Martin Falkus was one of the very first engineers involved in the creation of Call2Teams. His expertise, passion, and dedication have been instrumental in its success. Let’s dive into Martin’s journey, his thoughts on innovation, and his role in shaping the future of business communication!
I joined Qunifi before Call2Teams began back in 2017. I already knew Richard Carver (one of the Qunifi founders) and was keen to try my hand working in a startup. Richard and Mark Herbert (another Qunifi founder) are a power-duo when it comes to building tech and businesses, so even before Call2Teams came into existence it seemed like they were on the path to building genuinely useful products.
Kicking off the C2T engineering work was special. Building something from scratch in a small team and then starting to see customers use the product to make calls and get value from it is a great feeling.
On a high level, my role has moved from full-time engineer cranking out lines of code to gradually taking a more hands-off approach helping to scale both the team and technical parts of the product.
I expect I’ve followed a similar path to other engineers that join early in the creation of a new product. Although everyone in a startup ends up having somewhat fluid roles. You have to adjust to what needs to be done.
When we initially hit 1000 users the four team members at that time (Richard, Mark, Rus and me) went out for a meal at the Indian restaurant near the office to celebrate. It felt like a lot of users at the time, although little did we know the rate of growth was only just starting!
Users expect and require pretty much ‘always on’ capability for any telephony products. We have to make sure the product is reliable and usable even when components fail, and do all that in a way that doesn’t stifle innovation for new features.
Innovation is deeply embedded in the DNA of the C2T product. The team that builds and runs the product today has always kept the forward thinking perspective that was part of the original team.
Our customer base feeds in to that as well. We handle telephony for accounts that range from 1 to tens of thousands. That gives a wide range of customer exposure.
Beyond encouraging a culture of innovation and curiosity, we also take some more practical steps. Teams will get together ad-hoc in person and block out a day to do a deep dive on a possible feature or technical problem. The core of the first C2T Go product PoC came out of one of these sessions.
First of all, real user feedback is the most important input to building a product. The whole reason the product exists is to help users. Remembering that is a key to ensure the product doesn’t lose its way.
The journey changes a bit as the product becomes more mature – you have to balance changes, ensuring that solving a problem for 1% of users doesn’t cause the other 99% to have a degraded experience. We have some good mechanisms around that (e.g. our PBX templating system and feature flag setup). This allows us to provide some of those high-value edge cases and keep the product simple for everyone else.
It’s rewarding to reflect on the real-world usage of the product. Knowing every day there are millions of phone calls going through the platform in over 130 countries. That’s something special.
Lots of moments. Take some of the big items, like C2T Go, or the handling of configuration back and forth between Microsoft (sync/provisioning), or Teams True Transfer, these are all challenging technical problems where team members often each provide a little bit of innovation until we get to that first working PoC breakthrough.
Getting a new feature or update deployed where we directly hear back from customers about the positive impact. There is no point working on features that no one needs.
Not so much a hack but I put in effort to continually remove distractions. That could be making use of Outlook’s ‘Focus Time’, or even setting up your desk (and computer desktop) to be clear of just what you need to get the job done.
I had a good long think about this question. I’m more effective at solving problems in the morning, but I expect that’s because the inspiration for a fix has happened in the evenings when I’m thinking about other things.
We are still at the early stages for some of our newest features, notably Zero Touch Provisioning and Call2Teams Go. I’m looking forward to seeing the continued growth of those, ultimately leading to more customers enjoying easy to deploy and easy to use calling on Microsoft Teams.
Innovative.
The origin story of Call2Teams is another product we built called Call2Skype. From those early days right through to now, innovation has been one of the constants.
Lots of companies probably claim to be innovative. I really mean it in this context. The team that’s worked on Call2Teams really has lived it, working hard to deeply understand the customer problem and then equally hard to dig deep into the available tech to build a solution.
Numerous times, we've been told, 'That can't be done,' only to prove otherwise shortly after.
Having reliable and fast two-way presence that works back and forth between a large number of PBXs and Microsoft Teams would be a really interesting feature. We have built working PoCs in this area over 5 years ago, but there are lots of edge cases to solve to ensure the feature really does work well for everyone at scale, not least the limitations that Microsoft APIs in this area enforce.
I play drums in an 11-piece funk band.
Anywhere with a view and a good set of walks right on the doorstep.
Stay curious. For those wondering why, have a read of Paul Graham’s article from a couple of years back ‘How To Do Great Work’.
Martin’s journey with Call2Teams is a testament to the power of innovation, perseverance, and teamwork. From being the first engineer to helping scale both the product and the team, his contributions have been instrumental in shaping the platform into what it is today. His passion for problem-solving, commitment to customer-centric innovation and ability to embrace new challenges continue to drive Call2Teams forward in a competitive industry.
As the platform evolves, Martin remains excited about the future, new features, enhanced user experiences and the continuous push for innovation. His story is a reminder that groundbreaking technology is built by visionary individuals who are not afraid to challenge the impossible.
Stay tuned as we continue to share more behind-the-scenes stories from the brilliant minds at Dstny!