An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)
Lenny interviews Varun Parmer, CPO at Miro, about Miro's product culture, development process, competitive strategy, and growth. They discuss Miro's unique cross-cultural approach, product philosophies, and specific rituals like Miro Connect and quality reviews.
Deep Dive Analysis
19 Topic Outline
Varun Parmar's Background and Miro's Product Culture
Operating as a Global, Cross-Cultural Product Team
Empathy in Product Development: Miro Talktrack Example
Miro's Differentiation in a Competitive Market
The AMPED Cross-Functional Team Structure
Importance of Product Marketing in AMPED Structure
Competition's Impact on Growth and Product Strategy
The Importance of Speed and Unblocking Teams
Ensuring High Product Quality at Miro
Miro's Product Development Process and Roadmapping
Miro's OKR Cadence and Tracking
Miro's Product Stack and Tooling
Balancing Innovation, Maintenance, and Big Bets
Product Leadership: Accountability and Improvement
How Miro Acquired Its First 1,000 Users
Additional Growth Levers: Workshops and Miroverse
Integrating Product-Led Growth with a Sales Motion
Upcoming Features: Miro AI and Agile Practices
Lightning Round
5 Key Concepts
AMPED Structure
AMPED stands for Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, and Design. It represents Miro's cross-functional product organization, where all these functions are deeply embedded within each product stream to bring diverse perspectives and reduce silos.
Products Never Remain Same
This philosophy states that with every release, a product either gets better or worse from the customer's perspective. It emphasizes that in a competitive market, every product change is a 'chess move' against competitors, driving clarity and focus on investment decisions.
First to Hit the Brick Wall
This concept advocates for speed in innovation, especially in competitive markets. The goal is to discover insights faster than competitors, allowing for quicker pivots and maintaining a lead in building new experiences.
70-20-10 Rule (Three Horizons)
This resource allocation framework divides investments across three horizons: 70% for Horizon 1 (current business, delivering immediate value), 20% for Horizon 2 (adjacent opportunities, 12-36 months out), and 10% for Horizon 3 (next-generation, 3-5 years out).
Product Leader Duality
Product leaders at Miro operate with two personas: as a member of the overall product leadership team, their primary goal is to drive accountability across the team; as a stream leader, their primary goal is to drive improvement within their specific team and persona focus.
7 Questions Answered
Miro's product organization is primarily based in Europe, while go-to-market teams are worldwide. This setup necessitates practicing empathy internally to understand diverse perspectives and fostering teamwork to break down functional silos.
Miro differentiates itself by focusing on enabling cross-functional teams rather than single personas, offering broad applicability across various industries beyond digital experiences, providing unique advanced facilitation capabilities, and fostering a strong community.
Miro's design leadership team conducts a monthly triage of all shipped features, classifying them as 'high quality' or 'not high quality' with specific examples. This process helps calibrate and align the organization on what constitutes quality, building an internal muscle for design excellence.
Miro uses a rolling six-month roadmap, updated quarterly, with 80% precision for the first three months and 50% for the next three. This is guided by an annual strategy white paper, with teams operating autonomously within these guidelines and utilizing agile coaches for best practices.
Miro practices OKRs starting at the company level, then broken down for the AMP (Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Design) organization. They've evolved to six-month KRs for planning, with monthly traction reviews to minimize overhead and allow teams sufficient time for execution.
Miro focused on a user-first approach, reaching out to relevant communities, leveraging content marketing and SEO, and building strong viral loops within the product. They also evolved their model from time-limited trials to a freemium model to accelerate growth.
Miro benefits significantly from its use as a workshopping tool, where one user invites many others, leading to product exposure and sign-ups. The Miroverse, a platform for community-contributed templates, also acts as a powerful acquisition channel, sometimes even appearing in Google search results for specific use cases.
26 Actionable Insights
1. Products Never Remain Same
Adopt the philosophy that products are always getting better or worse, never staying the same, from the customer’s perspective. This framework drives clarity in decision-making, as every release is a competitive move that either gains or loses points.
2. Be First to Hit Wall
Aim to be the first to hit the ‘brick wall’ in new initiatives, especially in competitive markets, to accelerate learning faster than anyone else. This speed in uncovering insights allows your team to pivot and stay ahead of the pack.
3. Unblock Your Team Quickly
Empower product leads to instantly raise their hand when encountering roadblocks, and make it the leadership team’s job to quickly resolve these issues. This approach fosters a virtuous cycle of wins, building organizational competency and accelerating delivery.
4. Understand Your Competition Deeply
Recognize that a company’s success is directly related to what the competition allows it to do, considering their solution quality, distribution, and pricing. This perspective informs product strategy, ensuring clear differentiation and positioning in the market.
5. Adopt ‘Deliver Customer Value Faster’
Implement a core product motto like ‘deliver customer value faster with high quality’ as the foundation for all product activities, including performance reviews and measurements. This simple, clear statement helps rally the entire organization around common goals.
6. Implement AMPED Org Structure
Structure your product organization as ‘AMPED’ (Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Design) to foster cross-functional collaboration and break down silos. Deeply embed product marketing into each stream to bring diverse perspectives on positioning and competitive differentiation.
7. Lead with Accountability and Improvement
Product leaders should embrace two personas: driving accountability within the leadership team and fostering continuous improvement within their own stream. This duality ensures both strategic alignment and operational excellence.
8. Practice Empathetic, Direct Feedback
Foster a culture of open and constructive feedback, focusing on what is important for the business without shying away from difficult conversations. Frame feedback as questions to understand perspectives, promoting accountability in an empathetic way.
9. Conduct Binary Design Quality Reviews
Regularly (e.g., monthly) have design leadership triage all shipped features into ‘high quality’ or ’not high quality’ buckets. This classification system helps calibrate and align the organization on what constitutes high quality by providing concrete examples.
10. Measure Product Delivery Cycle Times
Track and make visible the cycle times for product delivery, from insight generation to metric movement, across all product teams. This allows teams to benchmark themselves, identify areas for improvement, and share best practices to move faster.
11. Host Bi-Monthly Miro Connect Demos
Institute a bi-monthly, informal demo ritual (like Miro Connect) where product teams showcase their work in a trade-show-like environment. This encourages cross-pollination of ideas, unexpected collaboration, and can lead to significant time savings, as seen with an engineer saving months of work.
12. Utilize Design Sprint Frameworks
Employ the five-day design sprint framework for zero-to-one initiatives to quickly validate hypotheses and gather user insights. This rapid prototyping and validation process helps evolve concepts based on early user feedback, as demonstrated by the development of Miro TalkTrack.
13. Rolling 6-Month Roadmap with Precision
Maintain a rolling six-month roadmap updated quarterly, with an 80% precision target for the first three months and 50% for the subsequent three months. This approach balances customer expectations (especially for enterprise) with the agility needed to pivot based on market changes or technological breakthroughs.
14. Allocate Resources with 70/20/10 Rule
Allocate resources using a 70/20/10 framework: 70% for Horizon 1 (core business), 20% for Horizon 2 (adjacent initiatives 12-36 months out), and 10% for Horizon 3 (long-term, next-generation bets 3-5 years out). This ensures a balanced investment across short-term delivery and long-term innovation.
15. Adopt 6-Month OKR Cadence
Shift from quarterly to six-month OKRs for the AMP organization to provide teams with sufficient time for execution and reduce planning overhead. While targets are set bi-annually, track traction monthly to maintain focus and make timely adjustments.
16. Publish Annual Product Strategy
Create and internally publish an annual product strategy white paper that clearly articulates key bets, their rationale, expected outcomes, and how they align with overall business objectives and OKRs. This artifact provides a foundational backdrop for all subsequent roadmap planning.
17. Cultivate Empathy for Distributed Teams
Actively practice internal empathy within a global, distributed company, especially between product and go-to-market teams in different geographies. This ensures product decisions are informed by diverse perspectives and the insights gathered by various internal stakeholders.
18. Ask Insight-Driven Questions
When reviewing product decisions or discussing priorities, ask questions that delve into the insights that informed those choices. This helps understand the underlying rationale, whether from internal interactions, external feedback, market trends, or competitive analysis.
19. Clarify Differentiators and Positioning
In a competitive market, be very clear about your unique differentiators and continuously invest in them, ensuring your positioning explicitly highlights why your product is different, not just a better version. This helps customers understand your unique value proposition and how you coexist within their tech ecosystem.
20. Use Miro as Project Content Hub
Leverage Miro boards as a central content and team hub for entire projects, from capturing user interview insights and brainstorming to facilitating meetings and workshops. This consolidates information and streamlines collaborative workflows across the product development journey.
21. Transition to Async Product Reviews
Move synchronous meetings to asynchronous reviews using tools like TalkTrack, where teams record audio/video explanations on a Miro board for pre-meeting consumption. This allows synchronous sessions to be more deliberate and focused on driving outcomes or achieving consensus by addressing comments made during async review.
22. Embed Live Dashboards in Miro
Integrate live dashboards from BI tools (e.g., Google Looker) directly into Miro boards instead of static screenshots. This ensures data visualizations are always updated, providing teams with real-time insights for decision-making without manual updates.
23. Enable Sales with TalkTracks
Utilize TalkTracks to enable your entire field organization by publishing the product roadmap as an interactive Miro board with recorded explanations from leaders. This allows sales teams to self-serve and understand product updates and vision for customer conversations.
24. Align PLG and Enterprise Sales
Deliberately bridge product-led growth (PLG) and enterprise sales organizations, viewing them as two channels for serving customers rather than competitors. Use product marketing to bridge insights from both sides and architect clear handoff processes for account maturity and expansion.
25. Practice Open Leadership Vulnerability
As a leader, openly solicit and receive direct feedback from your team, even in group settings, to demonstrate vulnerability and build trust. This practice helps identify blind spots and fosters an environment where team members feel safe to share their perspectives.
26. Leverage Miroverse for Growth
Encourage community contributions to Miroverse (a template library) as a key accelerant for user acquisition and organic growth. Popular templates can gain significant visibility, driving new users to the platform through search engine indexing and word-of-mouth.
5 Key Quotes
Every single day, every single time somebody is pushing your code to production and you're releasing a feature or an enhancement, you are making the product better or you're making the product worse, but the products never remain the same.
Varun Parmar
The success of a company is a direct relation of what the competition allows you to do.
Varun Parmar
What you want to do is that you want to be the first one to hit the brick wall.
Varun Parmar
Velocity is more like the game of golf, where you're just playing against yourself.
Varun Parmar
Your number one goal here is to be a product leader and, and, and, and accountability is what you have to write.
Varun Parmar
3 Protocols
Design Sprint Framework
Varun Parmar- Assemble a small set of people.
- Quickly mock up a concept in a short five-day window.
- Convert the concept into some sort of a prototype.
- Go out and get some validation from users.
Miro's Product Development Process
Varun Parmar- P-Strat: Define the product strategy (initial concept/idea pitch).
- P0: Define the problem (spec/one-pager).
- P1: Define the solution (actual product being built).
- P2: Ship the solution and measure if original metrics were hit.
Monthly Design Quality Review
Varun Parmar- A designated design leader ensures this happens regularly.
- The design leadership team reviews everything that was shipped in the past month.
- Features are classified as 'high quality' or 'not high quality' (binary function).
- Reasons for classification (e.g., ABCDE) are documented and made available to other designers.
- This process helps calibrate and align the design leadership and broader team on what constitutes high quality.