In this opening segment of the YouTube interview titled "Annual Budget Planning for Engineering Leaders," co‑founder Phil of Jellyfish introduces the conversation with senior director of engineering Patrick from DigitalOcean. Patrick shares his professional background, spanning roles at Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Groupon, Docker, and five years at DigitalOcean. Phil explains Jellyfish’s engineering management platform, emphasizing its data‑driven approach to measuring, optimizing, and crediting engineering work, especially during annual planning. The dialogue outlines a three‑step framework for annual budget planning in software companies: (1) define company‑level objectives set by the CEO and executive team; (2) determine how engineering and product contribute to those objectives; and (3) calculate required headcount and other spend to achieve the goals. The segment sets the stage for deeper discussion on aligning engineering efforts with strategic company targets and using Jellyfish’s platform to support that process.
Patrick, do you want to introduce yourself?
Yeah, thank you for that. So hi everybody, my name is Patrick. I am currently, uh, senior director of engineering over at DigitalOcean. I've been here for about, you know, 5 years now at the company. Uh, prior to that I was at Docker and, uh, Groupon, Microsoft. I actually started my career at Sun Microsystems, rest in peace. And so thank you for having me here today. Love to talk about this topic in particular and appreciate the ability to be able to do so with you guys.
Awesome. Thanks, Patrick. And I'm Phil. I'm one of the co-founders here at Jellyfish. I've been a product leader earlier in my career, focused on, you know, all things go-to-market now, but a lot of that go-to-market focus is working with people like Patrick and people like you to you know, help them get the most out of their relationship with Jellyfish and just, you know, to get the most out of their, out of their job. And just, you know, quick intro on Jellyfish in case you don't know. Jellyfish makes an engineering management platform, which I think for this, for this discussion, like the overview is it's an engineering management platform that enables leaders like you to have a data-driven way to measure and optimize and get credit for all of the work that your, your engineering organizations are doing. And, you know, I think the annual planning is one of those, you know, once a year big use cases that is, that can benefit from something like that. But, you know, I think all of you in the day to day of the job probably know how important it is to be able to understand and communicate and measure what's going on within, within your org. In terms of how this process works, again, you probably, depending on your role and how deeply involved you are in it, and maybe how many times you've been through this in your career, you probably know it. But I think the consensus, like not just, you know, us pontificating, but as we, you know, talk to all of our customers and try to make sure that the way we think about it is true, you know, when played out across some, you know, 3 or 4-digit number of teams, it's that you start by understanding what are the objectives of the company, right? Like, where— and, you know, this is usually, you know, CEO and, you know, executive team level. You know, where are we? Where— what do we want to get to next year? Sometimes that's in terms of revenue. Sometimes that's in terms of, you know, other strategic initiatives or milestones. But starting from that foundation, Then step 2, as it's listed here, is understanding, you know, again, we're speaking to software companies. And so, you know, usually software is a core part of, of software is the product, software is a core part of meeting those objectives. And so, you know, how does, you know, how does engineering contribute to that? And what does engineering need? Engineering and product, how do they accomplish that? And then once there's some understanding there, step 3 is like, okay, well, how many people do do I need and what other, you know, what other things do we need to spend money on in order to accomplish all of the things that come out of the exercise in step 2.
