In the last 2 years, the pandemic has given rise to innovation as well in the digital space as much as it caused world-wide problems. Overnight, companies of varying sizes (startups to the conglomerates) switched to remote work, if their jobs don’t require them to be physically present in the office. This meant that companies had to up their game on collaboration to ensure that work was getting done smoothly. This meant ultra-visibility and pressure on IT networks, cloud-based collaboration tools like Zoom, Microsoft & Atlassian suite of tools, and many others. I would like to talk about MIRO. Since the past year and half, I have used this tool extensively and wondered where this was before!
It was founded in 2011 in Amsterdam and it took a pandemic for my company to discover this amazing tool for collaboration. As of 2022, there are 35 million users of MIRO – Insane, right!Â
My MIRO experience
I have been spending around 1 hour a day with MIRO over the last 1.5 years.
- Meetings/Agile ceremonies/brainstorming workshops – Using MIRO boards for workshops has helped me get better engagement from the audience. Representing facts in a diagram format has the audience more engaged than before. The old adage “A picture is worth a 1000 words” is so true.
- Common understanding between participants – Earlier even pre-pandemic, my team used to interact with teams from other locations. So, we used tools like MS powerpoint, visio etc. to communicate with each other. But with MIRO, we also get to whiteboard and collaborate with each other.
- Faster consensus between a working group – When you have common understanding between participants, it leads to better and faster decision making.Â
Product Learning with MIROÂ
- User base – They found their niche user base with users trying to collaborate remotely. They realized the gap in communication especially with non-colocated teams and saw the opportunity there. This shows the power of user interviews.Â
- Crowdsourcing templates – If you think about it,
Microsoft PowerPoint has had very basic features for several years. For
example, you can create diagrams with the limited tools. You have
slideshow and template features. You can collaborate with others on the
cloud. What MIRO did right was the ability to create very pertinent
templates and allowed users to create their templates. Harnessing the
power of their users made MIRO a very powerful product. I call it “PPT
on steroids”!
- From agile ceremonies, different types of workshops, brainstorming etc, you can find a template. They are useful to scrum masters, product managers, program managers, business analysts and so many other roles.Â
- Templates like “customer journey mapping”, “planning”, “retrospectives” etc. meant that it made it easier for pertinent users to use MIRO.
- This makes it lucrative for companies to buy their “full license” version because so many roles find it useful.
- Collaboration features – Ability to comment, zoom in and out, digital post-its were small but very effective features that my team uses on a daily basis. These drive your meetings and workshops to a faster consensus. As product managers, we need to understand the value a feature would bring to solve a user’s pain/gain. Large effort to build something doesn’t mean big gains or vice versa.
- Foundational capabilities to keep MIRO thriving –
35 million users as of 2022 means that MIRO users can be its own
country! As product managers, we need to strike a balance of being able
to churn out new features and also ensuring that the platform is
scalable. So they are playing to their strengths. –Â
- UI and low learning curve – They have introduced so many tools from shapes, templates, emojis etc that it is very easy to collaborate. The user design is so intuitive that it doesn’t need a user guide for users to learn MIRO. People have found it easy to build new things. For example, my status report used to be a confluence page before but now it is a MIRO slide.
- Performance of the app – Given a worldwide audience, the app should be available 24 X 7.Â
- Remove logistical barriers to drive innovation – With MIRO, many of the logistical barriers were removed (like not having common understanding, or not being able to share ideas effectively). When these barriers were removed, our team could focus on solving the real problems!!
Our mission is to empower teams to create the next big thing
Closing thoughts
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. A team that can collaborate efficiently will always have small wins along the way, which paves the way for bigger wins. We talk about the product trio (product manager, engineering manager and UX) working together in product discovery. We want our engineers to come up with efficient designs that meet our customer’s needs. Diagramming and being able to share your ideas is key to be able to achieve all this!
Learn more about MIRO – https://miro.com/online-whiteboard/