//below is a non-updated rough-draft

Balena has long had a tradition of support-driven development. We believe that by making support an everyday part of our development process, we create the best products possible. At the yearly Summit retreat in 2018, however, heads came together to address a problem at the core of support at the time. The issue was simple: customer information was siloed and team members providing support did not have a single timeline of all of a user’s interactions with the team.

At first, this may not seem like a major issue. In traditional companies, most employees only ever see fragmented pieces of the customer timeline, if they’re even exposed to it in the first place. Every department handles their portion of customer-facing work and then promptly passes the customer on to the next department once they’re done. At balena, this status quo was, of course, untenable. ProductOS architect and the person responsible for spearheading the creation of Jellyfish, Lucian, sums up the downsides of context-poor user interactions through the philosophy of bounded rationality. The idea is simple: people usually make decisions based on the information available to them. It’s easy to justify a decision as long as it makes sense within the available information, even if that information may itself be severely limited. Oftentimes, of course, it is exactly that hidden information that may prove a seemingly-sensible decision short-sighted, or even plain wrong, in hindsight. Another benefit of a transparent process is that it allows any team member to find the context they may need and thus understand why a particular decision was made.

And so, the team set out to find a way to unify user context. The major culprit at the heart of the issue was the more than a dozen platforms that made up balena’s support at the time. That erratic setup actively hid context and made unifying information a very frictioned process. Even worse was that the team used only a small subset of each tool’s wide range of functions. The team realized that it made sense to take just the necessary bits and pieces from existing SaaS support tools and combine them all into a single product.

A short while after that fateful 2018 Summit meeting, Jellyfish was born as a general-purpose platform that would provide anyone on the team with a unified user timeline that has all the context necessary to deliver a great support experience. The origin of the name follows the origin of the product, with the idea being that a balena user represents the “head” of the Jellyfish, and all the bits of context around that user’s interactions are the attached tendrils.

Jellyfish has since evolved to encompass a lot more than just support. Today, the platform facilitates our entire Loop process and is gradually becoming home to more and more of our everyday work.

Let’s take a look under the hood and see how Jellyfish works in practice.