July 25, 2024
Congratulations on your new position! The first few months of leading a new engineering department – even for seasoned engineering leaders – can feel exciting and tumultuous. With a new role, come new opportunities, challenges, and team dynamics. It’s also critical that new senior leaders make a tangible impact in their first few months. Access to the right data is key in doing that.
An engineering management platform like Jellyfish can support engineering leaders across a range of different use cases. Sometimes, it’s easier to start by first addressing your most pressing pain points. Below is a list of challenges we commonly see with our customers and how Jellyfish can help.
Challenge: I struggle to explain to my CEO, CFO, and other non-technical executives how engineering efforts align with business priorities.
Jellyfish’s platform makes aligning engineering metrics with business objectives easy. For example, by prioritizing revenue-maximizing work, you can directly link engineering activities to financial performance and assign value to engineering activities.
At Teachable, Vice President of Engineering Richard Hunt used Jellyfish to give better project delivery projections to his executive peers within the GTM and Finance teams. Armed with data and insights, Richard has fostered more productive planning and trade-off discussions, creating a ripple effect across the business.
Challenge: I can’t identify bottlenecks impacting engineering effectiveness.
With Jellyfish’s Life Cycle Explorer, you can see where your team is spending its time (e.g., refinement, work, review, deploy) or if any outlier activities are throwing a project off course. Identify areas to streamline engineering operations and track the team’s progress over time.
Jobber leveraged Jellyfish to gain insights into engineering allocations, which empowered the team to address problems before they escalated. The team now measures DORA metrics, which improves productivity and sprint planning and aligns and optimizes strategic resource investment.
Challenge: I am not confident in providing precise deliverable timelines or updates.
Keep track of target and projected delivery dates in Jellyfish. Use the Scenario Planner to demonstrate to executives and your team how different shifts (e.g. adding developers to a project) will impact deadlines.
Iterable utilized Jellyfish to gain visibility into engineering work and priorities, enhancing their ability to set realistic timelines and communicate updates more accurately. Improving project management and transparency contributed to better planning and execution within the engineering team.
Challenge: I lack meaningful data to assess team performance effectively, so I must rely on intuition or activity-based metrics.
Jellyfish provides engineering metrics, giving quantitative insights into how well
teams are doing. This data, paired with Jellyfish DevEx surveys, provides a more comprehensive picture of team efficiency and health.
Skillsoft aimed to create a data-driven culture to boost morale and support career growth, leveraging Jellyfish metrics to recognize significant contributors and guide managerial discussions. This approach allowed for a more meaningful assessment of team performance, focusing on individual strengths and contributions to promote best practices and encourage promotions.
Challenge: I struggle to understand what finance needs for software capitalization, which takes up much of my time.
Jellyfish DevFinOps makes financial reporting easier by automatically generating reports on software costs. This frees teams from manual reporting and fosters a more productive and collaborative relationship with finance.
Optimizely faced difficulties with manual time tracking and data collation for R&D cost capitalization, which was time-consuming and prone to errors. Jellyfish automated many tasks in the cost capitalization process, saving significant time and improving data accuracy, thereby supporting Optimizely in efficiently managing financial aspects related to engineering efforts.
Ready To Make Your Vision A Reality?
As your organization evolves, Jellyfish stands ready to adapt by offering robust support in tracking and achieving your strategic goals. Whether overseeing investments, managing deliverables, or navigating cost capitalization, our dynamic platform ensures you’re well-equipped to support changes within your team, company, and the broader market.
To help you settle in your new role, check out the How to Make Your Engineering Leadership Vision A Reality guide and find out how engineering leaders like you get the most out of Jellyfish.
Good luck, we’re rooting for you!
