How Acoustic used Jellyfish for $80K contractor savings & increased product predictability 35%

Optimizing engineering practices

The leadership at Acoustic believes that the only way to truly optimize an engineering team is by using many points of data, not any single metric. It’s a belief that holds true to the Acoustic team’s work, integrating datasets from across their Marketing suite and empowering their customers to do the same. Acoustic’s platform touches all aspects of marketing – from crafting complex, personalized user experiences to cutting through the noise and finding compelling narratives within the data. The end goal is to deliver valuable and consistent results to customers. 

“At Acoustic, our number one goal is to deliver results for our customers. We measure progress consistently across our engineering team. Delivering on our product roadmap and solving our customers’ most pressing issues leads to more trusted relationships, which is key to building our business.” said John Riewerts, Senior Vice President of Engineering.

In order to fulfill that goal while also expanding their global customer base, Acoustic had to find a way to optimize their engineering practices. The team began leveraging Jellyfish to gauge how they allocated their engineering resources across business goals, but there was a desire to understand these allocations contextually – to know whether their investments were consistent with others like them. 

“I love the benchmarking feature. Without it, there was no easy way to measure and compare our investments within the company – let alone across companies. Now there is with Jellyfish,” John said. 

Acoustic’s approach was two-fold: first, they needed to evaluate whether their engineering allocations distribution optimally reflected the industry-leading standards which they hold themselves to. Second, they then wanted to use their findings to drive decision making – both in how to structure their teams to tackle objectives, and importantly, how to engage with engineering contractors in order to free up internal resources to enable any potential restructuring. 

Allocate to objectives

Prior to Jellyfish, it was more challenging to accurately verify the breakdown of how engineers were spending their time. Acoustic wanted a data-driven way to understand the trade-offs involved in spending time on non-objective work. Turning to Jellyfish’s Benchmarks allowed them to start creating an investment strategy to address this. Acoustic realized that their teams were focusing a lot of energy on support work in comparison with their industry peers. 

“After seeing this type of data in Jellyfish, we realized it would make sense to have a stronger support team in front of our engineering team. If we invest there, we could increase the amount of attention we could pay towards delivering objectives. This meant a better relationship with our customers,” John said. 

Rather than just blanket hiring more engineers to deal with their expanding objective scope, based on Jellyfish insight, they began to focus on engineers with skills geared towards support, as well as to engage with contracting partners that addressed this gap in order to alleviate the burden on their core engineering team. They immediately began to see results. “We are now completing nearly all of our commitments in an agile culture. We’ve seen a 35% increase in our ability to do so,” said John. 

Engaging with these contractors posed a different challenge to the Acoustic team, one that Jellyfish was also poised to support.

Know your rockstars & keep investing

“We’ve all had contracting agencies reach out to us and ask what we need help with. They all pitch the same script: we’re better. We perform better, have better talent or have a better process. Everybody says it. But how can we measure that?” John pondered. Acoustic wanted a tool that allowed them to compare one contracting agency to another. They also wanted to be able to compare the metric performance of these agencies against their internal staff as a benchmark of what good should look like and whether their investments were paying dividends. 

When one agency was outperforming another across almost every metric that mattered, they started asking questions. They realized it didn’t make sense to keep investing in underperforming agencies, and they could instead divert those funds to keep working with the contractors who provided the highest level of quality and throughput.

Whether it was reducing spend with an under-performing agency for direct savings, or adjusting spend to high performing agencies for inferred savings, Jellyfish provided Acoustic with the view to evaluate contractor performance and enabled them to adjust their strategy quickly.

Results with Jellyfish

The results Acoustic have seen from leveraging Jellyfish Benchmarks have been transformative to how engineering is run. John explains, “Jellyfish and its benchmarks feature gives us a consistent barometer to gauge our performance against teams in other industries, bringing a more game-like approach to our engineering culture. This culture is massive from a productivity perspective, enabling us to meet marketers’ needs as they orchestrate journeys with highly personalized content and highly performant teams. Jellyfish is critical to getting us to that point.” 

Jellyfish also opened up the team’s ability to look across the contractor landscape with a consistent ability to measure agencies based on productivity, quality, collaboration, process, speed, and alignment. To date, this has saved the company an estimated $80K  and enabled them to deliver on their promises more effectively. 

“Jellyfish really has allowed us to look at who our rock stars are so we can keep partnering and investing to ultimately get the outcomes that we’re trying to deliver,” John added.