November 03, 2022
It brings us great excitement to share the winners of Illuminate 2022, our software engineering leadership awards program.
Over the past few months, we’ve worked with teams across Jellyfish to understand the accomplishments of our customers and the challenges they have overcome. Choosing finalists for these awards was difficult, but it was even more difficult to name a single winner for each of these winners. For this reason, we’d like to congratulate all finalists, Acoustic, Auvik, Loadsmart, Hootsuite, Submittable, and ZoomInfo within this program. Your team accomplishments over the past year are nothing short of remarkable and are worth celebrating as we head into the holiday season.
We’re excited to name Submittable, Loadsmart, and Hootsuite as the winners of the 2022 Illuminate: Software Engineering Leadership Awards. Congratulations to Jess Dulay, Andy Wright, Jeff MacDuff, Gustavo Barbosa, Mailson Corrêa, Alex McRoberts and their extended team members.
We look forward to telling your full stories in the coming weeks.
Submittable: Winners of the Software Engineering Innovation Award
The Software Engineering Innovation Award celebrates engineering teams who prioritize innovation and growth work within their organizations. The finalists demonstrated a commitment to engineering that either increased revenue or reduced costs while helping teams understand the value and impact of the work.
Submittable, the winner, led a complete transformation from a sales-driven culture to a product-led culture in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The recent engineering work has not only transformed their organization, but also the lives of the communities they serve. The social impact platform uses Jellyfish data to communicate its new approach to engineering planning and focus on innovation to the rest of the organization.
“Submittable already had a strong philanthropic presence in the community and had made a huge impact across the country during COVID with the amount of lives that we had been able to positively impact,” said Jess Dulay, software development project manager at Submittable. “This made going into a corporate social responsibility focus a ‘no-brainer’ for us. So we hit the gas and we’ve been going ever since!”
Congratulations, Jess and the Submittable team!
Loadsmart: Winners of the Excellence in Engineering Operations Award
The Excellence in Engineering Operations Award recognizes teams who have transformed their engineering operations. Finalists achieved sustained excellence in their ability to regularly and quickly deliver value to their customers while balancing process, collaboration, and overall quality. The award focused not only on the improvements measured through engineering metrics, but also on the best practices instilled by leadership that will have a lasting impact on team performance for years to come.
Loadsmart, the winner, ranks high among Jellyfish customers for weekly commits, issues resolved, and PRs resolved, while maintaining low cycle times. The logistics technology platform company also stood out as a highly collaborative engineering organization with impressive comments and PR reviews per employee, along with a team dedicated to developer productivity.
“We’re excited by this award. It’s a consequence of the work our team is putting together,” said Gustavo Barbosa, VP of engineering at Loadsmart. “All of our engineering managers use Jellyfish to make more informed decisions — to be data-driven and have introspective conversations with our teams. It’s super important to know what we’re doing well, what we’re not doing so well, and how we can improve our execution and capabilities moving forward.”
Congratulations, Gustavo and the Loadsmart team!
Hootsuite: The Winners of The Outstanding DevOps Award
This award recognized engineering teams that have adopted DevOps as a way of life within their organizations and exemplify the principles communicated by the DORA team years ago. Finalists demonstrate consistent commitment to DevOps principles and sustained excellence across DORA metrics, which are measured within the Jellyfish platform.
Hootsuite, the winner, implemented objectives and key results (OKRs) across its departments, while using Jellyfish to transform its engineering leadership practice. The engineering team’s collective DORA metrics — including deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate — were consistently well above “elite performance” as determined by the DORA group’s 2022 State of DevOps report.
“Over the past few years we’ve made strides in our DevOps processes that have enabled us to perform at a world-class level, implementing practices and tools that incorporate continuous delivery, feature flagging, blameless post-mortems and true self-service interfaces for our platform components,” said Alex McRoberts, senior software development manager at Hootsuite. “In the past twenty-four months, we’ve had a strong focus on service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets, ramping from zero SLOs and no understanding of how we can leverage error budgets to prioritize investment, to over one hundred twenty SLOs and teams regularly spending time on reliability work today.”
Congratulations, Alex and the Hootsuite team!
Join Us in Celebrating Great Engineering Leadership
This year’s Illuminate winners represent the best of the best in software engineering. Loadsmart, Hootsuite, and Submittable are leveraging data to elevate their teams and paving the way for the next generation of engineering leaders. If you’d like to hear more about their teams firsthand, join us on December 6th for a live webinar where we’ll be celebrating the winners. Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks!
