In this panel‑style webinar hosted by Andrew Lau, co‑founder and CEO of Jellyfish, three experts discuss how engineering teams can demonstrate and measure return on investment (ROI) for the broader business. Andrew Lau frames the problem as the common perception of engineering as a “black box” that consumes a large share of operating expenses without clear, quantifiable outcomes. Andrew Corbell, a former engineering practitioner now on the investment side at Insight Partners, shares observations from hundreds of portfolio companies about how leaders report engineering impact to boards and investors. Ronak Patel, Chief Digital Officer at Umbridge, adds a consulting perspective on digital transformation and the need for visibility into engineering work. The conversation explores why business leaders feel disconnected from engineering, the importance of translating technical work into familiar business metrics (KPIs, SLOs, revenue‑related measures), and how emerging functions such as engineering operations, product operations, and the Chief Product Officer role are creating a common language across the C‑suite. Participants discuss practical ways to demystify engineering—by mapping effort to outcomes, using tools like Jellyfish to allocate time, and aligning initiatives with financial goals—so that engineering investment can be justified, optimized, and communicated effectively to stakeholders.
Chapters
My name is Andrew Lau. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO here of Jellyfish. I'm excited here today to talk about the ROI of engineering. So kind of a quick checkpoint here, why are we here? Well, so I'm excited for the triple-digit number of folks here joining us. You know, I think most of us are here because we are engineering leaders or we work with engineering leaders, and we'd love to understand how we can think about the ROI of these engineering teams. Engineering teams increasingly are the lifeblood of companies. It is the engine of most companies out there today, and it is a big part of the team. And so how should we all think about ROI? How should we think about this return here? Either as someone that works with engineering leaders or as an engineering leader ourselves, right? So that's why I'm here today. Now I'm excited to actually be on the horn here with Mr. Corbell. Andrew Corbell here joins us from Insight, and I'll let him introduce himself in a second. Andrew was a previous practitioner who has now gone to the dark side. He's got, we have our very own Darth Vader here. He's actually gone to the investor side of the table. And yeah, you can, you can see him deep breathing there. He's here to tell us what it looks like from the other side of the table with a little bit of empathy because he remembers the day when he was on our side of the table. And I'm also luckily here to be joined here with Ronak Patel here, Chief Digital Officer of Umbridge. And with Umbridge, and you can say in your own words, you get to work with some amazing companies to help them craft the story around how they can make their teams more impactful and the ROI there. But I'll let you both introduce yourselves in your own words. And so, Mr. Korbel, Andrew, please tell us more about the dark side.
Thanks, Andrew. Um, yeah, so as you said, I used to be a practitioner. Now I'm on the dark side, work for Insight Partners, which we have around 500 companies in our portfolio. So, um, and that's, that stretches from many different verticals, as you can imagine, and from, you know, small companies of making a couple million in ARR to hundreds of millions in ARR. So very interesting. We have about $90 billion under management. So we're a pretty big firm. We get to see a lot of cool things. I'm excited about this topic because day in and day out, I get to talk to R&D leaders that help in areas like this, whether that's how we report out to the board, how we do different things to talk about engineering and product and the impact that they make. You know, for the company. So that's a little bit about me. Maybe I'll pass it over to Ronak.
Yeah. Hey guys, how you doing? My name is Ronak, part of Umbridge. It's a craft-based studio here in Houston. We get the, you know, we get to work with Fortune 500 companies every day. We help them build their software, you know, work with their digital transformation that most companies are going through today and help them accelerate that. So we get to see a vast variety of different use cases from folks that are very product-focused already, and so just traditionally set up as a business and IT structure, and we try to help accelerate their digital journey.
It's amazing. This is a crew between all of us. I think we get visibility into how thousands of companies are actually running their teams. So I think there's some great diverse perspective here around how companies think about this. I just heard from Ronak that he's actually hailing from Houston. I'm calling from Boston, Massachusetts, actually Cambridge, Massachusetts here. Andrew, just to like get time zone aligned with everyone, where are you calling in from?
I'm calling in just up the road from Boulder, Colorado. So it's brunch for me right now.
So right on, a place of better air that we all look forward to visiting, right? So you heard it here, open invitation by Andrew to visit him in Boulder. That's what I heard.
Anytime. That's right. Okay.
Well, so before we kind of jump in here today, like what we're actually going to do here is we're I'm going to run this in a Q&A fashion a little bit, right? Because Andrew and Eric, you guys have visibility to how teams run. You have your unique perspectives of how you work with your portcos and your clients and what you've seen in your own stories on those things. And what we're trying to do today is kind of pull that knowledge out of your brains, share it with the rest of this group, because this is an important problem, right? It is 40% of OpEx for a lot of companies now. This is a very large and expensive team here. And many of us are actually asked to defend and explain and actually make campaign for actually why we're actually investing in those teams, right? And so it's a reason I care about this a lot around my role previously as a practitioner, but also one is actually seeing across many companies here. And so each of your perspectives on this stuff will actually help us answer this a lot. So when I step back and I look at actually why we started Jellyfish, one of the memes that I always heard when I was talking to other business leaders, they're like, ooh, Engineering is a black box. I have no idea what goes on there, but they're telling us we got to spend a lot of money over there because we need to make the thing that we're going to sell, right? And that was actually a meme that I heard from business leader on a business leader, right? And so for me, that tickled my brain as someone that actually was on the other side of the fence here, delivering a team, delivering product here, which is needing to think about and learning how to answer to that part of it. And that's where I think the ROI part of it comes in, because one phrasing here that I think we started this conversation is like, it's not just about the cost, it's actually about the return. Like we're making an investment. What are we doing for this part of it?
Right.
So, so for us, like that's the broad stroke trimming. Now, actually, the black box, I'll start this off like, how do we actually like demystify this black box? Right. So, so maybe I'll start with Andrew here and Ronak, please. You know, let's keep it casual. Any of us want to chime in, please do. Right. So Andrew, like you see from the other side, why do business leaders, investors, why do they feel so darn disconnected from engineering? Why is it perceived as a black box? Because we have to start with the why first, and then we can figure out how we actually solve this. And do you think that like, is it like, because they don't understand, like how does the impact get lost and why is that? So, you know, like help me understand it from that side of the table. Yeah.
I mean, I think, you know, there's a bunch of different threads to pull on here. I think one is, I mean, I'd even maybe throw it back back to you, Andrew. I mean, I think it's this, I think when we see most people in an executive position and CEOs, they really come from sort of that go-to-market side of the house. So it's like a whole, like this thing over here, this engineering thing, these people are talking about like story points and SLOs and like a bunch of things that just don't resonate. But like, if you think about it coming from, you know, if you're a CEO coming from the engineering side, It's probably the same thing. It's like, how the heck do we do quotas? How the heck do we do forecasting? How the heck do we do those types of things? And I think we need to figure out what is our common language across sort of the executive team. And I think a lot of that is around the finances and business metrics and KPIs and those types of things. So relating what we do in engineering back to that language so that we can all speak the same language is a very important thing. I think another threat to pull on is like, how's, you know, it gets lost, but I think now with this emergence of like sort of R&D operations, product operations, engineering operations, we're starting to get this visibility into what's happening into this black box because then you can relate that right back to this notion of like RevOps. Like, you know, every company has a sales ops team, right? And we're moving more into this RevOps and they're producing all these great things and say, what's the look inside of that? You could probably even rewind the tape even way further back to say like Salesforce, right? Like, oh well, just trust me, I'm gonna go hit my quota for this, this year before, before you could actually do this, this Salesforce thing and see that sort of flow through the pipeline to close. So I think there's a bunch of those things you can do. I think this other emergence of like a Chief Product Officer has really helped the CTO to kind of be that bridge between sort of the technical and the business side and be able to speak that language. So You know, I think there's a lot of different things that are emerging. This is a great time. And, and, you know, like we look at, at Jellyfish, it's great product to be able to like actually put where, where we're allocating our time. Where's that going? How do we actually have ROI on those initiatives that we're working on? Where do we double down? So like, I think, you know, technology is emerging. I think new positions in the suite, C-suite are emerging. I think these functional operational things are happening and And I think it's just getting us to meet people where they're at to get to that sort of common language across the executive suite.
