The Connect team at Funnel is the essential link between customer marketing data and the Funnel platform, managing smooth, efficient integration of marketing platforms. In this post, Emma (Product Manager) and Tommy (Developer) from the Connect team share how they operate, tackle challenges, and shape Funnel’s product and customer experience.
The Connect team at Funnel
The Connect team’s responsibilities are crucial to the Funnel experience. This team is at the heart of data connectivity, linking every customer’s marketing data from external sources such as Meta and Google, to Funnel’s platform. “If you’re a Funnel customer, you’re 100% interacting with the Connect team’s work,” Tommy explains. Connect manages most things around setting up connections to different marketing platforms to maintaining these connections, handling platform credentials, and building tools for other engineering teams.
The scope of their role can often feel broad. Emma says: “Every team at Funnel owns its piece of the product, and our part is connecting customer data. Our team is involved in both the back-end connectivity and end user experience, ensuring the data appears reliably within the platform.”
The Connect team, like all dev teams at Funnel, operates with a six-week alignment model. Each period begins with an alignment session, where all the dev teams set objectives for the upcoming six weeks. This longer cycle allows them to take on complex projects, dive deeply into new features, and maintain existing ones while providing room for mid-cycle adjustments as needed.
The Connect team uses a physical board with post-its to track their progress (and they insist it’s not a kanban board, just a very similar-looking, totally unique, non-kanban system!). This visual organization helps them focus on the most immediate tasks. “Our team comprises four developers (Tommy, Patrik, Hampus and Johannes), a product manager (Emma), and a designer (Unni)”, Emma notes. “Each person brings a different skill set, so our workflows adapt depending on the day and initiative priorities. Some days, we’re “all hands on deck” and work as a big group, other days, we split up and tackle different areas.”
In addition, the team often collaborates with other commercial teams such Sales, Customer Success and Support. “There’s a lot of give and take with other teams, and we adjust our priorities when something urgent arises,” Tommy says. “It’s not unusual for us to pause our scheduled tasks to support a high-impact customer request or assist another team. How much time we spend on supporting is very different from week to week but I would say we spend about 70% on developing new features and 30% of our time on support issues”.
The team is responsible for a wide array of functionalities, including enabling other teams to establish connections to marketing platforms, Credential management, and the infrastructure that supports other teams within Funnel. A major recent change was taking over the “Data Source representation” part of the platform from another team. “The decision to bring this responsibility into our team was driven by a need for continuity in the user experience,” Emma explains. “We found that when multiple teams handle different pieces of the connect process, there’s potential for inconsistencies. By centralizing it within Connect, we can ensure smoother, more unified interactions for our customers.”
One of the core challenges for the Connect team is striking a balance between building new features and maintaining existing ones. As Tommy points out, “While support and bug fixes are part of our work, they don’t dominate. Our primary focus is developing new features that align with Funnel’s growth strategy and our customers’ needs.” However, this focus on new features doesn’t mean they ignore customer issues when they arise. The team is flexible, able to pivot quickly if a significant problem or request surfaces.
Funnel’s company-wide strategy flows down into product and team-level goals, with each team focusing on specific metrics that align with high-level objectives. The Connect team applies an “upside-down pyramid” approach to translate these broad goals into actionable steps: at the top are the key metrics Funnel aims to impact, which then guide the team’s focus as they refine these into smaller, prioritized initiatives. This structured method allows the team to allocate resources effectively, balancing strategic alignment with flexibility to address immediate needs and directly supporting Funnel’s overarching growth.
A visualization on how the Connect team can address a problem
The Connect team has a great deal of autonomy in deciding how to address them. The process is research-driven, involving competitor analysis, user feedback, and trend assessments. “Our PM and designer typically spearhead the research phase, presenting findings to the development team to determine the best way forward,” Tommy says. This collaborative approach allows the team to tailor their initiatives to both the company’s strategic goals and the realities of customer needs.
Emma highlights the benefits of this structure: “We have support from product leaders and tech leadership, but there’s still a lot of trust placed in us. We make decisions based on our expertise and insights, which is incredibly empowering.”
As Funnel continues to grow, the Connect team faces the dual challenge of supporting larger enterprise clients while maintaining a positive experience for smaller customers. A recent focus has been scaling the platform to accommodate enterprise customers with thousands of data sources, allowing them to handle complex tasks like bulk actions with ease.
“Our big goal right now is making sure that our users feel in control of large volumes of data sources and that necessary actions can be performed quickly and in an iterative fashion ,” Emma says. “We’re working on features that will allow users to perform bulk updates across thousands of Data Sources, which is essential for agencies and large businesses managing vast amounts of data.” At the same time, the team hasn’t lost sight of smaller customers. “Last year, we put a lot of effort into simplifying the platform for new users,” Emma explains. “We made adjustments to prioritize the essential features, making the product more accessible to small businesses and new users.”
One of the Connect team’s recent projects is to build an MCC level connector for Google Ads. An MCC in Google Ads centralizes management when it comes to handling multiple accounts in the platform. At Funnel we’ll likely call it AutoConnect. It’s a result of how the Connect team develops features driven by customer requests for a more streamlined workflow and better user experience for the clients.
“When the idea for MCC integration first came up, everyone had a slightly different vision for what it meant,” a team member says. “We reached out to customers to understand the problem more deeply, and we found that the real issue was the time and effort it took to manually, keep track of and continuously connect new ad accounts.”
The team worked collaboratively to develop AutoConnect, a feature that automatically syncs ad accounts with Funnel’s platform. It’s designed to reduce manual steps, ensuring that new Data sources are seamlessly integrated as they’re added. “This project shows the power of customer input. By listening to what customers truly needed, we were able to develop a solution that significantly improves their experience,” Tommy reflects.
Funnel’s Connect team fuels each customer’s Funnel journey. By continuously enhancing features and refining integrations, they empower marketers to navigate their marketing data with clarity and precision, ensuring that every decision is backed by insight.