An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)

Apr 20, 2023 1h 25m 26 insights Episode Page ↗
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.
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.