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.

“We connect with systems that engineering is already using, we collect that data,” Lau explained. “We clean that data, normalize it and contextualize it with respect to business data. That’s where the insight comes from.”

Is there really a market for engineering management? In the midst of a global pandemic and economic recession this spring, Jellyfish announced it had raised $12 million from Accel and Wing Venture Capital. The firm also revealed that revenues had grown 90% and it was on pace to triple its customer base in 2020.

“Literally, every company on the planet could be a potential customer of Jellyfish in the future,” Lau said. “It’s not a necessary part of the pitch anymore, everyone intuits the total addressable market is large. Even air conditioning companies now have hundreds of software engineers.”

Focus on important things

Case studies of Jellyfish customers provide a glimpse into how the firm’s metrics-driven solution can help engineering teams avoid traveling down the wrong path. SmartSense by Digi, provider of scalable Internet of Things solutions, was knee-deep in developing a new platform when data from Jellyfish revealed that the work of its engineers was significantly below the allocation of resources necessary for a successful launch.

Toast Inc., which powers tens of thousands of restaurants with technology solutions, found that its 300 engineers lacked the data to properly optimize their work or were spending an inordinate amount of time attempting to find that information. Jellyfish implemented metric automation to provide the most useful data at the right time.

“We’re making sure that their team is working on the most important things,” Lau said. “When you’re working on the most important things, you’re really getting opportunity cost of engineers and making sure they’re driving towards things that really will help the business.”

Around the time that Lau and his co-founders were working together for the first time at Endeca, another startup was seeking to transform the sales management space – Salesforce.com Inc. In true startup company style, Salesforce’s co-founders developed a set of principles to guide both company and customer vision, wore Hawaiian print shirts and appointed Marc Benioff’s dog Koa as “Chief Love Officer.”

At the time, the sales automation management space was also a greenfield opportunity. Lau and his co-founders hope that engineering management will provide the same springboard for success.

“We’re trying to do for engineering what Salesforce did for sales,” Lau said. “Our ambitions are to build a large multibillion-dollar standalone software company. I don’t think it’s overly naïve to say that’s where we’re going, but there’s a lot of work to get from here to there.”

Here’s the complete video interview, the latest in the continuing Startup Insights series and one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE