October 19, 2022
Engineering teams have become the innovation engines of our society, and leading them has become no small task.
Jellyfish was founded on the mission to elevate and empower the practice of leading software teams as they take a larger role in the foundational strategy of organizations worldwide. Over the past few years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with numerous engineering leaders, and they’ve inspired us to update this initial mission statement slightly. We find ourselves compelled to elevate, empower, and also celebrate the practice of engineering leadership. We want to elevate the role of engineering leadership in the eyes of the executive leadership community, and spreading awareness of the contributions of engineering leaders and their teams to their companies is one way we can all contribute to this cause. More specifically, we believe we’re in a unique position to play a larger part in telling the stories of great engineering leadership, and that’s what we plan to do moving forward.
This is why we’re excited to announce Illuminate, our inaugural software engineering leadership customer awards program.
Introducing Illuminate: The Software Engineering Leadership Awards presented by Jellyfish
We want to shed a light on great engineering leadership and are in a unique position to do so. During our initial meetings, through the onboarding process, and during business reviews with our leaders, we hear firsthand accounts of the accomplishments of our customers. We learn about their leadership philosophies, priorities, values, etc. We have the privilege of working with many forward-thinking leaders and their teams, which makes choosing finalists and winners for a program like this even more difficult.
That is why we hope that introducing data into the equation will help translate the impact these teams are having on their organizations. Using data available to us within the Jellyfish Engineering Management Platform, we gain a deeper level of context about the total impact of engineering leadership on the organizations that they lead. Armed with quantitative and qualitative feedback, we have parsed the leaders amongst the already elite-performing engineering teams.
The Software Engineering Leadership Awards
Our first year of Illuminate consists of 3 award categories including:
- The Software Engineering Innovation Award
- The Excellence in Engineering Operations Award
- The Outstanding DevOps Award
There are several finalists per award category, and the winners for each award will be announced at 10:00AM ET on November 3rd. Why this date? It’s World Jellyfish Day, and we thought it’d be a fun way to celebrate.
Let’s discuss each category and what each of the finalists exemplifies based on the award criteria.
The Software Engineering Innovation Award
This award celebrates engineering teams who prioritize innovation and growth work within their organizations. The finalists for this award demonstrate a commitment to engineering work that either increases revenue or reduces costs. This leader helps teams understand the value and impact of their work, and fosters a culture of innovation through their team rituals, best practices, etc.
The finalists for this year’s Software Innovation award are:
The Excellence in Engineering Operations Award
This award seeks to recognize teams who have transformed their engineering operations. Teams have achieved significant sustained excellence in their ability to regularly and quickly deliver value to their customers while balancing process, collaboration, and overall quality. This award is not just about the measurable improvements observed through engineering metrics, but the best practices instilled by leadership that will have a lasting intangible impact on team performance for years to come.
The finalists for this year’s Engineering Operations award are:
The Outstanding DevOps Award
The DORA team transformed how software development teams operate, and at Jellyfish we are inspired by their work. We want to recognize the teams we work with who have adopted DevOps as a way of life within their organization, and who exemplify the principles communicated by the DORA team years ago. Now that we can measure the 4 DORA metrics within Jellyfish, we can quantify the elite nature of the teams we work with in a very quantifiable way.
Finalists within this category demonstrate consistent commitment to DevOps principles and sustained excellence across DORA metrics. These organizations demonstrate sustained DevOps metric improvement over time and the values of DevOps movement within their team culture.
The finalists for this year’s DevOps award are:
The Future of Engineering Leadership
In the coming weeks, you will learn all about the finalists for each award category and what made them stand out from the hundreds of teams that we work with. We’re excited to tell the finalist’s stories. And with these leaders paving the way for the next generation, we’re excited about the trajectory of engineering leadership in the years ahead.
