Always a Badger

Close ties to the WSB set up Carly Wood for a new challenge

Carly Wood (BBA ’12) has a role at tech giant Intuit that’s both new and familiar—her job is to make self-employed people more comfortable with running their businesses. It’s not unlike her earlier work as a student BBA Ambassador at the Wisconsin School of Business helping to make prospective and fellow students more comfortable on the UW–Madison campus.

Wood joined the software company as product manager in April 2015 at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, leaving a job she landed right after graduation as a marketing planning associate at General Mills.

“I loved working for General Mills in integrated marketing, but I was ready for something different,” says Wood, who was recruited by both General Mills and Intuit while studying at the Wisconsin School of Business. “I thought, ‘I need to get out of my comfort zone.’ I’d always lived in Wisconsin, until I took a job in Minneapolis. I knew this point in my career was my time to stretch.”

“My job is to understand our customer and what their needs are, and make improvements to our technology to meet those needs,” she says. “So I work with our designers and engineers, and I manage the rollout.”

As an undergraduate, she served as a BBA Ambassador, vice president of programming for Wisconsin BBA Student Government, and a leader with the Undergraduate Outreach Committee that marketed events to pre-business school students. She credits these WSB experiences with building her collaborative and leadership skills.

It all started with her introduction to the School.

“I remember being so excited to go to orientation, and it was just a three-hour PowerPoint presentation,” she says. “I left feeling deflated, and then joined a committee to improve the experience. We made it more interactive with student leaders, smaller breakout sessions, and a T-shirt that was a visible symbol of our community. We even built the honor code into the orientation.”

Even though she’s now across the country, Wood continues to work with the School. She recently became the recruitment chair for Intuit product management at Wisconsin and already has been back to campus to represent her new employer.

“There are a lot of Badgers at Intuit,” she says. “The cultures are similar. We’re collaborative and innovative. We’re always pushing ourselves to do new things. The company has found that Wisconsin students can be very successful at Intuit, so we keep going back to get more.”

Wood credits her career success to the leadership experience she gained through her Business Badger activities both on campus and after graduation.

“It wasn’t all from the classroom,” she says. “It was learning how to get people to rally behind you or an idea.”

Wood’s idea to get out of her comfort zone has worked, and she and her husband, Benjamin Wood, (BBA ’11) have built a home base in a place where they didn’t know one person a year ago.

“It was scary, but it was also exciting,” she says, suggesting that the best time to make a big move out to California from the Midwest is early in one’s career or right out of school. “There are a lot of young people and a lot of opportunities out here.”