Sofia has been working in the tech industry for many years. She started as a developer and soon discovered her passion for leadership. In this blog post, Sofia will share her insights on being a leader in a growing SaaS company, specifically focusing on our Engineering department.

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

My name is Sofia Cirverius, my role is VP of Engineering and I have been at Funnel since October 2022. Before coming to Funnel, I had been a leader for many years, mainly in the gaming industry. Today, I am responsible for ensuring that our development organization is set up for success on both strategic and operational levels. This includes communicating priorities and information to the teams, hiring and enabling our teams, as well as managing and supporting our Engineering Managers.

I work closely with the CTO, Engineering Managers, and our Product and Design peers to enable our teams to be successful and deliver the right outcomes in the right way. That means translating our company strategy to a product strategy for our teams to deliver on as well as figuring out what it means for our technical strategy and what tech investments we need to do.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the teams and stakeholders in other parts of the organization to figure out what they need and how we can succeed together. 

Sounds fun, who are you outside of work?

When I’m not working, I read a lot, mostly about motivation and neuroscience. I am particularly interested in how our brains work and how we can communicate and collaborate better. I’m also an avid gamer and I have three cats, a husband and two kids. 

Sofia, can you tell us a little bit about the product development department?

The product development organization consists of engineering, product, and design. At the moment, we are around 110 people. 

We work in cross-functional teams and strongly emphasize team collaboration. Our teams have clear ownership and make their own decisions and priorities. We all take responsibility for our part of the product and tech – you build it, you run it, you maintain it. We work in small iterations and deploy to production several times a day. Our developers are heavily involved in discovering our customer’s needs and how they use Funnel to make sure that we build the right things. We have a modern tech stack that mainly consists of Python, TypeScript and React, with two platform teams working in Rust. Everything is built on a microservice architecture in AWS. 

Some of our teams work on the data-in part of our product – integrating with all the different platforms we support, to get our customers' data into Funnel. Some teams focus on our app, giving our customers an overview of and the possibility to handle their data, workspaces and subscriptions. Other teams focus on making it easy for our customers to explore and organize their data, including developing our new dashboards and enabling data exports to other platforms.

 All teams collaborate closely with each other in our amazing team rooms in our office in central Stockholm. 

What are the most important aspects of being a leader in our product development department at Funnel?

We have some great people and teams in our product development organization. We have very high expectations of our teams and developers, who take on a lot of responsibility. 

Our leaders need to be exemplary listeners, amazing communicators and focus on supporting and enabling our people and teams to do their best work. We are very transparent and aim for a very open and honest culture where everyone can collaborate effectively. It’s also very important to want to learn a lot of new things and be comfortable with constant change.

What is the focus on moving forward?

We are working on a lot of fun stuff, for example making life easier for our large customers with complex setups. We are also taking the next steps in our data model and how we want our customers to be able to handle more complex data modeling and transformation. 

We are currently growing a few of our teams so finding the right people is also a big focus – we have high expectations of everyone here, so we need to find skilled people who enjoy having a lot of autonomy, responsibility and love to collaborate closely with their colleagues and learn new things. 

Interested in working in our development department? We are currently hiring developers!