In this webinar segment, moderator Speaker A and Andrew, the leader behind the Jellyfish platform, discuss how business leaders—particularly engineering and finance executives—can move beyond high‑level R&D expense figures to truly understand where R&D dollars and team time are being spent. Andrew stresses the importance of collecting granular spend and time‑tracking data by product line, initiative type (growth, retention, new features, maintenance), and macro categories. He argues that this data enables informed trade‑offs, ensuring that scarce R&D budgets are allocated to activities that drive growth or retention rather than being indiscriminately increased. The conversation also touches on the need for concrete KPIs that engineering managers can use to measure R&D ROI, such as team time allocation, velocity/agility metrics, quality indicators, and hiring/churn statistics. Throughout, the hosts engage the audience with a poll to identify participants’ roles (finance, engineering, other), underscoring the cross‑functional relevance of the topic.
Chapters
Kudos to you for building Jellyfish, and let's, let's learn a little bit about it.
Let's talk shop. Yeah, let's get into this. Yeah, the real stuff.
Yeah. So as we're talking about, you're seeing how much money is invested in R&D. How can the business leaders really understand where— how the money is being invested in R&D.
Yeah, well, I mean, I, I think like we all like— like, by the way, this is a cool audience because I think we actually have engineering leaders in here and finance leaders in here. Um, so I think it's a, it's a, it's a novel intersection on that part of it.
So that was a very subtle way to remind me to, to launch the poll. So while Andrew is speaking, I will launch a poll just asking people whether they're in finance, engineering, or other. So thank you, Andrew, for that.
Right on. Well, so while we're actually doing that poll, like we're going to talk a little about this. I mean, I think the answer first and foremost is we have to do better than just this, like, hey, this is 40% of OpEx for 2022 or 2021, right? Like we have to go deeper than that. And I think part of this is trying to understand like how your team is spending your money and time, right? In some ways they're synonymous, right? How do we actually delve into that and do we understand— oh, look at that mix, right? How do we understand like what people are actually doing? And so, look, in lieu of, you know, an energy management platform, I would say that simply you should collect the data. Do it, you know, do it manually if need be, right? But you need to understand where those large dollars are actually going because it's a fixed cost. It's scarce, right? And that'll lead you to actually make trade-offs around where you should be spending on things. Because you can't just blanket pile more dollars in there. You actually have to understand where those dollars are going to. Is this helping in growth? Is it helping in retention? Is it helping in new features? Is it for this product line versus that product line?
Right.
So I'd start there as a way to actually lift the covers and, and really kind of understand those parts. You're signing the check every 2 weeks anyways, so better to know. Yeah.
So the question, you know, and we're going to be talking about this throughout the whole webinar, so maybe you don't have the perfect answer because it is nuanced depending on the company, et cetera. But, you know, beyond just R&D expense and maybe looking at it in the way we're looking at it at a high level, the ROI on R&D, what are the KPIs that you think, you know, do you have some favorite KPIs as an engineering manager that you have a lot of success in your past history and as the leader of Jellyfish. What do you recommend?
Yeah, so I like, like you already alluded, there's no one size fits all because every one of our businesses are special snowflakes. But I think there are general themes that we should actually tackle this, right? Because, you know, first and foremost, I do subscribe that we should understand your percentage of your team's time being spent by product line and the percent on macro category, right? Which you alluded to earlier, which is you know, let's just say maintenance versus new features or growth versus retention, right? Just understand the macro spend of your time. Really recommend you do that because I think it has tons of strategic value in doing that. I also think that we should work with our teams to understand how are they getting faster. And this is where the culture of the teams fits in. Every team has a different measure of that. So it could be their agility. How much are they completing on a say-do basis? Or, Are they actually just pushing more activity through? Just even know that if you doubled your team size and you're not getting more activity, well, something's going on you should know about there. And then the last thing I want to make sure that we don't forget is you should be looking at quality, right? Like that is the full cycle quality, which is, you know, how are customers perceiving outages and failures and those things? And like, how much are you seeing over time? Like while on a given day, it may not seem that important, over trend it actually matters. And remember it's a zero-sum game. So like if we're doing bug fixes or support or maintenance, maintenance. We're not doing new features for growth and stuff like that. And then the last bit is around hiring, right? You should be looking at your staff— how much is churning, how much is growing in. I mean, this is analogous to all the other organizations, but given the hiring climate today, you have to pay attention to that.
