How Clari used Jellyfish to reach 79% on-time delivery and increase roadmap spend

Catching up to fast, unpredictable growth

Clari is an AI-powered revenue platform that transforms how companies manage and optimize the end-to-end revenue process. The platform provides complete visibility, predictability, and control over all revenue workflows — including revenue forecasting, sales engagement, pipeline management, opportunity inspection, conversational intelligence, and more — helping teams increase pipeline, conversions, and win rates. But as adoption of their platform grew, Clari’s engineering organization struggled to keep the same pace, leading to inconsistent and unpredictable delivery. 

As Clari accelerated and expanded its R&D efforts, dependencies became more complex, business leaders lacked transparency into deliverables, and project timelines were challenging to meet. The engineering team’s scattered focus threatened to dilute impact and erode trust with stakeholders.  

“Clari is your classic scale-up company. It was rapidly growing and hiring a ton of folks over those two to three years. As you can imagine, when scaling that fast, things were a bit chaotic across people, processes and technology,” says Andrew Korbel, VP, R&D Operations and Chief of Staff at Clari. To overcome these challenges, Clari laid out a clear path that would lead them towards more reliable delivery. Korbel explains, “We started to think about this as a three-step approach: first let’s focus on predictability, then the efficiency of the organization, and lastly we’ll start to be more effective.”Clari’s transition towards predictable delivery required reliable data. The company started using Jellyfish allocations and software delivery tools to gain the insights they needed to move forward with their plan.

Gaining control with allocations and delivery management

Achieving predictable delivery at Clari meant increasing visibility at every level of the organization. The company’s first move was to make sure each team had the resources it needed to succeed. By pinpointing and addressing allocation imbalances, Clari was able to create stable, cross-functional teams for the long term. Clari then trained these teams in Scrum, getting everyone to the same baseline and using the same language — critical with developers spread across the United States, India and Poland. 

Next, Clari got teams in the same room for quarterly planning sessions. Teams use these in-person meetings to set objectives and establish priorities, aligning efforts with the company’s long-term goals. Clari’s commitment to transparency has driven the quarterly planning process. Face-to-face conversations, supported by allocations data from Jellyfish, give teams visibility into what other parts of the organization are working on so they can move forward together. 

Clari also established feedback loops in the form of weekly steering. The company previously lacked data on allocations, making it impossible for leaders to understand how much time was being spent on specific engineering activities. With Jellyfish data at their fingertips, the business has instant visibility into what teams are working on across the organization. As a result, Clari saw a significant increase in predictability and productivity: on-time delivery rose from 67% to 79% since introducing Jellyfish.

Increased roadmap spend and streamlined capitalization

As Clari began using Jellyfish to track resource allocations, the company was surprised by what the data revealed. Clari discovered their “Keeping the Lights On” (KTLO) spend was significantly above the industry average, taking valuable resources away from their product roadmap. Since adopting Jellyfish, Clari has adjusted allocations, driving down KTLO while increasing roadmap allocation by 5% —  shifting more resources toward building new features and improving existing products. 

Clari also saw significant benefits to their software capitalization processes. Before Jellyfish, the company took an entirely manual approach to capitalization, which was time-consuming and lacked precision. Clari used Jellyfish to automate their software capitalization, resulting in a 50% increase in efficiency as well as more reliable data for more accurate financial reporting.

However, the impact of Jellyfish goes beyond financial gain: Jellyfish also helps Clari achieve team development and culture objectives. “We believe in equipping people with data so they can make better decisions faster,” says Korbel. “Jellyfish gives us that; you can kind of feel it. People are using it: when you have a conversation with someone, they’ll show you the data.”

Improving engineer satisfaction with DevEx

Clari also used Jellyfish to take a more data-driven approach to developer experience surveys. Before Jellyfish, the company used surveys with generic questions that couldn’t zoom in on the specific needs and pain points of engineers. Jellyfish DevEx allows Clari to take a targeted approach and uncover specific issues that affect an engineer’s experience.

Clari deployed a Jellyfish DevEx survey that quickly revealed frustration with the company’s existing documentation processes — an issue that wasn’t captured in their previous surveys. DevEx also allows leaders to pinpoint issues that are only impacting certain areas of the organization, with the ability to break down survey results by region and role. Clari can now take targeted steps to resolve headaches and improve the developer experience; the company plans to conduct DevEx surveys with Jellyfish every six months to track progress and uncover new issues.

Driving efficiency with Jellyfish now and in the future

After making huge advances in predictability, Clari is ready to move on to step two of their program: efficiency. Clari plans to use Jellyfish Developer Productivity metrics to help leaders better understand work patterns, identify bottlenecks and act to make teams more effective. Clari is also experimenting with testing and building processes, all of which are possible thanks to the visibility provided by Jellyfish. 

Looking forward, Korbel is confident that the organization will continue to embrace Jellyfish and the benefits it provides. At Clari, people understand that transparency into the system is critical to getting the best results for their customers. 

“If things aren’t going as expected, it’s not about the people — it’s about what’s going on in that system that needs to be fixed,” says Korbel.