Q2’s 20th Anniversary — A Legacy of Innovation to Strengthen Financial Institutions
By Adam Blue, Q2 Chief Technology Officer
As Q2 turns 20, I’ve been thinking a lot about what drew me to join this company two years after its founding.
In 2006, Q2 founder Hank Seale and Chairman and CEO Matt Flake approached me about joining the company to help them fulfill the mission of building strong and diverse communities by strengthening their financial institutions. They had a clear vision of using technology to enable community banks and credit unions to survive and stay competitive, and the core of the business revolved around customers and their needs. They truly valued the impact these banks and credit unions had in their communities.
From the beginning, the company’s mission and culture have been one of our strongest assets. Being customer-centric influences every aspect of our culture and business. That may sound cliché, but it’s a critical component of our success. Customer focus creates value for employees as well, and companies that don’t focus on their customers usually don’t do very well in the long run.
The way that you become customer-driven is by loving your customers’ problems so deeply that they become yours. Innovation comes from this philosophy.
Empathy Drives Innovation
Many tech companies operate by building something and then convincing people they want it. We don’t operate that way. Over the years, we could have created any number of fascinating products just to put a feather in our cap, but if it doesn’t solve a customer problem, it has no value to us. That doesn’t mean we don’t innovate. It just means we innovate with purpose. For example, we were early with out-of-band multifactor and implementing AI into our solutions, and we were way out front with adding flexibility to the product set.
A lot of our innovation ideas have come from our customers and our developers finding a way to change a product, deploy it differently or take advantage of a new technology to meet that need. It’s very much taking the “necessity is the mother of invention” approach rather than making a strident declaration of technical excellence.
This can be a very difficult way to work because, as we’ve grown larger, many of our people don’t have as much primary contact with the customer as they and we might like. And there are a lot of distractions in the space: What competitors are doing, what the analysts think we ought to be doing, and what the press and the news cycle say is important or not important. Our task is to sift through all of that, focus on the problem in front of us and ask if it’s creating pain for our customer and/or whether it’s an opportunity to create value for that customer.
Because we design products in response to our customers’ needs, our process could be described as collaborative but that’s become such a buzzword that it’s lost its meaning. To me, the heart of collaboration is rational empathy. If you’re a great industrial designer or a great user experience designer, you likely have an innate or deeply learned talent for adopting the perspective of another person (i.e., the customer).
Even the concept of creating an open platform was driven by our customer need/empathy approach. The impetus for our SDK (software development kit) and Q2 Innovation Studio was that we needed to be able to make the platform flexible without making it unmanageable. So we created a mechanism that we could use to extend the software without limiting customers from taking future upgrades by building an architecture where the core of the software platform was distinct from the extensions we’d built.
In doing so, we realized we could capture innovation. I use the word capture deliberately because I believe you capture innovation as much as you sit down and drive it. And we were failing to capture innovation because there just weren’t enough hours in the day to develop the ideas of our customers and partners. The notion was if we opened the platform, we could bring many new minds to the ecosystem of improving the software overall.
We realized something else, too. Opening the platform and inviting other people to play in our sandbox, so to speak, raised the bar for the experience for our own developers, and it has made us a better company.
It’s been four years since we launched Innovation Studio, and our competitors are still trying to catch up. In making that investment and welcoming our customers to change the way the software works, we’re telling customers we think they’re smart and can help solve some of their own problems.
In Appreciation of Our Customers
When I was 12 years old, I did not dream of being the CTO of a company that helps banks and credit unions build stronger communities through the use of technology. I wanted to be a Jedi or a samurai or something goofy like that. I couldn't imagine that I’d be in an industry where, every day, I feel that the work my team and I are doing really matters to people.
I’m deeply grateful that I’ve been able to help shape a company where our 2,500 people around the globe have such a meaningful impact on the lives of 22.5 million people in the United States who use our digital banking products every day. It’s extraordinarily rewarding to think about the sheer scale of the effect we’re having by working hard, listening, making good decisions and just doing our jobs well. And that’s compounded by the trust our customers place in us and, by extension, the trust that their account holders place in our products.
In celebrating anniversaries, many companies talk about their legacy, and certainly Q2 has a 24-year history of innovation, but I believe legacy is something we must continue to earn and build every day. The way I measure our legacy is asking: How did we do today? Was the application up? Was the data center up? Was it performing? Did we help people stop fraud? Did we secure our customers? Did we listen well? Did we work hard at being more effective? Did we try to improve?
Legacy isn’t an accomplishment. It’s an ongoing record of service that happens one day at a time.