“I’ve stayed with Quicken because it’s the kind of company that always strives to do what’s right for the customer. It’s not all flashy bells and whistles. It’s about putting in long hours to do things the right way, for the right reasons.”

Kristen Dillard, Vice President of Product Management for Quicken Simplifi, is the polar opposite of HBO’s Silicon Valley executives. She’s thoughtful, insightful, and, most importantly, she’s profoundly in touch with the people she works for — the subscribers who count on the app every day to help them manage their money and keep their financial futures on track. 

She’s been with Simplifi from day one, but she’s been with Quicken’s portfolio of personal finance products much longer than that. 

“I’ve been with Quicken ever since it became an independent company,” Dillard said. “I came over when it spun off from Intuit, and I was at Intuit for several years before that. Between the two, I’m coming up on my 21st anniversary.”

Despite more than two decades in finance coding, Dillard’s enthusiasm for pushing the envelope and driving improvements is still downright infectious. It’s impossible to talk to her without walking away excited — about the app, the company, and everything that lies ahead.

But those future plans wouldn’t be possible without the grueling effort that went into Simplifi 4.1.

Quicken Simplifi: the initial launch

“When we first started building Quicken Simplifi, we wanted to get version one out as soon as we could,” Dillard explained. “We wanted to start learning what our customers needed from a cloud-based, mobile-first system. We asked them, of course. We did a lot of market research to get the core system right. But when people start using it in their day-to-day lives — that’s when you learn the most.”

That core system proved its value, and Simplifi took off. In fact, The New York Times Wirecutter has named it the best budgeting app of the year every year from the moment it came out of the gate.

And that brought a whole slew of requests for new features.

“A growing, dedicated customer base is exactly what we wanted,” said Dillard. “We’ve offered live phone and chat support from the beginning to talk with customers in real time and listen to what they want. We even let customers set up meetings with our coders so they could tell us directly what they needed. Those interactions keep us grounded in why we’re building it — who we’re building it for.”

In the three years since January 2020, when Quicken Simplifi first launched, the team has added a slew of improvements and features that weren’t in version 1.0: 

  • Savings goals
  • Planned spending
  • Broader time horizons for bills
  • Expanded support for investments
  • Special tracking for refunds
  • The ability to review transactions and recategorize them
  • New tools in reports
  • Achievement badges to celebrate financial progress
  • And the ability to customize rules for push notifications, just to name a few

The team has also been working behind the scenes on cutting-edge tech like artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve matching rules for names, categories, and more, all to make the app that much smarter — and that much less manual.

Needless to say, that’s a lot of added code in just a few short years.

Rebuilding from the ground up

“We learned a lot as we grew. But one of the things we learned is that our base code wasn’t going to be scalable for this audience and their specific needs,” Dillard admitted. “The base code needed to be leaner. Faster. With less duplication of effort between the web and mobile versions. To give our customers what they needed, we were going to have to go back to the drawing board.”

But how do you start over when you’re responsible for a living, breathing app — one that’s already serving a rapidly expanding customer base? 

That’s the question Dillard and the Quicken Simplifi team faced a year and a half ago. The solution? They were going to have to do both — keep supporting the existing app while rebuilding it at the same time. For several months, that second job fell exclusively on the shoulders of Rammohan “Ram” Akula, Lead Developer for Simplifi.

Quiet and introspective, Akula comes alive when he talks about the Simplifi code.

“The code is much more concise now,” Akula said. “Much more powerful. It’s so much faster — loading, interaction, navigation. We tightened everything. Almost 120,000 lines of code gone.”

That sounds like a lot of code to remove. But was it really? Or was it more like a drop in the proverbial bucket? I had no idea how many lines of code might make up a financial app, so I asked.

Akula chuckled politely.

“Yes,” he told me. “It’s a lot of code. There are something like 125,000 lines of code left, so it’s close to a 50% reduction. And we’re still cleaning wherever we can. It’s just a lot easier now.”

Akula worked alone for about a year, rebuilding the structure of the database itself from the ground up.

“It was an exciting project,” Akula said. “It gave us a chance to say, ‘Okay, our customers like the app. It’s going to be here for the long run. What’s the right way to rebuild it?’”

The final push to version 4.1

After a year of working solo, Akula was joined by several more engineers for the final six months of the project as the team switched more resources toward finishing the new version.

“We didn’t want to make our customers wait for new features,” Dillard said, “so we worked in that parallel system for a long time. Every time we built a new feature in the existing app, we built it into the new one too — the one that was still under development. 

“We did that as long as we could. Finally, about six months ago, we shifted most of our resources over to version 4.1. It was a huge effort, but it was the right thing to do. Our customers are going to get tremendous benefits out of being patient with us over the past six months.”

So if you’ve noticed Quicken Simplifi 4.1 thundering down the track with speeds worthy of the Kentucky Derby, there’s good reason for that. Behind the scenes, the team has been working hard for a year and a half on the release — prepping it for the blazing response times Simplifi customers are seeing today.

But those speeds are just the beginning.

The future of Quicken Simplifi

“This new foundation will let us move incredibly fast,” Akula said with a smile. “Our customers won’t have to wait for new web features to be released on mobile. With this code base, most of our new features should be released on the web and mobile apps simultaneously, or even on the mobile app first.”

What’s next for Quicken Simplifi? Dillard and Akula wouldn’t say, but the grins on their faces would have put the Cheshire Cat to shame. 

“We’ll keep doing what we’ve always done,” Dillard said. “We’ll listen to our customers and do what’s right for them. They’re just going to see the results faster than ever.”