Intuit’s CTO spent years resisting becoming a boss—now he leads a team of 8,000
For the first 17 years of his career at financial software giant Intuit, Alex Balazs worked as an engineer and rose up the ranks to become a vice president, without a single direct report.
Today, in his current role as chief technology officer, 8,000 employees are under Balazs’ purview, representing nearly half of Intuit’s total workforce.
“I fought to be an individual contributor as long as I could,” says Balazs. “I didn't really want to move into leadership positions.”
Balazs' trajectory is similar to that of many corporate technology leaders, who began their careers because of a love for coding and tinkering and have since had to learn to apply that skill effectively on a much broader scale. In his role as CTO—a job he was appointed to in September, Balazs oversees Intuit's technology strategy and leads the product engineering, data science, IT, and information security teams globally.
This is his first tax season as CTO. It's a critical time for the maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma but even more so this year. For the first 40 years of the company’s existence, Intuit designed software to make it easier for individuals to do their own taxes. Today, with data and artificial intelligence, Intuit wants customers to trust Intuit to handle more of the process for them.
“We're in the middle of that,” says Balazs. “And so obviously, there's a lot to do from a tech perspective, a capability perspective, and data and AI perspective.” Those newer tools include Intuit Assist, a generative AI-powered financial assistant.
Balazs says he was an introverted child but also saw the potential to be a great leader, inspired by his chemist father who rose up through the ranks at wastewater treatment plants. At the age of 12, his parents signed him up for a programming class at the local YMCA. It was 1983, the same year Scott Cook founded Intuit. Balazs was an athlete who competed in sports like football and basketball but equally enjoyed learning how to source code from physical magazines in his parents’ basement in Ohio.
Balazs joined Intuit in the fall of 1999 as a senior software engineer and was one of the first engineers to help put the desktop-bound QuickBooks onto the internet. At the time, Balazs explains, Intuit “wasn’t really a technology company. People knew the products, they didn't really know the tech behind it.”
Throughout his earliest years at Intuit, Balazs considered himself a “boundaryless” leader, preferring to exert influence through his competence as an engineer. He was jolted after Intuit acquired Boston Light Software and founder Paul English left with many of Intuit’s leadership team to start travel search company Kayak. The experience left Balazs feeling abandoned and even angry.
That was when Balazs began to step outside his comfort zone and when the leadership qualities within him began to emerge more evidently. He was later selected to join Intuit’s leadership training program and learned the ropes from his predecessor Marianna Tessel and another former Intuit CTO, Tayloe Stansbury.
When he became CTO of Intuit, which generated $14.4 billion in total revenue for the latest fiscal year, Balazs got some friendly advice from CEO Sasan Goodarzi, who he recalls told him: “Alex, the best thing about you in this role is you've been here for 24 years. The worst thing about you in this role is you've been here for 24 years. You need to act like it's Day One."
As a leader, Balazs keeps his experiences as a frontline engineer top of mind, and, in fact, he still has running code in production. “I will make a bigger impact by the environment that I create, by the culture that I create,” he says.
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
