Podcast Summary
The Importance of Gaining Positive Points in Product Development: Every release either improves or damages your product. Tracking the impact of each release helps maintain focus and improve the product. Miro's approach includes bimonthly product demos and a culture of continuous improvement.
With every release that your competitor is making and every release that you are making, you are either gaining positive points or going negative. 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 worse. This framework of gaining or losing points drives an insane amount of clarity in terms of what you're doing and what the impact is going to be. That's the insight shared by Varun Parmar, CPO at Miro, during his interview with Lenny in his podcast. The conversation covered Miro's product culture, development process, competitive threats, bimonthly company-wide product demos, and more.
How Miro Cultivates Empathy and Teamwork for Better Product Development and Company Culture: Miro prioritizes empathy both for customers and within their teams, seeking insights and perspectives from diverse cultures and locations. By emphasizing teamwork and asking the right questions, they can make better decisions and provide better outcomes for their customers.
Miro, a global company with 12 different hubs worldwide, has a unique approach to product development and company culture that focuses on empathy and teamwork. With product management, designers, and engineers based in Europe and go-to-market teams worldwide, Miro practices empathy both for their customers and internally among their teams to gain insights and perspectives from different locations and cultures. The company also values teamwork and brings diverse perspectives to their problem-solving approach, ensuring the best outcomes for their customers. To maintain empathy and team collaboration, Miro emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions to understand the insights and perspectives that inform decision-making.
Miro's User-Centric Approach to Innovation and Asynchronous Collaboration: Miro prioritizes understanding users' needs through empathy and the Design Sprint framework, leading to the release of Miro Talktrack, which enhances collaboration. The company's focus on cross-functional collaboration enables teams to innovate efficiently.
Miro, an online collaborative whiteboarding platform, values assuming good intentions and practicing empathy to better understand their users' needs. They use the Design Sprint framework, a five-day initiative that quickly validates hypotheses, to develop new experiences and insights. They recently released Miro Talktrack, which allows asynchronous collaboration by recording audio and video on top of a Miro board. Instead of the traditional screen recording, Miro synchronized the movement of the board to allow users to add comments and reactions while watching the video. Miro continues to do well in a competitive space by empowering teams to innovate and focusing on cross-functional collaboration.
Miro's Team-Centric Approach to Collaboration and Innovation.: Miro's unique platform facilitates cross-functional team collaboration and innovation, with a focus on workshops and team rituals. Their hybrid approach, centered around personas, fuels their community-driven growth and success.
Miro's value proposition lies in its team-centric approach to solving problems, rather than catering to a specific persona. With a focus on cross-functional teams, Miro offers a platform that enables collaboration and innovation across industries and verticals. Its unique capabilities, such as facilitating workshops and team rituals, sets it apart from its competitors. The company also values its community, which fuels its growth and success. With over 1,800 employees and 450 product managers, Miro's product team is structured around persona-oriented foundations, with a hybrid approach that includes outcome and product area orientation.
Miro's Persona-Based Product Development Approach: Miro creates teams focused on solving problems for specific personas, but also has a cross-functional organization for different perspectives. They also have a formal process for big projects to ensure a comprehensive viewpoint.
Miro has a persona-based approach to product development, which involves creating sets of individuals focused on solving problems for key personas, such as IT admins, security personnel, or developers. This approach allows Miro to align people around solving problems and creating value for specific personas. However, to avoid pigeonholing themselves into this approach, Miro has a cross-functional product organization called AMPED, which includes analytics, marketing, product, engineering, and design. This allows for different perspectives and a more holistic perspective on the end-user experience. Additionally, Miro has a formal process for big projects that involves product reviews and ensures a much more comprehensive viewpoint.
Improving Product Development and Market Positioning through Best Practices and Competition Analysis: Involving product marketing and considering competition are crucial for a company's success. Democratizing best practices and prioritizing efficiency can drive growth while being aware of market disruptors.
Encapsulating enterprise requirements in a set of best practices and democratizing them across all feature teams can improve product development efficiency. Including product marketing in the leadership team can provide unique positioning and competitive differentiation insights that are valuable when thinking about a market with increasing competition. The success of a company is directly related to what the competition allows it to do, as seen in examples such as Microsoft entering a market and disrupting the growth of category leaders. Taking competition into consideration can accelerate or decelerate a company's growth, making it a critical variable to pay attention to.
Key Considerations for Building a Strong Product Strategy: When creating a product strategy, it's important to assess the competition's distribution, pricing, and packaging. Differentiation is crucial, and ongoing investment in product improvement is necessary to stay ahead in a constantly evolving market.
When building your product strategy, it's important to consider your competition's distribution outreach, pricing, and packaging. It's not enough to simply focus on the customer and ignore the competition, as products either get better or worse and the market is constantly comparing them. To stand out, make sure your positioning is clear and your differentiator is well-defined. Additionally, always invest in making your product better, as products never remain the same and the market is constantly evolving. Ultimately, every decision you make should ladder up to the eventual market consolidation that will happen.
The Importance of Speed in Product Development: In competitive markets, being the first to hit the brick wall is key to success. Moving quickly to innovate and uncover insights is essential for product managers, who must create urgency and attract driven team members.
In product development, it is important to understand the competition and strive to be the first one to hit the brick wall, as speed is a major determinant of success. Being innovation-centric and building experiences that don't exist elsewhere requires moving quickly to uncover insights and discover new paths. While some may advocate for moving slowly to go fast, in competitive markets, speed is crucial to stay ahead of the pack. As a product manager, creating urgency and constantly driving the team to move faster is essential, and it attracts personalities driven by challenges and a desire to prove themselves by solving those challenges.
Overcoming Product Development Roadblocks Through Prompt Communication and Building Organizational Competency: To overcome roadblocks in product development, product leads should communicate challenges to the product management team, who can resolve them quickly. Building an organizational competency in figuring out what to build requires identifying efficient task performers and instilling a customer-value focused culture.
The biggest challenge in product development is roadblocks that can manifest as technical, organizational, or priority challenges. The key to overcoming these is for product leads to instantly raise their hand and call out the challenges they face, and for the product management team to quickly resolve them. Resolving these challenges leads to a virtuous cycle where wins are celebrated, leading to increased courage to tackle more challenges. To build an organizational competency in figuring out what to build, it is important to identify people who can do certain tasks more efficiently, figure out which parts of the core base to build, who should be part of the team, and how to define the scope and success of the project. The culture of the organization must be focused on delivering customer value faster with high quality, and this should be ingrained in every aspect of the product development process, including performance and reward systems.
Linear's Monthly Product Review for High-Quality Design: Linear's binary process categorizes high vs not high quality products, enabling the team to identify and measure key attributes for better product development. This approach simplifies the process and improves operationalization.
The design leadership team at Linear conducts a monthly review of everything that has been shipped and categorizes the product into high or not high quality. This process helps the team to calibrate and align around what they mean by high quality. It enables them to identify the attributes and how to measure them to enable better product development. By classifying products, the team can easily understand what great products look like and work towards building more of them. This approach uses a binary function that takes into account the attributes of high-quality products instead of long documents, making it easier to operationalize.
A Culture of Quality and Velocity in Product Development: By implementing a process like P-strat and tracking cycle times for small, medium, and large projects, teams can improve productivity and promote continuous growth, resulting in faster delivery of quality products.
The company discussed in this section has a unique approach to building quality and measuring velocity in product development. They focus on building a culture of quality and continuously improving through tracking cycle times from idea to delivery of products. They have a process called P-strat, P0, P1, and P2 that helps them formulate ideas, specifications, and the final product. They track the time it takes for each step and classify each project as small, medium, or large. They make this information available and encourage team members to benchmark their productivity against their standards. This approach promotes a culture of continuous growth and improvement, leading to faster delivery of products.
Miro's Flexible Roadmap and Strategy Approach for Product Development: Miro's rolling roadmap and annual strategy white paper allow for flexibility and collaboration within product teams, while agile coaches encourage best practices. Miro Connect provides networking opportunities for teams every two weeks.
Miro, a product development platform, has a rolling six-month roadmap with a 80% position level for the first three months and a 50% position level for the following three months. This allows for product teams to be flexible based on customer requests, competitive moves, and technology breakthroughs. Miro also publishes an annual strategy white paper that outlines key bets, expected outcomes, and overall business outcomes. Teams use this white paper to build their roadmaps and are encouraged to embrace best practices with the help of agile coaches. Additionally, Miro Connect is a unique ritual that happens every other Friday where teams present their work and network with colleagues.
The Importance of Collaboration and Goal-Setting in Product Management: Insights from Miro's VP of Product: Collaboration and knowledge sharing are crucial for success in product management. Setting clear and achievable goals and using efficient workflows can also improve productivity. Using software, such as Miro's, can help streamline processes and benefit the wider product management community.
In a podcast interview with Varun Parmar, VP of Product at Miro, he shares a success story where an engineer at a conference was able to save the company months of work by offering to help with a coding issue. This moment highlights the importance of creating opportunities for collaboration and sharing knowledge within a company. Parmar also discusses Miro's use of six-month rolling roadmaps and quarterly OKRs (objective and key results) to set and achieve goals as a company. Additionally, Miro uses its own software to manage their product reviews and maintain an efficient workflow. Sharing their templates for these processes can be valuable for others in the product management community.
The Versatility of Miro for Team Collaboration: Miro is a flexible tool used for various purposes such as project management, designs, workshops and dashboards. Teams use other tools like Jira, Confluence and Google Docs to complement Miro's features.
Miro is a versatile tool used by teams at Miro for a variety of purposes including project management, design, user feedback, brainstorming, meetings, presentations, and dashboarding. For project management, Jira is used to handle tickets and Confluence is used to record specs. Google Docs and Coda are also utilized for tracking KRs effectively. Insights from user experience interviews are captured on Miro boards, which become a team hub for a particular project. Miro is also used to facilitate meetings and workshops, and presentations using Showtime, which allows for interactive sharing and commenting. Recently, teams have started to move synchronous meetings into asynchro view using Miro Talktrack feature, and Miro boards are used for dashboarding to act as a single source of truth for multiple use cases. However, there is still no universal solution for road-mapping.
How Miro Uses Talktracks to Empower Their Field Organization: Miro utilizes a flexible approach to enable their teams, balancing innovation and maintenance work based on their resources. Their allocation strategy follows a 70/20/10 framework across three horizons.
Miro uses Talktracks to enable their field organization with their entire roadmap published as a Miro board for enablement purposes. Each team can choose their own tools allowing for flexibility within the organization. Balancing innovation and maintenance work depends on the state of the team and their allocated resources. Varun Parmar suggests that innovation versus maintenance work varies on a spectrum of anywhere from 60 to 80%, with 20 to 40% of available capacity getting allocated to architectural initiatives such as infrastructure, maintenance, and ensuring scalability. The framework for allocating resources is 70/20/10 across horizon one, two, and three, respectively.
Miro's People-Centered Philosophy for Successful Product Development: To achieve success in product development, Miro's team wears two hats - product leader and stream leader. Each must focus on accountability, improvement, and delivering value to customers, while always prioritizing the company's best interests.
Varun Parmar, Miro's product leader, believes that successful product development requires a people-centered philosophy. Miro's product leadership team is responsible for driving accountability and improvement within the organization. Specifically, members are expected to wear two hats: that of a product leader and that of a stream leader. Stream leaders are responsible for delivering value to customers and should focus on driving improvement every day. Product leaders, on the other hand, need to hold themselves and other leaders accountable for doing the right things for the company. Feedback and observations are shared constructively from an empathetic perspective, always with the goal of doing what is best for the business.
COO of Miro on Building Trust Through Vulnerability and User-First Approach: Being open to feedback and prioritizing user needs can help build trust and accelerate growth for a product or company.
Varun Parmar, the COO of Miro, shared his experience of receiving direct feedback openly during leadership team offsites. He believes that by showing his vulnerabilities and areas of improvement, he builds trust among his team members. When asked about the feedback he received, Varun highlighted that finding time to communicate with him was a challenge, and he's working towards improving his responsiveness. Lenny, the interviewer, shifted the conversation towards Miro's growth strategy, and Varun explained that their user-first approach helped them reach out to relevant communities and invite early adopters to start using the product. The company focused on building vital loops that reduced barriers and accelerated growth, resulting in the acquisition of the first thousand users. The collaborative nature of the product further helped in creating a loop of growth where users share Miro with others.
Miro's Product-Led Growth Strategy and the Importance of Handoff Process: Miro's growth is driven by product-led channels and specific use cases like workshopping. Their enterprise segment enhances their flywheel strategy. The self-serve to sales handoff process is well-architected and essential for their growth success.
Miro's unique growth strategy is centered around product-led growth and specific use cases, such as workshopping, where inviting multiple people is a common occurrence. The Miroverse, with its popular templates like the FIFA World Cup template, serves as an additional acquisition channel that draws in more users. While product channels are the primary contributor to growth, the enterprise segment has become a key part of the flywheel that accelerates growth. Miro's sales team works closely with their product team, with the product marketing team bridging the gap between the two. The handoff process from self-serve to sales is well-architected and key to their growth.
Miro Unveils New Platform Enhancements, Including Miro AI and Agile Ritual Improvements: Miro's new features prioritize team collaboration and productivity by incorporating AI technology and tools for facilitating agile practices. Additionally, the Chief Product Officer recommends insightful books and values problem-solving skills in hiring.
Miro has announced exciting new features, including Miro AI and deep enhancements for team rituals and agile practices. Miro AI harnesses generative AI and large language models, and the new enhancements allow for private feedback during retrospectives and program increment planning. The platform also offers a plethora of apps and capabilities for conducting team rituals, automating tasks, and streamlining asynchronous and synchronous communication. Additionally, Varun Parmar, Chief Product Officer at Miro, recommends books like Satya Nadella's Hit Refresh and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Parmar also asks a math problem during interviews to quickly figure out people's problem-solving skills.
Insights from Miro's Senior Director of Product Management on Clear Communication and Feedback for Successful Product Development: Clear communication and feedback are critical for successful product development. Miro's simple motto of "great customer value faster with high quality" drives positive outcomes. Miroverse provides templates for interesting uses and users can reach out to Parmar on LinkedIn with suggestions.
Varun Parmar, the Senior Director of Product Management at Miro, talks about how simple concepts can rally organizations and lead to positive outcomes, like their motto of "great customer value faster with high quality" which is part of their evaluation rubric. He also encourages Miro users to contribute their interesting uses of the platform as templates on Miroverse and to reach out to him directly on LinkedIn if they have any suggestions on how to improve the product or expand its platform. Parmar's insights highlight the importance of clear communication and feedback for successful product development.
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