June 09, 2020
2020 Engineering Management & Alignment Report Demonstrates Leadership Lacks Visibility
BOSTON, June 9, 2020 — Jellyfish, the pioneer of Engineering Management Platforms, today released its 2020 Engineering Management & Alignment Report. The report produced by the Jellyfish Data Science team analyzes the operations of dozens of engineering teams and over 4000 engineers. Amid the move to remote work, it highlights a significant gap in understanding between what engineering leaders, which Jellyfish defines as Directors, VP’s, CPOs and CTOs, estimate is being worked on, and what their engineering teams must spend their time on in reality.
The report shows that engineering leaders overestimate the amount of time and resources going into the roadmap and the development of new products and features by 62%. Visibility is a key challenge causing this knowledge gap. The study points out that the majority of engineering leaders have poor visibility into the work their teams are doing due to a variety of reasons: poor project labeling or documentation, the effect of mergers or acquisitions resulting in divergent practices, and the dynamics of multiple business units or distributed workforces are just some of the ways that can make visibility more difficult.
“Software engineering is now more strategic than ever to the success of modern businesses. As engineering teams move to remote work worldwide, maintaining visibility into the breakdown of engineering work only becomes more challenging,” says Andrew Lau, Co-Founder & CEO at Jellyfish. “Understanding how much can be devoted to roadmap vs. infrastructure work, customer support, or production issues is critical for engineering leaders as they align with their business counterparts. Without a more complete understanding of what is being done, how can businesses make strategic decisions and engineering leaders take corrective actions and ensure the right projects are being prioritized?”
Some noteworthy findings identified in the 2020 Engineering Management & Alignment Report include:
Engineering leaders overestimate resource availability for new feature/roadmap items. They estimate 59% of engineering capacity can be devoted to roadmap work, while the average engineering team only spends about 36% of its time.
Customer support consumes more time than expected. The average engineering team spends 22% of its efforts on customer support, 83% more than estimated by their leaders.
Visibility into the real work of teams is limited. Almost a quarter of the work done by engineering teams is dedicated to unknown projects or is unable to be attributed to an investment area.
High performing teams have dramatically higher visibility for engineering leadership. These teams have 59% less unknown or unallocated work and spend 16% less time on customer support and 35% more time on roadmap.
To learn more, download a copy of the 2020 Engineering Management & Alignment Report or visit our website.
About Jellyfish
Jellyfish is the leading Engineering Management Platform (EMP), providing complete visibility into engineering organizations, the work they do, and how they operate. By analyzing engineering signals and contextual business data, Jellyfish enables Engineering leaders to align engineering decisions with strategic business objectives and deliver the right software, efficiently, on time. Companies like Acquia, Toast, and Jobvite use Jellyfish to optimize the process, allocation, and structure of their organizations, and to focus their teams on what matters most to the business.
