How Five9 used Jellyfish to consolidate an organization of more than 400 engineers

From siloed teams to a unified organization

Over the past two decades, Five9 has led a technology revolution for contact centers — the tools and systems companies need to manage customer interactions. Founded in 2001, the company led the industry-wide shift away from traditional on-premises support solutions to more agile and affordable cloud contact centers. Today, Five9 is a large technical organization with a broad product portfolio — the company employs a large number of engineers in development hubs in California, Australia and Portugal, and has a global headcount of nearly 2,400.

With hundreds of engineers, it can be difficult to know what’s happening across different teams and initiatives. Eighteen months ago, driven by the need to increase efficiency, the company underwent a reorganization, bringing together its DevOps, Engineering, Programs and Production Operations teams into one. Five9 aimed to streamline operations and standardize metrics systems across these units to gain more visibility across the entire team.

Five9 used Jellyfish to fulfill its visibility objectives. Alex Hadden-Boyd, Director of Engineering Operations at Five9, used allocations to verify the assumptions her teams were making by matching them to concrete data. 

“We purchased Jellyfish for the primary purpose of objectively measuring allocations,” said Hadden-Boyd. “We wanted to see what software engineers were actually working on.”

Five9 began with allocations, but the reorg quickly led the company to find new uses for Jellyfish. As roles and responsibilities shifted, Five9 employees realized new ways to leverage their engineering data. They became more data-driven, and Jellyfish allowed them to refine their own workflows and operations at the team level.  

“The reorganization brought a lot of teams together. The Engineering Operations team that I run was previously working with just software engineers, using Jellyfish’s original features. When we started with the larger group and Jellyfish introduced new capabilities, we found that Technical Program Managers were super interested in delivery management. Software Engineering managers were interested in team health and operations, and Leadership and Finance were interested in allocations,” said Hadden-Boyd. As a result of this widespread adoption, Five9 began taking advantage of every value the Jellyfish platform had to offer.

Managing performance at different levels

The Five9 team was relying on Jira to manage performance and delivery but found the tool to be limited, particularly when looking for tangible ways to improve teams. Jellyfish made it possible for engineering leaders to look both company-wide and team by team to identify opportunities.

“When we dissected it team by team, it allowed us to put improvement plans into place for teams that had poor sprint predictability,” said Hadden-Boyd. “Our Agile coaches took those findings and worked with the teams to identify better techniques to plan their sprints.”

Jellyfish proved to be particularly valuable for Five9 to track deliverables in progress. The team gained new visibility into their high-level initiatives, including how their deliverables evolved from the starting point and took on new additions. “Cracking the progress on that — what the initiative started as and what was added to the deliverables in progress — helped us to focus as an organization. That’s a big value add, and it’s something with Jellyfish that’s become very important to us,” said Hadden-Boyd.

Mya Hauck, Senior Engineering Operations Manager at Five9, also found that Jellyfish had clear advantages for reporting. The company can now divide reports by manager, tracking all of the work performed by people that report up to a specific manager — including those who may not be included in their team specifically. 

Loved by engineering managers 

Five9’s engineering organization quickly grew to appreciate the value of Jellyfish, and within 18 months the company increased their number of active users by 35%. “We’ve been playing catch-up with licenses and who we’re measuring,” said Hauck. “It’s been very well received by engineering managers.”

For Hadden-Boyd, the biggest breakthrough with Jellyfish has simply been the ability to reveal and track metrics that they previously didn’t have access to. The company had never previously been able to track sprint predictability for the company as a whole — which is now one of the fundamental metrics that engineering leaders use to communicate to the executive team.

Next step: DevFinOps

While Five9 already uses Jellyfish to manage team health, delivery, and operations, the company is now exploring new ways to use the platform. According to Hadden-Boyd, the company will soon begin a DevFinOps pilot to extend the visibility provided by Jellyfish to their financial reporting.

The organization’s growing Jellyfish deployment isn’t just a matter of increasing active users. The individual employees themselves are also finding new ways to use the platform in their daily operations. “Teams are confident in navigating the platform themselves,” said Hadden-Boyd. She feels that the result has been more appreciation across the organization for the role of Engineering Operations. “We’ve been able to teach Product and Engineering how to focus on their metrics.  Using Jellyfish, we’ve been successfully able to teach people how to fish,” she concludes.