Cost Capitalization & DevFinOps – Ryan Kuchova, Jellyfish

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to another techstruck TV episode. I am happy to be joined by Ryan Kuchova.

He's with a company called jellyfish. You may be thinking jellyfish. I think I've heard of them you hopefully you have we had Andrew from jellyfish on I guess was a maybe a week or two ago and kind of introduce I think was the first time we've had someone from jellyfish on texture on TV, but if you miss that one or you're not sure Ryan first of all, welcome second of all tell us about jellyfish.

Yeah Allen first off. Thanks for having me excited to be on today and dancing all the deeper with you today a little jellyfish. So jellyfish, I guess he's an analogy to kick it off and say it's a single here jellyfish is trying to do for engineering what Salesforce did for sales, right?

What do we really mean by that at the highest level we're trying to do is better service business insights and better time with the engineering organization. Feeling toward the broader organization is looking to achieve to make sure there's better Synergy between all functions across software companies and really any company that has a software development team inside of it to which everybody's walking lock and step what we're doing with that is essentially we're setting a top tools or our Engineers are already using day-to-day to help surface these insights without any changes required from the engineers. Got it.

So Ryan. You know, that sounds great. And I think most of our audience kind of gets that and at a high level it is but you know when we get down to it, I mean SATs based offering that really allows the development slash engineering teams.

And in today's world write that includes devops and that's re's and platform engineers and traditional developers testers. All of these folks to kind of have that. You know against saying with the Salesforce thing that relationship management type of of interface place where they you know are thinking why don't we talk a little bit about what's your role in?

Jellyfish a little of your background? Yeah. Absolutely.

So my role of jellyfish is the head of customer strategy my background they got me here is essentially it's a little bit unique and I think some of my friends even say it was kind of tailor-made to end up at jellyfish. It's a 50/50 split balancing between various Consulting and operating roles. I cut my teeth technically at Accenture doing things like bite good instrumentation performance Diagnostics eventually end up getting the startup bug bounce around a few different Boston based startups before making my second way back into Consulting where I joined a boutique strategy consulting firm.

We were focused on this intersection between software development and business itself, right and Really founding Doctrine was around Marc Andrews and sophomores eating the world. Right? And this concept where there's a lot of complexity inside of the engineering world, right?

It's been a black box to a lot of the functional elements of a business. So how do you want better communicate the engineering side to the business but second inside of the umbrella, that's R&D and we'll classify today as both engineering and product. How do you help them run more effectively and I really love that role and we ended up growing fast integrated acquired to form UI Parthenon software strategy group.

And then a few years later, I decided to jump back into the startup world and you know to be transparent. I was didn't want to leave that that realm and I was doing some research into the space and stumbled upon jellyfish and realized they're taking such a unique approach to this. That's so different than others that have had taken a 4A into this where it's not productivity.

It's that's not just measuring lines of code. Right instead. We're trying to quantify effort understand the impact as well as provide context around where Engineers are spending their time day to day and so my role here is really to help Drive value, right?

So I work with our customers, you know, both pre and post sales help them understand how can you leverage jellyfish to best operationalize your R&D teams as well as help better communicate and ensure that business as a whole is running more effectively. And so our team of our team here essentially is value drivers partner and closely with our customers. Sharing how others are leveraging those insights things of that nature to help them take these unique insights.

They may not have even seem before and help action changes inside of their organizations. Got it. Excellent.

You know you're right you are you're uniquely. Positioned for this role right with the experience and you know, I I met through a lot of young people. when you're my age everyone's young but And I tell people you can't just like go to school thinking.

This is what you're going to be the world is such a dynamic place the workplace the Technologies we use you got to be no pun intended agile and Nimble right and and you know find those kinds of solutions that they make you happy, right? You're kind of like what you like to do, but also be that take your unique skills, but also give you a chance to stretch right? No one wants to be doing the same job.

Saint path over and over again. Anyway, excellent man. Thank you for that background.

All right. just a couple days ago jellyfish to announce the big new offering and I wanted to ask you to kind of share it with our audience a little bit. We are and what is now live is this newer module?

We're referring to it as dead finops. What the heck is dead thin UPS course emerging space is how we think about it and maybe to answer that. I'll step back just a little bit right when you think about all things development, right?

And I keep using this this phrase that it's it's a black box right people have yet to have insights into it engineering has been a little bit of a side of pen to as opposed to integrated across and organization and an analogy. I like is thinking about SecOps right where you start integrating security earlier into a software development life cycle with the idea increasing the communication the collaboration between the operations teams and the development teams, very similarly, if you think about this what is eventually been a contentious relationship between finance and Engineering right? We're now trying to introduce that and break down some of those walls essentially bridge that Gap.

between finance and engineering So deathfinops is essentially all things financially related around what Engineers are doing day to day right from an engineer's perspective. There are saying hey, we need a few more headcamp so that we're able to go off and actually tackle this, you know, refactoring initiative or spend a little bit more time on technical debt. And hey, we also need to cut down on some of our support costs, right?

How do we surface that in a way that Finance teams understand our true capacity and where we're actually spending our time and alternatively Finance teams need core information from Engineers to be able to actually execute their job right? Whether that be trying to understand unit economics or the working understand cost capitalization or other workflows along those lines, right? How do we better surface these types of insights these key pieces of data that enable Financial teams to do their job without essentially pooling engineers then during leaders off the line to run spreadsheet analytics and go back.

And forth trying to understand the why or the what or the how much right what surface all of that so we can make those right decisions and also free up more time for doing people's core jobs, which on the engineering side is delivering software financial side, right? It's making the right decisions and position in the company for Success from a financial perspective. I love it.

First of all, our audience is technical right? Secondly. you know, we've heard of fin Ops and I think finops is something that Has gained a lot, you know, certainly since the finance Foundation is part of Linux Foundation started.

You know, it's it's gone. I don't know if it's quite gone mainstream, but it's gone pretty You know well known. synops here right is a a an evolution if you will excuse me your fin Ops and you know, I I think you you and jellyfish are like you guys are gonna have to sort of mission be missionaries.

Around this let's talk about you know, like how do you go to market with this kind of thing Ryan? Yeah, it's a great question. And yeah, I actually want to step back even just a little bit knowing that our crowds more technical as you suggested, right?

Mmm and speak a little bit around like some of the workflows they might be familiar with right one of them and people I heard of this is this idea like R&D cost capitalization. Similarly. There's things like R&D tax credits, right?

These are often the more painstaking elements some of the biggest pain points where you have to have the most granular data and so it's awesome East also decent amount of friction between finance and Engineering is part of that. Yeah what these workflows really are just a step back a little bit is they're essentially this idea of providing inputs to where we're Engineers are spending their time such that Finance teams can interpret that data in different ways and treat it differently inside of their balance sheet their income statements and things of that nature. We can go on a more detail just a bit on those if it's helpful, but when we go to market right, it's actually a unique Synergy and that is that we talk To engineering leaders.

We already do with our core Engineering Management platform, which is hey, how do we help your team? Become most effective, right? How do we help you?

Deliver that software on time and one of the pain points that keeps coming up is that they want more time, right? They want more time to work with their teams. They want more time to remove the noise and allow more flow time for the engineers, but also the leaders themselves.

And they also want to make case for more head count. Hey, we need more headcount to do X or set better expectations around what's actually doable with the team that we have today? And also where our technology architecture sits, right?

We might need to do a refactoring in order to achieve the next goal. And so it's it's a unique and actually really good corollary or intersection of the two where they often start saying. Hey, the pain points here is wow if I have visibility to where we're spending our time.

Could I use this to also take this large set of work that's on our plate and put it to the side and automate it right and on the finance teams. We're also hearing similar. Hey, I just want visibility not because I want to see everything they're doing but I do need to do these core sets for our job.

And so combine the two together when we go to market. It's actually it's actually just selling a great value proposition on both ends the ability to help automate these workflows and these challenges that these teams are facing day to day and freeing up a lot of time across both of them and how then the better Fidelity of data as well and when they're doing that Love it, excellent stuff, you know. Yeah you were talking about R&D tax credits and I get testified personally would Would have pay that it's trying to figure out right go back to your engineers after the fact that say well how much time did you allocate on this thing?

Whereas, you know? Yeah. It was a road to nowhere.

But so this this sounds like a great thing right just in terms of an offering is this is a standalone separate offering from from you know, the main jellyfish platform or an add on or how is that kind of sliced and dice if you will? Yeah, excellent excellent question, so, Devfin AppSec as a module as part of our core platform the leverages the same capabilities and already exists in our platform. Right what that means essentially is that jellyfish has Engineering Management platform is already passively sitting atop the tools that Engineers are using day today right in doing so we're already able to quantify engineering effort and categorize that for plethora of use cases that are part of our core platform.

We now offer death finops inside of our application and as a separate module that can be you know, leveraged by both engineering leaders as well as Finance leaders as part of that core platform as well as a standalone, you know capability, you know, should that be the ask of the customer as well? I love it. Hey, we're kind of wrapping up here, but For people want to get more information on this.

Where do they go Ryan? Yeah. Great question.

com CEO. You can also go to LinkedIn pretty easy to find there Ryan Kuchova k u c h o VA have an answer any questions that might come across. All right.

Hey Ryan. I want to thank you for you your first appearance here on Tech strong TV. Come back in see us again soon.

I hope until then be well up there in Boston and we'll be in touch. Sounds good. Thank you so much for having us hopefully connection.

All right. Hey, just a quick reminder. com.

So that's correct. I take a break here on Tech strong. We'll be back in a moment.