During Mark’s eight years at Funnel, he has learned and shared things both big and small from writing millions of miles of code. You should continue reading if you’re curious to learn more about the phrase “If it's important, you won't forget it” as well as how you can incorporate your passion for music into work. 

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role in the company?

My name is Mark. I'm originally from England, and I have lived in Sweden for 20-odd years. I'm a full-stack developer here at Funnel, but I do have more of a focus on the front-end side of things. I'm currently a member of the Explorers team in our engineering department along with two other developers, one product manager, and one designer. Currently, we are focusing on building our dashboard offering.

How long have you been working here, and what path led you to your current position?

I've been at Funnel for eight years. I've always had the same position, but I have been in different teams over the years. As the company has grown we've split into different groups and added more teams to our engineering department. During my journey here at Funnel, I have been a part of getting these new constellations started, and to get them established. 

What is your reason for staying at Funnel for so many years?

Well, I mean, it's the same reason why I started here in the first place. I spoke to an employee working at Funnel. At the time, I didn't know a great deal about agile product development. All I knew was “sprints” and “backlogs” and those kinds of things. This employee told me, “No. We don't do any of that.”

Here at Funnel, we try to work on one thing at a time, and we have small autonomous teams that make decisions. I was intrigued, so I thought I'd stay here for a year and learn as much as I could before moving on to somewhere else. But I'm still here, because of the company culture.

More specifically for me, it is about the trust and transparency that we have at Funnel. It is easy to take it for granted when you have been here for a while, but you have to remind yourself that you shouldn’t take that for granted, Funnel is, in my perspective, unique in that way. 

What are the most important things you’ve learned while working here?

Beyond the technology itself, which I have learned a great deal about, I think it goes back to what I just talked about: the whole product development process. The most important thing I have learned is how to know what you're supposed to be building. 

It’s about asking the questions; What's the best use of my time and my team's time? What should we be doing now that has the most impact? 

Figuring these questions out is the hard part of this job — much more difficult than actually writing the code. This is also why you need a team. It's not something that one developer can do by themself.

Can you explain more about the product development process at Funnel?

Our teams are autonomous, meaning that they make their own decisions about what they're going to build (keeping in line with business goals, of course). To be able to do that, we need different sources of information. We rely on our product strategy, and we also conduct interviews with our customers to better understand what new features or changes will have the most impact.

This needs to be balanced with things like technical debt. You need to balance what you need to update, different dependencies, what security problems might arise. Furthermore, it is your responsibility to make sure your code is performing. It needs to work quickly, and it needs to be up to date. 

Given all this input, your team says, “given all of that, this is what we're going to do.” Then, you align everyone’s focus and begin collaborating to complete the project as quickly as possible. We believe that we are the most effective when we can all work together on the same thing. 

This differs from other ways of working because you don't have a long list of things that you are constantly trying to prioritize. Instead, you are focusing on one thing at a time. You are trying to keep these loops as short as possible and have a constant delivery to production. You work on something for a few days instead of working on something for a month before releasing it. 

Can you share an instance where you had to learn something completely new? How did you approach it?

When I started at Funnel, the whole Amazon Web Service was new to me. However, due to our structure of working closely in small teams with different skills and specialties, I have been able to learn more about that from my team.

And these learning aspects of the role are constant. And if our team doesn’t know something, we can always turn to another team within engineering to teach us. 

What have been some of the biggest challenges you've faced in your role, and how did you overcome them?

We have lots of big challenges all the time, and I guess what we try to do is turn them into smaller challenges. We break them up and try to identify what the ideal first step is. 

I’ll give you one example. We recently held one of our Alignment weeks. This is an event during which the technology-based parts of the organization meet to decide on the top priorities for the coming weeks. A couple of cross-collaborative teams were trying to improve the onboarding process. The challenge was to get all the steps in between to work. We had six or seven different teams involved, and everyone had a small part to play. 

We needed to move through the whole chain from beginning to end, to make sure that blockers were removed so that all the teams could contribute to their part of the process. Everything worked really well, and we managed to solve this challenge together. 

What is the most valuable lesson you've learned from your time here?

I'll sum it up with one sentence. “If it's important, you won't forget it”. 

Someone told me this during my first weeks at Funnel, and it stuck with me. I think it goes back to these backlogs of tasks that you think you have to write down. Basically, if you have added something into the backlog that you can’t remember, is it actually that important? 

How has working at Funnel shaped your perspective on work and life in general?

Well, some of the approaches to breaking down tasks or how to approach having lots of things to do, I have also applied at home. For example, if my wife is complaining that there are so many things to do, my approach is usually “Well, let's write it down. We'll do one thing at a time”.

One example is that we have a summer house, where we sometimes have small projects like renovating the guest house. It just feels overwhelming. At that time, we looked into what we needed to do first on Post-its and put them on the wall. As we completed the tasks, we moved the Post-its to another side of the wall. You can use this methodology for doing anything really, not just product development.

Can you tell us about something that you like at Funnel outside of your role?

So, we have these bands that we form for different Funnel occasions. We've got a few musicians here, and it started with us just sitting in one of the conference rooms and playing music during lunchtime once a week. 

When we had our first conference in France (Camp Funnel), someone said, “wouldn't it be fun to form a band for the conference?” So we did. Then, it sort of became a tradition for all of our events. 

At our latest Camp Funnel in Spain, we actually had three or four Funnel bands playing at our own live concert. Last year, we also performed at our summit and winter party here in Stockholm. It is something fun we do, because people here enjoy it. 

We also have the music quiz. This is an initiative I started at Funnel. The first one was before COVID and we did it with paper and pen. But then COVID hit, so we had to do it remotely. Everybody needed to be able to hear the same music, and we still wanted people to be able to communicate with each other and collaborate on answering the questions.

So, we made an app for it, and this is still used at our quiz nights today. It has been very appreciated. This is a great example of things you can do at Funnel, and we have an amazing office team that encourages these types of initiatives.  

What do you think is important if you want to join Funnel as a developer?

I think it is important to enjoy working in a team. Collaboration is very important here. We also seek people who listen and want to learn, as well as people with skills that we can learn from. Funnel is not a place for people with big egos. 

If you are interested in becoming a Funnel developer, you can read more about our tech department and view open jobs → here.