out and Equal recognized his championship of workplace equality with their Champion Award in 2014. Vijay was also invited to serve on AnitaB.org’s US Board of Trustees in 2015. He serves on the board of technology startups and social ventures in India as well as in Silicon Valley and actively mentors (and is mentored by) entrepreneurs, women technologists, and next-gen talent.
Prior to Intuit, Vijay built large R&D centers for Sun Microsystems and Oracle in India. Vijay was an entrepreneur for the first 14 years of his career in the US, first at Transarc (acquired by IBM in 1993) and later, NetDynamics (acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1998). At Sun, Vijay led the Application Server team and subsequently the e-commerce platform at iPlanet, a Sun-Netscape alliance.
Vijay has a graduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Arizona and a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.
I got to know Vijay at Sun Microsystems while he was running the large Sun India Research Center. I was building and running teams across multiple sites, with India being my largest. Vijay was always there, supporting me as needed and giving me feedback at each step along the way.
Questions Interview
I asked Vijay three questions that were specific to him.
- In your current role, you are responsible for global engineering strategy across development centers in a number of countries. Talk a bit about the role and how your success is measured.
- You have spent time in enterprise and consumer software companies. What are the similarities and differences?
- You have worked in the US (mostly Silicon Valley) and in India. How has this experience helped you in your career?
- As a follow on, do you have any recommendations for managers in terms of considering international assignments?
I then asked Vijay the same six questions that I ask all interviewees – in a lightning-round format.
- What’s the most important factor you consider when hiring someone?
- Who was your most effective boss, and what made him or her stand out?
- What was the most difficult transition that you made in your career?
- How do you approach helping someone with their career development or path?
- What tools and tricks do you use to find work-life balance?
- How do you go about building relationships with your peers and other leaders in the company?
As you will hear in the interview, Vijay is a very humble, hard-working communicator that spends as much time as is required to build trust. This trust is important in working through challenging issues that exist across the product development sites at Intuit.
“Invest in relationships upfront sometimes – not necessarily focused on what do I need to get out of it, but really to set the ground and get to know someone. This is why I travel. I make it a point to visit every one of our sites meet people face to face and interact.”
This strong relationship-building does not go unnoticed by the leadership at Intuit. Here is what Brad Smith, Executive Chairman of the board of Intuit, had to say about how Vijay builds these relationships:).
“Vijay loves to rub belly to belly”
There is so much wisdom that Vijay shares in this interview. It quickly becomes obvious why he has been successful in a very challenging matrix-like role!
Career Path
Vijay’s career path has taken him from deep engineering to global site strategy. From India to the US, back to India, and now back in the US. Hear how he made these many changes as it became more and more obvious as to where his greatest strengths lie.
