Tag Archive for: Jama in the News

jama connect for medical device development

Today, Jama Software, introduced Jama Connect for Medical Device Development, a new solution designed to help engineering teams better manage device requirements, risk and design control all on one powerful platform. The newest release makes regulatory submissions and audit preparations a straightforward process, speeding time-to-market deployment with no reduction in quality.

Consistent product quality and safety proves to be the top challenge for innovators throughout the medical device development lifecycle. Constantly evolving regulations and the new complexities presented by connected devices makes management of these shifting complexities difficult. Our teams have been hard at work to bring this solution to fruition and help medical device developers simplify and accelerate the development lifecycle. This single platform can help accelerate innovation, maintain consistency and high product quality, and manage ever-changing complex regulations in medical device development.

“Developers are balancing increased regulatory requirements with device development costs that lead to challenges across the production lifecycle,” said Josh Turpen, Chief Product Officer at Jama Software. “We’re excited to introduce our new solution designed specifically for medical device companies which will help ease the development process from the start. Jama Connect allows developers to hit the ground running with preconfigured templates and best practices built-in, saving product teams from the cumbersome and often frustrating process of filing paperwork.”

Note: Now that our medical device blog series is concluded, you can go back and read Part I, Part II, and Part III.

Jama Connect for Medical Device Development can help teams:

• Easily demonstrate traceability
• Manage risk analysis
• Maintain audit trails and export data
• Improve product development with reuse and baseline management
• Streamline compliant reviews and approvals
• Manage design verification and validation

Jama Connect for Medical Device Development is designed to help you get ramped up quickly with a platform, training and documentation aligned to industry regulations ISO 13485:2016, 21 CFR 820.30, and ISO 14971:2019, while applying a proven Systems Engineering approach to product development. When you purchase Jama Connect for Medical Device Development, our consultants partner with you to adapt the solution to fit your product delivery process and build adoption of Jama Connect within your organization. Contact us to learn more.

About Jama Software

Jama Software provides the leading platform for requirements, risk and test management. With Jama Connect for Medical Device Development, teams building complex products, systems and software improve cycle times, increase quality, reduce rework and minimize effort proving compliance. Representing the forefront of modern development, Jama’s growing customer base
of more than 600 organizations includes Boston Scientific, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott, and Merck.

Visit jamasoftware.com/solutions/medical-devices to learn more about Jama Software for Medical Device Development.

 

 

Our Ask Jama Live series kicked off last week in Seattle, and a great community of local customers came out to meet each other and Jama Software product leaders over breakfast at the Hotel Theodore. On the agenda: a presentation of best practices and the Jama Connect™ product roadmap, with engaging discussions in between.

Customers speak up.

Customers bring their own experiences with Jama Connect to an Ask Jama Live event, so we expect each one to vary. In Seattle, a customer explained his unique business problem to the group: he knew Jama Connect could be solving more problems for his company, but he couldn’t convince others to see the product as anything more than a Requirements Management tool. 

With our Chief Product Officer Josh Turpen right there to offer guidance and a room full of other Jama customers to weigh in, the discussion turned into a lively brainstorming session about the range of possibilities the platform offers, and ways to advocate for its expanded use to others across a company.

RSVP to attend an Ask Jama Live event near you.

It was an exciting morning, and an Ask The Expert session at the end ensured everyone got answers they needed to their own questions about Jama Connect.  

 If you’re a Jama Connect customer, don’t miss this opportunity to gain insights and expertise you need from a trusted, enthusiastic community. Find an event near you and RSVP now. Here’s a list of upcoming stops on the road trip:

Boston
New York 

 

As we continue our growth and expansion into new markets, today we are excited to announce some important leadership transitions that lay the groundwork for ongoing success at Jama Software.

Eric Winquist Embarks on His Next Chapter

Guided by a bold vision to revolutionize the way products are developed and built, Eric Winquist co-founded Jama 11 years ago. Since then, we’ve made significant progress toward that vision.

While the accomplishments are too numerous to list, here are a few of the many milestones that Jama has achieved in the pursuit of revolutionizing product development:

  • We brought a unique solution to market – Jama is the best-of-breed product development platform that helps companies build better products faster.
  • We scaled our operations – today we are a global business with over 600 active customers, nearly 200 employees and offices in North America and Europe.
  • We completed our first acquisition – we acquired analytics specialist Notion.
  • We are expanding our partner ecosystem – we have partnered with other technology companies, consulting firms and product development process experts to broaden our reach and the scope of offerings.
  • We continue to focus on growth and innovation – in June, we secured a new funding round led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from Madrona Venture Group to help us unlock our potential for years to come.

Eric has spent the past year in Amsterdam getting our European headquarters up and running with great success. We have quickly grown the team to 15 employees working in Europe and are seeing growing momentum in the region, including expanded office space and the hiring of seasoned sales leader Stephen Porter.

Now, after getting our European operations off to a strong start, the time is right for Eric to take a well-deserved break. We will be forever grateful to Eric for over a decade of hard work and leadership, and look forward to cheering him on as he explores what’s next.

Jennifer Jaffe and Jonathan Cogan Take the Next Big Step

As we look ahead, we are excited to announce two executive promotions that set the stage for future growth.

After five years as a Jamanian and with a robust background in the world of product development, Jennifer Jaffe has been promoted to Senior Vice President, Products & Strategy. Jennifer recently relocated to our European headquarters in Amsterdam to work more closely with our growing team and roster of innovative European customers. With this promotion, Jennifer and her team will drive Jama’s strategic vision and product roadmap.

We’re also pleased to announce that Jonathan Cogan has been promoted to Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales. With two years at Jama under his belt and a strong background in sales for enterprise software and SaaS solutions, Jonathan recently assumed responsibility for our Account Management organization in addition to leading New Business Sales, Sales Development and Sales Enablement. With this promotion, Jonathan and his team will have worldwide revenue responsibility to drive sales and adoption of our new and existing products.

We are excited to promote these two from within Jama and solidify our commitment to ongoing product innovation and market expansion for many years to come.

Our company’s mission is to modernize, digitize, and transform product development — making it a competitive advantage for our customers. Part of that strategy involves demonstrating the dramatic business benefits of digital transformation to companies around the globe.

More than 550 global customers currently use Jama Software as the system of record and action when developing some of the planet’s most complicated and innovative products. We want to ensure the collective voice of our customers continues to resonate and empower other product developers to realize the realities of what’s possible, the best practices to utilize, and pitfalls to avoid.

It’s with these goals in mind that I’m thrilled to welcome Laura Trotter as our VP of Marketing, and the newest member of our executive team. Laura brings with her over 20 years of marketing experience for leading SaaS, enterprise software, medical/life sciences, and telecommunications companies. In addition, she’s an extremely driven, passionate, and caring person who will elevate our organization and enhance our awesome Marketing department.

The executive team and I are excited to welcome Laura to Jama. To help get to know her better, she’s answered a few questions about her new position.

Jama Software: What excites you most about working at Jama?

Laura Trotter: For me, it comes down to three things:

  1. Product – I know firsthand what it’s like to work for a company that doesn’t properly handle its product development process. I also know what it’s like to work for a company that does. (In fact, one of my past employers is a Jama customer.) Trust me when I say that I much prefer the latter!
  2. Customers – Jama’s customers are some of the most innovative in the world. Knowing that we’re helping these companies fulfill their missions is inspiring.
  3. People – When determining whether I can work with someone, I always ask myself if I could be stranded in an airport with them. I haven’t met a Jamanian yet that doesn’t pass this basic “sniff” test!

JS: What do you see as the biggest opportunity for Jama and its customers?

LT: The world needs to know the value of what we offer and why it matters to them!

Product development is at a pivotal moment. There’s a paradigm shift happening in the complexity of what’s being built. Luckily, Jama has some amazing product development experts on staff who specialize in the industries and markets we serve. And, as a company, we have the collective knowledge to lead “big idea” conversations that will fundamentally move the discipline forward. As a marketer, this is truly exciting!

JS: Our customers make some of the most complex and innovative products in the world. How do you plan to help others like them digitally transform their product development?

LT: I don’t think there is really any special sauce to this — it comes down to understanding why product developers need to make this change, and effectively conveying the steps to successfully transform.

Jama has an opportunity to communicate how product development can be a competitive differentiator. This is especially true with products that must work within a diverse ecosystem of other connected products.

JS: Our marketing team loves its furry, four-legged friends. Do you have any pets?

LT: Yes! Wasn’t this a requirement for the role?

I have a dog and a cat. My dog, Murphy, is a Soft Coated Wheaten Terrier. Unfortunately, he has a genetic disease that causes his kneecaps to rotate (ouch). I’m afraid I won’t be able to bring him into the office because of this, but I’ll get my dog fix thanks to Bernie, the Marketing department’s unofficial mascot, who is beyond sweet.

My cat, Socks, is a rescue cat. I like to say that he picked me during an adoption event that I happened across when I lived in San Diego. Believe it or not, I didn’t think that I liked cats before Socks. My husband now calls me the “cat whisperer”… and, at times, I get a few “crazy cat lady” references too!

As Jama Software’s customer base continues its rapid growth and our solution becomes more mission critical for our customers, it was clear I needed to bring on a rockstar to lead our engineering efforts going forward. One who has experience with large-scale enterprise software, critical business processes and workflows, as well as big data and analytics. Plus, this person would need to have empathy for companies building products in regulated industries.

I found all that in John Gasper, our new Vice President of Engineering.

John is a seasoned technology leader with more than 25 years of experience building state-of-the-art software solutions in Silicon Valley and Portland, Oregon. He was most recently Vice President of Engineering at Skyward IO in Portland, where he built applications for commercial drone operators. Previously, he ran engineering teams for industry leaders such as PeopleSoft, Intuit, ADP, Serena Software, and Thomson Reuters, in multiple domains including financials, payroll, taxation, healthcare, and requirements management.

John is also passionate about the thriving technology culture in Portland, and serves as co-chair of the Technology Association of Oregon’s Development and Engineering Community.

At Jama Software, our mission is to modernize, digitize, and transform product development so it becomes a competitive advantage for our customers.

The No. 1 job for John, and our engineering organization overall, is to continue building for the reliability and quality of our software and hosted solutions so our customers can always count on us being there when they need it most. John’s second priority will be to continue our heritage of bringing cutting edge solutions to product development teams, so we can make it easier for them to build the innovative products of the future.

I’m thrilled to welcome John as a Jamanian, and am excited for our employees, customers, and partners to get the chance to work together with him. To kick things off, John was kind enough to answer some questions from our team about his new role at Jama Software.

Jama Software: What attracted you to Jama Software?

John Gasper: Jama Software has a great reputation in town, so I thought I needed to check out this company. Once I met Scott and several other employees, I could easily see the reason for the reputation! Jama has assembled an amazing team. Couple this with a strong business model and incredible customers, and you get an unbeatable combination. I’m looking forward to working with the Jama team to write software that is used every day by companies around the world to add real business value.

JS: What do you see as the biggest opportunity for the Jama Software engineering team?

JG: The Jama Software engineering team is doing an amazing job. There are obviously opportunities to build more features and leverage the ever-changing technology. We need to do both.

I would also like the engineering team to continue to be a a model for others in Portland. The tech community here is fairly close-knit. Jama Software can participate in meetups, the Technology Association of Oregon, Tech Talks, internships, and more. This will not only let us showcase some of the cool things we are doing, but also help to grow the overall technology community in Portland which, in turn, helps recruit and retain the very best talent.

JS: Our customers count on us to deliver a reliable product development platform. What’s your approach to ensuring product quality?

JG: Quality is the single most important aspect in software. Great features that don’t work create frustration for customers quickly. This means quality needs to be in every step of the development process. Everyone has a role: the requirements need to be reviewed to make sure they are clear and meeting the business needs, the code needs to be unit tested by the engineers before it goes to QA, and then QA needs time and tools to be thorough.

I also like to engage others in the quality process, including those in the company and customers, where it is possible. This also includes using our product ourselves. If we find it hard to use, imagine how much more difficult our customers will find it! Understanding how customers really use the software often empowers the team to drive quality at each step.

JS: How do you plan to foster innovation that enables teams to make product development a competitive advantage?

JG: I’m a big fan of carving out time for “experimental” engineering. This could be a few hours a week or even a day each month, when the team is working on their innovation projects. Innovation is often a team sport, so I like to see small teams working together on these projects. I also like them to be demoed to a wide audience, since that might spark someone else’s innovation.

Since most of the best software out there started as someone’s innovative idea, it’s important to support these projects early on. It’s also important to recognize that not all ideas will turn out great. This means celebrating the “failures” is just as important as celebrating the successes.

To help inspire innovation on our product, I hope to have the engineering team engage with customers to see how they are using it. Watching people do their job with our product is an amazing way to inspire the team to build a highly competitive solution that our customers will love.

JS: Every Friday, our engineers take turns creating music playlists for the team to enjoy. If you were tasked with being the guest DJ one afternoon for the Engineering department, what artists would be on your playlist?

JG: This is the hardest question! My music tastes tend to be very eclectic, so I pick my own playlist based on what I’m doing and my mood at the time.

I could see a playlist running the gauntlet from the golden age of jazz with Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong up to modern jazz like Diana Krall and Norah Jones. I’d have to through in some Sting as well. I could also see some classic 70s rock in there like Queen and Styx.

I also like to support local bands, so expect to see some Pink Martini, The Decemberists, and Portugal The Man. Since I’m always looking for new bands, I’m sure there will be a few other surprises in the list!

Today’s announcement of our European headquarters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, marks a milestone for Jama Software and our customers around the globe. Since our early days, Jama Software has served a global customer base. Opening this new headquarters further reflects our commitment to serving innovators around the world, and increasing the level of local support and service to a growing number of customers developing new products in Europe.

In recent years, we grew our support capabilities, adding Europe-based, multi-lingual team members to better meet our customers’ needs. Spearheading this next step is Jama Software’s co-founder Eric Winquist, who will oversee our European efforts from The Netherlands. Eric has worked with many of our European customers over the years and I’m glad they’ll be in his capable hands.

Additionally, our fiscal year 2017 closed on April 30, and it was one of exponential growth for Jama Software. More than 100 new companies globally started using our product development platform and more than 250 existing customers expanded use of Jama Software to new teams and divisions. That growth has helped fuel our overseas expansion.

As we charge into our new fiscal year, we’re focused on modernizing, digitizing, and transforming complex product development for our customers. We’re inspired by the amazing technology customers like Ekso Bionics, Spaceflight Industries, Zoll LifeVest, and NASA are developing. The year ahead holds lots of exciting things for Jama Software and we look forward to continuing this journey with the Jama Nation.

I can’t believe Jama turns nine this summer! I started the company to solve a problem that frustrated me personally — the amount of time and money wasted when product teams built features nobody used. It seemed simple: connect stakeholders with engineers and get everyone on the same page. Problem solved!

While we’ve made tremendous progress and built a great team at Jama, we’re just getting started. Today’s products are driven by software, connected to the Internet and evolving rapidly. Complexity is increasing, development cycles are shrinking and the pressure is on to get it right the first time. To solve today’s product development challenges, we’ve got a lot more work to do.

Thinking back, I didn’t expect Jama would help our customers resupply the international space station, create breakthrough medical devices, build autonomous cars or ensure billions of dollars flow to the right accounts.  I wanted to help connect teams so they made fewer mistakes and find ways to scale product management best practices. But these customer stories make me the proudest of what we’ve accomplished.

So, here we are about to close our fiscal year 2016 and start a new year on May 1 (yes, we have an odd fiscal calendar, but that’s another story).  As we finish out the year, I wanted to share my thoughts on Jama’s growth and evolution.

This year was our first as a fully recurring revenue company with 100% year-over-year GAAP subscription revenue growth. The conversion from perpetual to subscription took two years and tons of hard work across the company — but it was worth it. The SaaS/subscription business model aligns us to our customers’ needs and requires that we deliver value for them every year. When they succeed, we succeed; it’s that simple. This is a strong foundation for building a company that delivers long-term value to the people that rely on its products and services.

We added over 100 new customers including NASA, United Technologies, Zoll, Eaton, John Deere, Samsung, NVIDIA and Estes. It’s exciting to see the products our customers are building. They truly are building the impossible products of the future, and that’s what our vision is all about. Working with our customers is what inspires me, and I love hearing the stories of these amazing projects that are changing the world.

This year, we doubled down on companies building connected products. Today’s complex systems are software-driven, with more options and new regulatory compliance challenges. These companies need new tools to help manage the complexity inherent in connected products, product variants and component reuse, and to achieve compliance — all while accelerating development cycles.

Jama has been preparing for this for some time. We committed a multi-million dollar investment in R&D to deliver on new capabilities to help customers innovate more efficiently. We are delivering a new Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) multi-tier, horizontally scalable platform built on REST APIs. Translated into English, this means that Jama can scale to meet the performance needs of the world’s most complex global product development initiatives, from medical devices to spacecraft, to intricate enterprise software systems.

We also know that many of our customers require the security of an on-premises solution. We will soon be launching the next generation of Jama On-Premises. Jama’s enterprise private cloud bundles our multi-tier cloud platform, packages it for delivery behind the firewall and automatically replicates our scalable platform and auto-provisions the platform in our customers’ data centers. This is specially designed for companies that require top-secret product development protocols and an on-premises option, but includes the scalability benefits of the cloud.

Our product development team is also delivering on our feature roadmap and releasing new capabilities, including actionable traceability, which simplifies real-time requirements decomposition. And, these traceability updates will launch this Spring!growth

Jama launched solutions for the medical, semiconductor, aerospace and automotive industries, as well as Scaled Agile (SAFe™). Software drives rapid innovation in these industries, and companies must accelerate development cycles in order to compete. To be successful, it’s critical that companies manage the complexity of concurrent software and hardware development, all while achieving regulatory approval.

As we look to the future and continued growth, I am excited to share that after nine years leading Jama from startup to scale up, I have hired Scott Roth to lead Jama’s next phase of growth.

I’m excited for Scott to join Jama for several reasons. He brings fifteen years of SaaS experience including executive roles in product, marketing, sales and service. Most recently, Scott was EVP and General Manager of Return Path’s global 250-person email optimization division. Prior to Return Path, Scott spent six years in executive leadership for ExactTarget prior to and after their $2.5B acquisition by Salesforce.

Scott’s industry experience and business acumen, combined with his passion for growth, made him my ideal candidate to lead Jama.

But beyond the resume, I’ve gotten to know Scott personally. He’s warm, caring, wicked smart and brings a bias toward action. Most importantly, we share views on the importance of culture and people-first leadership that have made Jama a unique and rewarding place to work.

Hiring Scott enables me to transition into a new role as Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman, a position that will allow me to dive deeply into the company strategy, engage directly with customers and partners, and evangelize the benefits of collaboration within product development.

This is an energizing and exciting time for all of us at Jama, and I look forward to doing big things together as we execute on our vision to make possible the impossible products of the future.

Today, we are excited to announce a round of funding led by investors Trinity Ventures, with participation from Madrona Ventures Group. These firms are excellent, both in reputation and in their approach. Over the past six years, we have often considered the option of institutional investment, and until now, have opted to fund our growth organically, through customer revenue. Given the product delivery market opportunity, it’s the right time for the company to ignite the gas and fuel the next phase of our growth and we’ve found two partners who share our vision and who believe in the Jama plan.

Both Karan Mehandru, General Partner at Trinity Ventures, and Tim Porter, Managing Director at Madrona, have extensive experience advising Saas-based enterprise software companies. The Jama team extends a warm welcome to these new partners.

I could not be more excited about the opportunity in front of us. Jama’s strategy of addressing product-delivery challenges with an enterprisewide platform that knits together the business and development side of the process is resonating strongly with the market. Our core requirements-management, collaboration and testing solution over the past six years has proven our business model with a rapidly growing number of Jama customers – 600+ and counting – and a broader ecosystem of partners that have chosen to work closely with us on this journey to introduce a modern product delivery platform.

This journey will continue as we accelerate development of our core product and continue to take a leadership position in the market. The innovation we are delivering with social collaboration, requirements management and testing will further cement Jama as a core component of product-development strategies in the new age of highly complex, smart products, software and embedded systems.

With this funding we will focus on further investing in our own product and engineering teams, scaling our footprint geographically and raising our profile. It will enable us to increase the rate of innovation across all of the Jama projects. Those investments will continue to fulfill enterprise requirements and expand adoption with our customers in the coming months.

I am excited about the opportunity ahead. We have an amazing team here at Jama and I am thrilled to welcome these two amazing investors to our team.