Andrew Lau, Co-Founder & CEO of Jellyfish sits down with Dave Vellante for a Digital CUBE Conversation.
https://siliconangle.com/2020/07/22/startup-jellyfish-sees-no-shortage-opportunity-engineering-management/
Startup Jellyfish sees no shortage of opportunity in engineering management
STARTUP INSIGHTS BY DAVE VELLANTE WITH MARK ALBERTSON
In the business world, “greenfield” is a market that has yet to be fully commercially exploited. The three co-founders of startup Jellyfish Co. believe they have found a significant greenfield opportunity in engineering management.
There’s a lot at stake for engineering teams in most companies today. There are constant conflicts between speed of delivery and quality of a product when DevOps teams are called upon to ensure a timely software release. On some occasions, the future of the business itself depends on a successful outcome.
This struggle was highlighted in a survey released last month that showed a significant majority of organizations prioritized quality over speed and still continued to experience customer-affecting issues.
“As you get to larger teams, bigger than 50 to 100 engineers, it’s really hard to understand what the team is doing,” said Andrew Lau (pictured), co-founder of Jellyfish. “It’s really hard to make sure they’re working their best and pointed in the right direction. That’s the problem we got together to solve.”
Lau spoke with Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon and co-host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE, in the latest installment of Startup Insights, a series that focuses on how investors and entrepreneurs navigate market challenges inside the technology industry. They discussed the experience of the firm’s co-founders in startup engineering teams, key steps all companies should consider, the importance of alignment, how Jellyfish uses data, customer use cases and parallels with a sales management business that ultimately became quite successful.
Finding a better way
Jellyfish represents a reunion of sorts for the three co-founders. Lau, Phil Braden and David Gourley first worked together at Endeca Inc. 20 years ago. Endeca, a provider of unstructured data management solutions, was ultimately acquired by Oracle Corp. in 2011 and the three engineers went on to participate in about 15 startups between them before reuniting to form Jellyfish.
The repeated process of building and leading engineering teams led Lau and his colleagues to wonder if there could be a better way.
“Jellyfish really comes out of our own experiences,” Lau said. “Engineering teams are probably the most strategic if not the most expensive teams on most companies’ rosters. We realized how hard it was to lead those teams and connect with the business at scale.”
Before starting Jellyfish, the three co-founders did something not always routine at the dawn of a new business. They spent more than two months just listening, holding conversations with more than 65 technology leaders across a broad range of industries, according to Lau.
“I said: ‘Tell me not to start this startup, I don’t want to invest years of my life to find out there’s a better solution out there,’” Lau recalled. “At the end of those interviews, people leaned in and said: ‘Could you write up your notes on this and send me the answer?’ We knew we didn’t have the solution yet, but there was pain out there and an opportunity to solve something.”
To reduce the pain of engineering management, Jellyfish relies on a set of principles which are encapsulated in the blog section on the company’s website. Under the heading of “Top Five Slides Every Vice President of Engineering Should Show at Board Meetings,��� Lau outlines key steps which include a focus on hiring and productivity, along with attention to quality and communication.
One of the principles that’s core to successful engineering management is alignment with the goals of the company. “Make sure that your team is spending your dollars, time and effort in the right way that aligns with the business,” Lau said. “If you’re a company that splits time between enterprise and small, medium sized business efforts, make sure the features the team is working on actually align with the strategy of the company. You can’t do that if you don’t measure it.”
Insight from engineering data
To assess alignment, Jellyfish uses data, specifically information leveraged extensively by engineers for product development. This might include resources available through GitLab or GitHub along with testing and continuous integration tools.
...
Here’s the complete video interview, the latest in the continuing Startup Insights series and one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:
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Andrew Lau, Jellyfish | CUBE Conversation, July 2020
Andrew Lau, Co-Founder & CEO of Jellyfish sits down with Dave Vellante for a Digital CUBE Conversation.
https://siliconangle.com/2020/07/22/startup-jellyfish-sees-no-shortage-opportunity-engineering-management/
Startup Jellyfish sees no shortage of opportunity in engineering management
STARTUP INSIGHTS BY DAVE VELLANTE WITH MARK ALBERTSON
In the business world, “greenfield” is a market that has yet to be fully commercially exploited. The three co-founders of startup Jellyfish Co. believe they have found a significant greenfield opportunity in engineering management.
There’s a lot at stake for engineering teams in most companies today. There are constant conflicts between speed of delivery and quality of a product when DevOps teams are called upon to ensure a timely software release. On some occasions, the future of the business itself depends on a successful outcome.
This struggle was highlighted in a survey released last month that showed a significant majority of organizations prioritized quality over speed and still continued to experience customer-affecting issues.
“As you get to larger teams, bigger than 50 to 100 engineers, it’s really hard to understand what the team is doing,” said Andrew Lau (pictured), co-founder of Jellyfish. “It’s really hard to make sure they’re working their best and pointed in the right direction. That’s the problem we got together to solve.”
Lau spoke with Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon and co-host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE, in the latest installment of Startup Insights, a series that focuses on how investors and entrepreneurs navigate market challenges inside the technology industry. They discussed the experience of the firm’s co-founders in startup engineering teams, key steps all companies should consider, the importance of alignment, how Jellyfish uses data, customer use cases and parallels with a sales management business that ultimately became quite successful.
Finding a better way
Jellyfish represents a reunion of sorts for the three co-founders. Lau, Phil Braden and David Gourley first worked together at Endeca Inc. 20 years ago. Endeca, a provider of unstructured data management solutions, was ultimately acquired by Oracle Corp. in 2011 and the three engineers went on to participate in about 15 startups between them before reuniting to form Jellyfish.
The repeated process of building and leading engineering teams led Lau and his colleagues to wonder if there could be a better way.
“Jellyfish really comes out of our own experiences,” Lau said. “Engineering teams are probably the most strategic if not the most expensive teams on most companies’ rosters. We realized how hard it was to lead those teams and connect with the business at scale.”
Before starting Jellyfish, the three co-founders did something not always routine at the dawn of a new business. They spent more than two months just listening, holding conversations with more than 65 technology leaders across a broad range of industries, according to Lau.
“I said: ‘Tell me not to start this startup, I don’t want to invest years of my life to find out there’s a better solution out there,’” Lau recalled. “At the end of those interviews, people leaned in and said: ‘Could you write up your notes on this and send me the answer?’ We knew we didn’t have the solution yet, but there was pain out there and an opportunity to solve something.”
To reduce the pain of engineering management, Jellyfish relies on a set of principles which are encapsulated in the blog section on the company’s website. Under the heading of “Top Five Slides Every Vice President of Engineering Should Show at Board Meetings,” Lau outlines key steps which include a focus on hiring and productivity, along with attention to quality and communication.
One of the principles that’s core to successful engineering management is alignment with the goals of the company. “Make sure that your team is spending your dollars, time and effort in the right way that aligns with the business,” Lau said. “If you’re a company that splits time between enterprise and small, medium sized business efforts, make sure the features the team is working on actually align with the strategy of the company. You can’t do that if you don’t measure it.”
Insight from engineering data
To assess alignment, Jellyfish uses data, specifically information leveraged extensively by engineers for product development. This might include resources available through GitLab or GitHub along with testing and continuous integration tools.
...
Here’s the complete video interview, the latest in the continuing Startup Insights series and one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:
