From a Brewing Degree to Funnel's Answer Desk

From fermentation to forecasting

Bruno Ferraz was studying brewing and process engineering — fermentation schedules, temperature tolerances, batch quality — when Funnel's Sven Hamberg gave a talk at Uppsala University in 2019. The company and its product made such an impression that Bruno joined. He spent a year in Data Operations, wrote his master's thesis, and on graduation rejoined Funnel in Sales Operations, the team that has since grown into Revenue Operations.

The jump from brewing to go-to-market systems reads as a turn, but both are process problems. Bruno started in process and automation, picked up programming while solving difficult problems, and has since moved into analytical work. What carried over from his first career is a comfort with starting from nothing: when a problem has no existing framework, you build one — the same instinct that drives a brewer adjusting a batch when fermentation drifts off schedule. His degree left behind a practical habit: treat every new question like a new batch, measure what's happening, and change the process until the outcome is right.

Insights, systems, process

Revenue Operations at Funnel runs on three functions: insights, systems, and process. Insights means understanding what the business is asking in its data; systems means getting answers to where teams can see them; process means building workflows so people act on what they now know.

The Customer Success team shows how the triad works in one problem. CS needs to understand what different customers want to focus on. Solving that means understanding the customer data (insights), pushing findings to where CS partners can see them (systems), and building a workflow that helps the partners act on those findings (process).

The mandate behind the team is blunt: help other teams do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. Because most problems pull in all three functions at once, the team cannot operate as a single-discipline unit. Every question lands somewhere inside the triangle, and usually in the middle of it.

Problems with no answer key

The defining feature of the work, Bruno says, is being confronted with problems no one in the team — or any other team — has solved before. The method is to start from scratch: talk to different people inside the organization, map the problem as it really exists, and learn whatever new skill solving it demands. "It never gets boring."

Funnel backs the learning habit with structure. Employees can sign up for external courses, and internal topic groups exist across the company for people to meet and discuss shared interests. Bruno and a colleague are currently working through time series forecasting — a branch of analytics that projects future values from historical patterns, used here to anticipate what customers will need next.

The pairing is characteristic: a problem shows up, nobody has the answer, so someone goes and learns the skill. By the time the next similar question arrives, the capability is already part of the team.

A microcosm of the whole company

The RevOps team is culturally diverse, and its members' prior careers vary widely. Alongside Bruno's brewing background sit people from Sales, Marketing, and Data Science. Bruno calls the team "a microcosm of Funnel as a whole."

What unifies them is not experience but motivation. Everyone shares an interest in helping other people, and in learning and growing both individually and as a team. That shared orientation is, Bruno argues, the starting point for collaboration. The team actively looks for people with unique perspectives — the kind who bring a different problem-solving toolkit into a room where the answer isn't known yet.

The effect shows in how the team works. When a problem arrives, the first move is to find whoever in the room has seen something similar, even if the industry context was completely different. A brewer and a data scientist don't describe the same problem the same way — which is exactly why both are in the room.

The team with answers

Bruno's proudest achievement is that RevOps has become the team that has answers. The team now gives meaningful input to business leaders, and its work directly shapes decisions made at Funnel. What started as an initiative from within the team itself has become a core part of its analytical and insights function.

Bruno says the comparison between 2019 and the present is inspiring. The depth of business understanding the team has built shows in the capabilities it now has. Where the team once responded to requests, it now anticipates them — and the shift from reaction to initiative came from the team's own work rather than from an organizational mandate. The trust took years to build and rests on a track record of answers that held up.

The result is that RevOps is treated as a trusted advisor to the business, not as a support function. That distinction is the one Bruno keeps returning to: the team's output feeds decisions, not just dashboards.

Only just getting started

Despite the progress, Bruno says it feels like the team is "only just getting started." As Funnel has grown, new functions have emerged — product analytics is the one he's most excited to work with. The potential to improve the customer experience is large, and improving the customer experience is how Funnel gets more successful. For RevOps, that means the team's mix of analysis, tooling, and workflow design continues to find new applications.