In this acceptance speech, Jess Duley, a software development project manager at Submittable, thanks Jellyfish for awarding the company the Engineering Innovation Award. She acknowledges the support of her CTO Andy Wright, the engineering team, and the role of Jellyfish’s metrics in driving change. Duley describes Submittable’s evolution from a sales‑driven startup to a technology‑led organization, highlighting its strong philanthropic work during the COVID‑19 pandemic and its commitment to corporate social responsibility. She emphasizes how Jellyfish helped measure and improve product‑engineering alignment, foster a collaborative culture where product and engineering work as teammates, and expand the company’s global community impact. The speech concludes with excitement about future innovations and continued community‑focused efforts.
Chapters
Hello, my name is Jess Duley and I'm a software development project manager at Sumitomo. On behalf of my company, I'd like to give the biggest thank you to Jellyfish for choosing us as recipients for Jellyfish's Engineering Innovation Award. This could not have been possible without the help and trust from my peers in our engineering org, from jumping in and helping me help us make some amazing things happen on this journey and not being afraid of the metrics that Jellyfish continues to give us. But I'd like to properly thank my CTO, Andy Wright. Not only did he discover Jellyfish on our behalf, but he's also been my advocate and empowered me to dive into Jellyfish as well as Atlassian's Jira to make the changes to support and reflect the input impact that our research and development org has made through our innovation throughput. When we both joined Submittable a couple of years ago, engineering was pretty sales-driven, which isn't uncommon for a startup, but as a company, we wanted Submittable to be more, and we've transformed our company into a technology-led company. Submittable already had a strong philanthropic presence in the community and had already made a huge impact across the country during COVID With how many lives we were able to positively reach and make, which made really diving into a corporate social responsibility-based type of work a no-brainer for us. And we made it our company goal that we would work towards that. So we hit the gas and have been going ever since. Jellyfish is on this journey with us as we continue to become an even more efficient technology-led company with product alignment, and we continue to make a positive impact in our communities and keep furthering our reach globally. It's been pretty amazing just to see not only how Jellyfish was able to measure just the work that we've done, but it's also been able to show us the impact in our culture within our company, how that's changed. We're— we have an R&D org where product and engineering talk as friends and as teammates. And we're continuing to really, really invest in that and make sure that everybody is a part of this amazing thing and no one is left out. And I'm so excited to see what Seminole keeps doing, but more importantly, what other changes that we continue to make off of the things we're building in our communities. So as we continue to further our reach out there, I'm so excited. To just continue just being gracious for this award. So thank you again so much, Jellyfish, and everyone on my team for making this possible.
