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

26:17And that's just like a direct example. And I think I've seen that multiple times first at Adobe where I was part of the document cloud business clearly saw that, you know, at box as well. And I think like you can, in general, like sort of look at every single category and you can say, you know, there was a category leader and they were growing at a certain clip or a certain pace. And all of a sudden, they were a bunch of entrants that get in and what happens to your growth rate. And it's all dependent on how strong is the competitor in terms of providing a good and absolute solution. That's one.

26:47And the second is how strong is the competition in terms of their distribution outreach. And then the third thing is how strong is the competition in terms of the pricing and packaging. And really like this discussion, especially because often the advice is, don't worry about the competition, just focus on the customer, it's gonna be fine. Which you're saying is that's not right and I agree. What do you do with that in mind? How does that impact the way you build product or strategy? Is there some you could share that maybe tactically someone can leverage in to have their approaching their product strategy?

27:18It depends on like who the competition is and what is their advantage here. And you know, we talked about one specific competitor and I have a lot of respect for them. By the way, and I learn a lot from them every single day in terms of how they make bets and how they enter markets and stuff. At some point, I'm gonna write a book on them. I feel we'll have to come back to talk about that. That's right. And I think like it sort of comes down to, you know, how do you think about your unique place, you know, relative to all of these players? And in your customer's mind, are they able to clearly understand what is the unique value that you deliver relative to everything else?

28:01And part of that is the unique capabilities you provide. Part of that is how you're packaging those unique abilities to them. And making sure that they, in their mind, can see how you coexist in this overall sort of tech ecosystem that they might be investing in to enable their employees or, you know, to enable them to operate. And so I think it's sort of looking at that from that lens. Got it. So I'm hearing is be very clear bet your differentiator and continue to invest there. And then make sure your positioning is clear around why you're just identifying. Here's why we're different and we're not just like a better version of this thing.

28:40Here's why we're different and making sure that's really clear. Exactly. And I think the other thing I would say, like there's another core philosophy I have, which is products either get better over a period of time or they get worse. Products never remain the same. And I think you can take that philosophy to a bunch of things in life, but I'm going to take the lens of products, which is my core philosophy is like 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.

29:16And the lens for this, Lenny, is actually from a customer's perspective, from the end user perspective. And the thing is that, you know, if you are a player, there's no one else in the market, that's one thing, right? So that's great. Like, you know, kudos to you for actually identifying a blue ocean strategy and sort of executing to that. But most markets, most products actually have, you know, either direct or indirect competitors that are available. So from the customer's mind, you know, you're doing something, the competitors doing something. So in their mind, they're looking at these products and they're looking at these companies and they're saying, you know, which is better versus not.

29:51And so with every release that your competitor is making and every release that you're making, you're either making chess points, moves against them positive points or you're going negative. And I think like that framework, if you have in mind, you know, it actually drives an insane amount of clarity in terms of, you know, what you're doing and what the impact is going to be because every single move that you're making, the customer has that sort of in their mind, if not explicitly, implicitly, that they are actually comparing these things. And I think it brings a level of focus in terms of where you need to invest and why you need to invest and why this is going to make those decisions.

30:27And so I think it allows at least for product leaders to make some high quality decisions around the bets that they're making and how they're going to play out in terms of like eventual, you know, once the dust settles, you know, and the market at large is going to say, I'm going to standardize on something. And now I feel I need to go get it for everyone. Or this is the tool that I want to use for this particular use case that all of these decisions that you're making ladder up to, that final sort of play that you have to do in terms of the market consolidation that eventually happens. This is so interesting.

31:00Essentially, what you're saying is that you find that being very close to an understanding the competition really well is really essential versus like this kind of the other end of the spectrum almost from just like, don't worry about the competition, don't pay attention. I like these like this point metaphor of just like, are we moving ahead or further behind? Is there any operationalize that to kind of track that? And then also just like, how do you not over obsessed with, let's just get you up, get more features, that kind of thing. Like how do you find that balance? I'll be honest, like I don't think we've figured it out.

31:31We haven't cracked the nut in terms of how to operationalize this, but I know you are based more than me on some of these things. So maybe we can like on this and then come up with something. All right, that'll be it. That'll be some we work on. Any other product philosophies that you want to share? That was awesome. This is all like sort of related to it. It's like a string of pearls. I think like there's maybe like one more pearl. We can actually spread into the needle right here, which is, you know, we talked about sort of how do you ladder this up and stuff. And then the question is, okay, how do you know, like, you know, that, you know, everything that you're doing is that in the right direction or not, and like, you know, should you move slow and be much more mindful about the things that you're doing or should you move fast and like make certain bets and then decide certain things and stuff.

32:24And I think like there are two sort of views that are out there, you know, my personal sort of, you know, perspective on this is that what you want to do is that you want to be the first one to hit the brick wall. And, you know, this is particularly true when you are in a market that is competitive. And the reason for that is that, you know, if you consider yourself as an innovation centric company and you believe that, you know, you are building experiences that fundamentally don't exist anywhere else and you're sort of paving the way for the rest of the folks to basically get inspired with how you are building these experiences.

33:03Speed is the single biggest determinant in terms of, in my experience in terms of, you know, who ends up being more successful versus not. And I think like this, I don't know, maybe this is a little bit controversial where, you know, people say like, you know, go slow to actually go fast. And I think I have a lot of respect for that in certain areas, you should do that. But when you are trying to, you know, figure out like sort of new experiences and stuff, you know, and you don't know, you know, if it's going to resonate or not, like, you know, speed is something that you should accelerate for the organization, you know, I think like Frank Soutpen, you know, talks about this, you know, a lot in his book.

33:42And, you know, you know, how can you accelerate? And I think for me, from a product perspective, like the fundamental concept is like, can you be the first one to hit the brick wall where you have this, where you have the learning faster than anyone else in the market so that you can decide, oh my God, the path that I was going was not the right path. I need to do 10 degrees, you know, best or I need to do 30 degrees east. And I think as long as you're like one or two or three steps ahead of everyone else in terms of uncovering or, you know, discovering those, those insights, then, then I think, you know, you can continue to be a head of the pack in terms of, you know, building, building product and business.

34:21You're talking about urgency. I've never met a founder or product leader who doesn't want their team to move faster. They're always encouraging their team. How do we move faster? I'm curious if there's something you've learned tactically about helping your team move more quickly. You mentioned Frank Soutpen's book, Amp it up. Is what it's called, by the way, in case folks want to check it out and he's big on just like creating a sense of urgency, constant urgency. And we'll link to that and show notes. What have you found helps create urgency and generally helps your teams move faster than then just like move faster, everyone?

34:52My fundamental sort of belief here, Lenny is that every product manager, I can talk to product managers because, you know, there is reason certain one, so someone wants to be a product manager because like in my view, it's like one of the most tankless jobs like you get to do. And all of this. You should walk and it's like, well, you have to do this. And there's like, but like it attracts a certain personality and that personality is driven by challenge and that personality wants to prove that they can solve this challenge and do something amazing. So I think fundamentally, you know, the product persona actually wants to move fast.

35:32I think the reason why in some cases, we are not able to move fast is because of roadblocks that we run into. And those roadblocks can manifest themselves into technical challenges. They can manifest them in cells of organizational challenges. They could be priority challenges and so on and so forth. So my fundamental sort of approach to solving that is to ensure that the product leads who are working on these capabilities can instantly raise their hand and call out that there are challenges that they are running into. And then the job of the leadership team, the product management team is to essentially go and quickly resolve those issues, right?

36:16And I think like if you are able to resolve those issues, then what it does is it actually starts a virtuous cycle where you can actually start to see those wins. And once you see those wins, you actually create that courage to do more things. And maybe because you've seen how that specific roadblock was solved and you have a pattern matching that you've developed now, you can solve a lot of those things on your own. And it's the next level of challenge that you know, going to raise your hand. And what that does is it starts to build this organizational competency in terms of how you can figure out, you know, what to build.

36:48And you know, we all find these people in our organizations where there's someone somehow is able to do certain things in one tense, the time that would take a normal person. It's not that they are like 10 times faster. It's just that in my observation that they've figured out which part of the court base they should build in versus not who should be part of their team and who should not be. How they need to define that from a scope perspective. What does success look like? And it's the architecture of bringing all of these things together that actually brings that magic of online terms of like, Hey, we are able to deliver faster.

37:19I really like this topic. But I'm hearing is one of the biggest roots of slowing slow down in a company and product development is blockers not being unblocked. And I always feel the same thing. Like if you like a PM's job, like number one job is to unlock their team because like their job is basically make the most out of their team that they're marshaling towards some outcome. And the way you do that is just figure out what's slowing them down. You're talking about this like idea of a PM raises their hand to leadership. Hey, we're blocked by this thing. Is there like a process you've come up with there to help you do that?

37:50It's like connected to it. I would say like we are trying to sort of systematically like in gray in this in the culture of of the organization. So we have a motto in the in the product organs. Very simple. Single sentence. Deliver customer value faster with high quality. That's it. And everything that we do. And when I say everything, everything, like from like, you know, formance and reward system and measurements, everything is based on this one single statement. And it has three attributes. The first one is deliver customer value. And we believe customer value is only delivered when customers use it.

38:23So anytime as a PM at mirror, when you ship something, we're looking at, well, what was the metric you were going to move and how much did it move? And we have some original targets that we can go back to. So that's the first aspect of what we're doing, deliver customer value. The second one is move faster. And there are certain cycle times that we are measuring across the organization. Okay. You know, from the time you came up with the idea to the time that you actually pitched a solution to the time you actually shipped it to the time we actually moved the metric, it's information that has been collected and has been made available to the organization.

38:52And you can say, Hey, if it was a small medium on large, you know, what's the average? What's the median? What's the variance? And you can say, Hey, like looking at this data, what can be improved? So that's on the faster aspect. And then the last one is around high quality, which is, you know, we want to build best in class, you know, collaboration experiences. So we are always, always getting inspired by what we find, you know, in applications and experiences that we see around us. And we're saying, Hey, when it comes to, you know, designing sharing flows, you know, we believe that these are the three, you know, apps that have the best in class sharing flows.

39:25When it comes to, you know, designing some synchronous capabilities like this, these are the best in class apps that we should look at. So we are always trying to make sure that we are benchmarking ourselves against that. And we have a design team on a regular basis, like when we ship stuff on a monthly basis, our design leadership team does a triage of everything that got shipped into like high quality or not high quality is just like a binary function. And we're doing that. And we're saying, Hey, the reason why we believe it's not high quality is because of A, B, C, D, E, and we're making it available to other designers.

39:55So they can actually start to build sort of that telemetry in terms of like some things are more subjective, but you can start to see some pattern matching and say, like, Hey, you know, this is what this is what it looks like. This episode is brought to you by linear. Let's be honest, the issue tracker that you're using today isn't very helpful. Why is it that always seems to be working against you instead of working for you? Why does it feel like such a chore to use? Well, linear is different. It's incredibly fast, beautifully designed, and it comes with powerful workflows that streamline your entire product development process from issue tracking all the way to managing product roadmaps.

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41:15Okay, so every month or so, the design team looks at everything that's shipped. And puts things into a bucket. Either this is, it's like a binary thing, high quality or not high quality. Wow, that is so cool. And then one, what do they do with that? Did they send it out to the product team? And then two, is this just like FYI? Or is it like we need to fix all these low quality things going going back? Or is it more just like for the future, please be aware of these are not high quality? Yeah, so it's actually both. So generally, what happens is that the design leadership team is doing this, and there's one particular design leader who's the designated person to make sure that this is happening on a regular basis.

41:53And right now, the way we're using it is that we're actually using it to calibrate and align it on the design leadership around what we mean by high quality. Because it's one of those things, right? It's like, you know, if you've never seen colors, and I ask you Lenny, describe pink and compare that to red. And like if you haven't seen like colors, like how do you describe colors? You can't. But like if I show you and I say Lenny, these are three examples of what pink is, and these are three examples of red is, then you're like, oh, I get pink and I get red. So there are certain things that you just like when you write it, it's very, very hard to describe it.

42:26But if you show specific examples, it's very clear. Oh, I get it. I get why? How pink is different than red? But if I try to describe it, it's going to be very hard. So we got into these endless conversations at some point about a year ago where we're saying, we need high quality, we need high quality. And people like, let's just go and define this thing. And we had like a bunch of our leaders go and like write like, you know, documents, like really long documents in terms of like, what are the attributes and how do we define those attributes and how do we measure those attributes and how do we enable people to do that?

42:56And it felt like it's a good thing because we are trying to codify it. But it also felt like, you know, it was a very heavy way of solving that problem. And then, you know, we just came up with this approach, which is like, what's great versus not great and just start classifying it. And as you know, it's like, modern, the systems are like classification systems and we got this kind of sense, like reinforcement learning approach. Yeah, defining. That's right. That's right. And I think it's worked work decently well. I would say like, with most things like, you know, we need to operationalize it and we need to make sure that now we are democratizing it and everybody has access to it and so on and so forth.

43:29But I think it's been a good start. And now, you know, we are sharing this more openly with others in the in the York. When I said that, I imagine you from the outside, you have a very unique culture and approach your product. There's a great example of that. I've never heard of a process like this. So what I'm hearing is essentially trying to build the muscle within the organization of what is quality. It's like this continued heuristic of like, okay, I get it. And so PMs on the team start to like understand in their head what that means. Right. Super cool. You also talked about the middle part of that sentence, I'm moving faster in the you track and measure that somehow.

44:04Can you talk more about that? Because that's something every product team is always trying to understand. Like, how do we know if we're going faster, if we're going as fast as we could, how do you actually do that? How do you measure these things? The core philosophy there is like, you know, velocity is more like the game of golf. Where you're just playing against yourself. Like it's not like, if Lenny and we're running out of the golf course, like it doesn't matter. Like, you know, I'm not competing against you. I'm just competing against myself because that's the only thing I'm going to just hit the ball.

44:31So it's like, how better, how much better can we get? So I think there are core philosophies around that. And what we're trying to do is that, you know, on all the product teams, the feature teams that we have, we're just collecting all the information and we're making it available to everyone so that they can actually see what the cycle times are. And what we're interested in is from the time that you have an insight, from the time you believe, I can do something unique for my user, for my persona. You know, how long does it take for you to actually deliver that value? And, you know, we have, you know, we have a product process that we follow, which starts with the P -strategy, and then we go into P0, which is, you know, definition of the problem, then we go into P1, which is definition of the solution, and then we go into P2, which is once the solution is shipped.

45:18You know, are we hitting the metrics that we originally had to define upfront before we decided to work on this? And, you know, you have all of these stagegates and then we basically classify everything that we're doing in small, medium, large, you know, and you can go in and you can say, hey, I thought this was a small thing and, you know, small thing is like something you can get it done in less than a month and so on and so forth. And, you know, there are like 50 other product teams that are shipping this features and what's the average? What's the variance, you know, what's the median? And, oh, wait a second.

45:48Actually, it seems like I took way more time in the problem definition stage. Let me actually try to go talk to this other product team that actually did it much faster or, oh, you know, I actually did it really, really fast and the reason why I did it fast was because of this. Let me go share this out with the broader team. And, and usually like the product ops function, we call it product excellence internal, like sort of product excellence function is is recording some of these things. I would say, you know, getting reliable data and then because we have some things that are going through meetings and there's something that are going through Slack, like, you know, we could, we could do better on some of those dimensions, but all of this data is available and we, we provide it openly and folks can benchmark themselves against that.

46:34So cool. Okay. Say of this piece strat, you called it document, which is kind of like an initial concept. And then it's interesting is the p0p1, which is often for bugs, but it's cool that you use it for defining your products. So he's strat is just like an idea pitch p0 is a spec basically, like a one -pager for the product. And then people want in p2 are basically getting to like, here's the actual product we're building. And you basically track time per step and map it to here's how large this project should be. And over time, you track per person, it sounds like just like, are you matching the benchmarks of like, how long a small project should take across each step?

47:12Yeah, exactly. Wow. That is extremely cool. Uh, it whatever templates you can share these things that we can include in the show notes would be awesome. Yes. Because people are always looking for just like, I want to do some of the stuff and maybe just plug and play the more than the merrier. Yes. Shifting a little bit. It sounds like you guys are doing scrum in some form.

47:37You plan for in the future in details specifically, just like high level, how does the product development process work? So there are certain things that, you know, I learned at box and, you know, that inspired some things that we do at at Miro. And there are certain things that we we've also like one of the things that we've instituted is sort of, you know, our roadmap process, right? So that's sort of the the first thing around how the different teams are looking at, you know, the things that they're going to work on. So we have a rolling six months roadmap. Uh, it seems large, but we got like I mentioned, a number of enterprise customers.

48:15And if I've learned one thing that large enterprises like is is asking for a roadmap review. So that tends to be my favorite meeting of sitting down with the enterprise leaders and walking through what we are working on. So what we've done is, if tried to architect something, which actually allows our customers to get what they're looking for, but at the same time does not remove the agility that is so important for us to deliver value faster. And so what we do is we have a rolling six month roadmap that gets updated every three months. And the first three months of that that roadmap, we have a 80 % precision level, which means that 80 % of the things that we claim to be on the roadmap will get done.

48:55That's that's the target. And for the for the next three months, because it's six months, so the first three months is 80%, and the next three months is 50%. So we have a much lower level of resolution in the next, you know, three months after that. And what that allows the product teams to do is actually have flexibility, which is based on what the customers are asking for based on what the competitive moves are, based on some technology breakthroughs that happen around large language models. They can pivot and they can pivot and move towards that. And they won't get penalized either by the customer or internally in terms of doing that.

49:27So that's what we do. And that's all on the backdrop of an annual strategy that we publish or every year, you know, we publish a strategy white paper that it gets published internally available to every single millionaire, you know, across all functions that clearly articulates, you know, the key bets that we want to make, why do we want to make those bets? What is the expected outcome? And how does that ladder up into the overall business outcomes that we're trying to drive from an OCR's perspective, as well as the overall business strategy that we have? So people take that product strategy, you know, white paper or artifact and then against that, they're building their road maps, which get updated every three months.

50:06And then inside of the teams, we, enable teams to be quite autonomous in terms of some of the rituals that they're doing. We want them, you know, to obviously embrace best practices. We've got a team of agile coaches that, you know, share best practices are, you know, are available, you know, to help if there are certain specific, you know, needs that teams have. And then I think like on top of that, there are certain key, like I would say, rituals that we do that may be are unique. So for example, we have something called as Miro Connect, you know, which happens every other Friday. And, and, you know, every other Friday, you know, for example, in our Amsterdam office, you can go in there and at four o 'clock in the afternoon, you know, four to seven or eight.

50:54And sometimes it goes really late. You've got a bunch of product teams, you know, sitting around tables and it feels like, oh, it's like a bridge or something. And you just people are coming in, they're having a good time. You've got to drink in your hand. There's maybe some light music playing in the background. And you're going from table to table and you have teams that are actually showing all the amazing work that they have. And it, you know, if done right, like it happens once in a while, but like if done right, it's magical in terms of the outcomes that you can get. So I'll tell you, there was a team that actually was presenting at our Berlin hub.

51:25And they were saying, we're working on this feature. You know, and there's an, you know, there's an engineer, you know, who walks over to that desk and says, what are you working on? And the team describes it, oh, we're trying to do, you know, something like this. And this engineer had actually worked on that particular problem in their, in their prior life, like literally they had implemented this. So he says, so, so how are you going to implement this? And the team, the engineer that's sitting there says, like, this is the approach I'm going to take. And it's going to take me three months. And he's like, oh, would you mind if I go and help you with this?

51:56And they're like, sure, more than married, go ahead. So this person, you know, you know, puts down their beer and says, okay, I'm having a good time. Let me just head back to, to my home. And in the next three or four hours, goes and courts the entire thing, makes a pull request. And next in the morning, one of the engineers from this court team that was exhibiting at at Mirroquin Act, you know, looks at the pull request, you know, reviews the court and says, yes, something that would have taken, you know, three months for this court team because they didn't have the expertise literally got got done in in three hours because there was another engineer that ran into them and said, I know how this is done.

52:29I can actually help you here and and went ahead and ended the right thing. And so we're trying to create these magic moments. It happens once, once in a while, but we have one success story. And I like to tell that in every opportunity that I get. But that's another sort of sort of unique thing that you've done in terms of book ending things around how we operate here. That story is like a dream for any PM. Just imagine, at least, having months of work with the one conversation. I imagine people were like, how do we replicate this on often? I love that. With the these meetings just understand if their team isn't Berlin, let's say, there's a screen there, like in front of a table and they're like talking through a screen, like a video conference.

53:12Yeah, I mean, like right now what we've figured out is that there is really hard to do these events, you know, over, you know, audio video conferencing and stuff. So generally, what happens is that you have an audio video bridge that's playing, but mostly it's people walking up to the respective teams and then having like a live conversation like that's that's usually how these things are operated. Yeah. Got it. Okay. So you have six month rolling roadmaps. You have a yearly vision strategy for the company. Two weeks sprints. Is there also a quarterly LKR sort of process? Or is it yes, or not?

53:48There is. Okay. Can you talk a little bit about how that works? Yes, yes, yes. That mirror we practice OCRs and you know, it starts off at the company level. And then, you know, those company level OCRs are taken by the AMP organization. Like we describe, it's the AMP organization. And then we break it up. And, you know, I would say like we have refined it over the period of time, the two years that I've been at at Miro and early on, we were doing OCRs on a quarterly basis. And I would say more recently, we've actually evolved to six month ARs. And what we found was that, you know, six months was the right cadence in terms of giving enough time for teams to basically push forward in executing these KRs and minimizing the quote and quote overhead of doing replan every single quarter.

54:42And we found that it was much more effective and efficient for the entire organization to do it on a six month basis. However, we are doing traction on a monthly basis. So every four weeks, as AMP, you know, we are looking at our KRs for the AMP organization on a monthly basis doing traction. However, the planning, the targets are done on a six month basis. I love how OCRs could just be anything like, could be every six months, could have objectives, could have cure results. Like it's just such a term that just applies to anything that people do with goals, basically. That's true. And it works.

55:18That's great. That is so true. And again, if there's any templates that your team could share of the way you do that stuff, that would be amazing. I'm going to include that in the show notes. Yeah, absolutely. Because I think like as you would expect, like, we run Miro on Miro. So there's like a lot of things that we could share as templates in terms of how we are running things on Miro, not just as OCRs, but in terms of product reviews. And, you know, we have a base of how we are doing asynchronous reviews, combined with synchronous reviews. And there's this blended experiences that we have. And so we can we can definitely share out with the community, how we how we do some of these things.

55:55Awesome. And that's a great segue to another question I was going to ask is just what are their tools? What's in the stack of the product teams workflow? So Miro obviously, maybe talk about like what use Miro for, but then what else is in there? Like what do you use for task management, bug tracking, things like that design? So we're starting from the bottom up like infrastructure up view like so we all of our tickets are our handle in in in Jira and you know, we're using some of the Jira newer capabilities in Jira in terms of coming up with road maps and, you know, coming up with the priorities and stuff.

56:30On top of that, the all of the specs, you know, generally get recorded in confluence. Having said that, we're actually a big fan of, you know, tools like, you know, Google Docs as well as Coda, you know, that allows us to track RKRs in a in a pretty effective way. You know, on on top of that, obviously like we we use Miro a lot, I would say, for a lot of our things, especially on the on the product and design side of the team, you know, generally all of our insights get captured inside of Miro boards. So when we are going and, you know, conducting user experience interviews and stuff, we will record those and then those recordings get added to a Miro board.

57:14So Miro acts as the content hub or a team hub for a particular project. You know, once you capture all of those insights, then generally, you know, all of the brainstorming and and team ideation happens on the Miro board as well. So Miro is actually also used as a tool to facilitate meetings and workshops. Once all of that, you know, is synthesized into a set of recommendations and outcomes. You know, so when we go into these product reviews that we were talking about, Lenny, the same Miro board then gets manifested into a set of presentations. So we use Miro for presentations. We've actually made some really amazing updates in terms of our capabilities there and folks haven't checked them out.

57:53I would strongly encourage them. So there's a capability called Showtime that basically abstracts out the UI and lets people focus on the content but do it in a way that it's interactive. So everyone that's on the call can can can can have reactions, you know, can share their comments and leave comments while the presentation is happening without actually disrupting any of the flow for the user. So we use that a lot for presentations as well. And I would say more recently, what we've started to do is that we've started to move some of our synchronous meetings into async reviews. So I talked about this stock track feature that we have.

58:24And a lot of teams, what they were do is that they were actually send you, you know, five minute, 10 minute talk track in advance. And it's just a link to a Miro board. You click on it and then you just sit back and relax, you know, and then you have this magical experience where you're sitting back and the Miro board is automatically moving because Lenny was like recording it like that. And then you have the video play and then you can pause it any time. You can add in your comments and stuff. So that the next time when you meet instead of actually providing context to everyone, those those synchronous sessions are a lot more deliberate and focused on driving outcomes or achieving, you know, consensus.

58:56So people are just focusing on the comments that were added as part of the async product review so that when they meet synchronously, they can use that. So Miro boards are used for that as well. And I would say now a lot of our dashboarding shows up in Miro boards now. We recently released a data visualization capabilities around most popular BI tools. So at Miro, we use Google looker a lot. So a lot of our dashboards are in looker. And what you would typically find is that our analyst team and product teams will just grab a link to a looker dashboard put it on a Miro board and it unfolds into a full visualization.

59:29And unlike a screen grab, you never have to go update it because right there on the Miro board, it's always updated and you can refresh that. So you basically have this this this this experience where Miro acts as that single source of truth for a lot of the teams across the entire journey of product development. Where a single Miro board is is is is beating the needs of like multiple sort of use cases there. And then for the road mapping, is that in Miro like that each seems road map or he's something like Jira. Yeah, so I think like we've got a couple of tools for road mapping and our observation is that while those tools are great for for for the unique need that they're solving, we haven't found like a like a universal solution for road mapping.

1:00:09So there are some teams that use Miro, you know, for road mapping and they would use the Kanban sort of widget in in Miro for that, you know, what are they working on? What's coming next? What's in the backlog? But I would say like it is a problem that is not completely solved in terms of how do we actually bring, you know, these artifacts together at scale. What we are starting to see and this is actually a unique use case of Miro is that we actually enable our entire field organization using Tokrex. So what happens is that we have our entire road map published out as a Miro board for enablement purposes so that that's an artifact that is approved to be shown to a customer and what you will see is that you'll see five or six recordings in there and you know, the leader for enterprise has done a five minute recording on everything they're working on the leader for platform has done that the leader for end user experience has done that, you know, that the person who's driving some of our AI experience has done that and so you can go in and you can just click on that video and you can self sort of meet your needs by by using Miro and then this capability that we have.

1:01:09That's awesome and it sounds like each team can basically choose the tools they want to use. There's not like standardized. Everyone needs to use Giro or Miro for their road map. I like that. I like how teams do that often. Maybe one last question around the product org and then I want to shift a little bit to growth and how Miro grows and things you have learned about growing. So question I always try to get to is how do you think about balancing new bets and innovation with maintenance and just general like incremental work? Do you have some sort of philosophy as a product leader broadly and then maybe Miro specifically have just like the had a balance investments in these two buckets and maybe three buckets, you know, bugs incremental work and then just big bets.

1:01:53How do you think about that? So, you know, we have some some rule of thumbs in terms of like how we want to allocate, you know, our investments across these buckets and I would say a lot of it, Lenny actually depends on sort of the state of the team. Like there are certain certain teams that have more tech debt than others. There are certain teams that are actually working on some really big zero -to -one features than other teams. And so I think like there is a variance, you know, the standard deviation actually is dependent on like which part of the spectrum that you're in, which is are you a team that we believe needs to create the next generation experience on the platform and hence we have to prioritize innovative work or are you the team that's actually so critical to actually you know, meeting our objective around like better board performance or any of the other things that we believe are important and hence we need to invest in those in those critical areas.

1:02:41But I would say in general, you know, in a version versus not, you know, you know, varies on a spectrum of anywhere from 60 to 80 percent. So I would say about 20 to 40 percent of the available capacity at any given time is either getting allocated to to architectural initiatives, you know, there's technology roadmap that our CTO is is driving that we believe is extremely important as the platform scales. And you know, now as you know, we have over 50 million people on the platform. So we continuously have to invest in making sure that the platform can scale and there are certain teams, you know, that probably have 40 to 50 percent of their allocation towards that because they're critical part of the component and there are other teams that are maybe more end user focus and are more UI focused where that allocation is lower.

1:03:23But I think general rule of thumb is 20 percent is always a given, but it can go as high as 40 to 50 percent on bigger bets and longer term thinking. Yeah, 22, 22, 40 percent goes on the technology related initiatives. Oh, got it. Infrastructure maintenance, making sure everything's there. Run the business. Exactly. And then what about just big long term bets that you're not expecting to pay off anytime soon, do you have a curious to give just more percentage of say total resources you put there? You've probably seen this, you know, the framework of like three horizon, like it's it's quite popular in like McKenzie, like, and so on and so forth.

1:04:02And so for as like horizon one business, which is what we are, you know, the thing that's delivering food on the table, generally there's about a 70 percent allocation of resources that we have to overtake. Then there is a rise in two, which is an adjacent thing, you know, over the next 12 to 36 months, we believe it's material. Usually that tends to be around 20 percent of the allocation. And then there's a rise in three, which is like three years out, you know, three to five years, you know, next generation things. And that's about 10 percent of the ratio. So it's like 70, 20, 10 across horizon one, two and three.

1:04:30Awesome. Any other thoughts along the lines of just how you think about product before we shift? And I only have a few questions around the growth kind of story of mirror in which you've learned about growing. In terms of like product leadership and like what, you know, what we believe is is is is the way we want product leaders to be developed. And I think it's like more of a people philosophy. And so, you know, we have a product leadership, which is which constitutes of all of the folks who are running all of these streams. And I always tell them that you have two personas that you have to think about.

1:05:04Everyone who's in the product leadership team is a product leadership team member. And the fundamental thing that you have to do is drive accountability. So the number one thing that a product leader on the product leadership team needs to do is drive accountability with others in the product leadership team. The other persona that they have is that they are a stream leader that actually responsible for delivering value for the respective persona and respective customers and stuff. So when you put on the persona hat of a stream leader, which is different than the persona of a product leader, your number one metric, the number one goal that you have is drive improvement.

1:05:41So when you go back and you work with your team, always have the lens, are you improving things? And whatever you want to improve, but you always have to ask yourself, today compared to yesterday, tomorrow compared to today, have I improved things? And that's the yardstick you should think about. When you go sit in the product leadership team every Monday morning, every Monday afternoon at one in the afternoon, when we meet together, your number one goal is actually to drive accountability around this. And are you making sure that we as leaders in the organization are doing the right thing for the for the company?

1:06:10And I think like that's like a philosophical construct that I always remind people in terms of what they should be doing. So as an example, tomorrow we have calibrations, we have our annual sort of review cycle happening in the company times. Always a blast. All of always fun and so critical, you know, as a leader, because it sets the tone for everything that you're going to do. And you know, in my opening remarks, the only thing I'm going to remind everyone in the room is that your number one goal here is to be a product leader and and and and accountability is what you have to write. That's it.

1:06:41Just hold each other accountable, including myself in terms of making sure that as we go in, like that's the key thing. And I think like once people sort of understand sort of like the duality of how they need to operate across those two specific goals, it actually leads to to a really high performing teams and teams that actually are able to create somewhat of a magic, you know, if they are open and there is trust that that that has been built in the team. And when you say accountability, what does that look like? Is it pointing out, hey, you didn't achieve this thing we were trying to achieve or you didn't do a great job leading this meeting?

1:07:17Is it just like direct feedback often or is there some other way you see that manifested and what do you like to see? Yeah, I think it's it's basically practicing feedback in a very open and constructive way and focusing on what is important for the business and not shying away from having some of those those observations and conversations, you know, not shying away from them. But it's all in the lens of like what is the right thing to do for the business? And if you feel that that one or more members of the leadership team are not living up to what needs to be done, then just voicing it and it's not like you're complaining or anything is just like I have this perspective, is this the right perspective or not?

1:07:58Because actually it ties very well with the overall cultural values that we have. If you do things with the lens that you are being empathetic, then you pose it as a question as opposed to a statement. And I think that's one of the things that we practice a lot at Miro is that I believe that I am seeing there are certain things that are happening that it could be just me that I'm not seeing the other things. But what is it? Can you help me understand? Can you help me figure out that why why certain things are happening? Because I might just be missing the perspective, but because you bring it up and and that's part of practicing accountability in an empathetic way, it actually gets the entire team in the right mindset in terms of how they operate.

1:08:38Has anyone given you some sort of direct feedback recently or pointed out something you didn't do well that held you accountable that you could share all the time? When we do our off -sites, this is actually a fun thing is that every off -site that I do with the leadership team, usually there is a one to two -hour session, there's feedback to Veron. And I actually do it openly. I will have about 10 people in the room and I will force people to be very honest and I want to show my vulnerabilities to everyone that I am not perfect and I have lots of areas to improve. And every time people do it, it's interesting that they open up in very amazing ways and I think I love it because it helps me become better, it helps me identify my blind spots.

1:09:30But what it does is because I do it in an open way, it brillains a lot of trust, it brings trust that I do it openly and I'm an open book and they can share whatever they want, not just with me, but openly in front of everyone. Are you willing to share one thing they suggested that they pointed out that they wish you did differently or better? Yeah, I think like in general, finding time with me tends to be a bit of a heart thing and generally there's always this feedback which is like need more time, maybe more responsiveness over email or slack or something like that and that's an area that I'm constantly working on and improving.

1:10:10So yeah. I feel like a cop out, that doesn't feel too painful to hear, I'm like yeah, yeah, I know, I don't have a lot of time, I'm sorry, but I get it, I get how, and that comes back to your point about blockers and how important it is to unlock teams because that leads to a lot faster progress. That's true, that's true. Okay, so let me shift a little bit to Miro's growth and I only have a few questions here, I know it's getting late in your site, so I don't want to keep you too long. Sure. The first is something I'm on this constant quest to understand how companies got their first users and I haven't actually heard the story of how Miro got its first thousand users or customers.

1:10:47I know you weren't there in the early days, but you happen to know how Miro initially grew and got their first thousand users and customers. I think like the fundamental thing there is that we always had like user first approach and reaching out to certain communities that were relevant to what was being, it was like a key part of lighting the fire if you will, the proverbial way, people start to talk about the product and and given the collaborative nature of the product, some of the earlier doctors invited people who were also earlier doctors and the flywheel started to work. I've heard that we did a fair amount of content marketing and listing the product on sites like Caktira sort of helped.

1:11:29There was some early investments in terms of SEO and organic growth, so there was a focus there which was the main source of driving, traffic, the top of the funnel came through that. The product teams were very intensely focused on sort of building vital loops as a key mechanism of driving growth once the traffic came in. Every interaction that actually introduced barrier, they looked at it and they looked at the data and they said, let's reduce this barrier, let's remove this thing so that the product could be effectively embraced and it was an evolution over a period of time. There was also the fact that early on in the journey, some of the features were presented on a trial basis and then later on like sort of the model was evolved from a trial basis, time limited to a premium model that further accelerated the growth for the business.

1:12:27I would say those were some of the approaches that were taken to get to the first 1000 users or so. You talked about how Miro grows, whereas this magical loop of I use Miro for myself, then I share it with my team and in whatever way I'm using it. They're like, oh, Miro, this is cool. Then they start using it and then they share with people that they want to work with and increase this loop of growth. I imagine that's how Miro mostly grew initially and continues to grow. Is there anything surprising or unintuitive about how Miro grows that is beyond that? I imagine sales apart of it and we can talk about that, but is there anything else that is interesting that is worth mentioning?

1:13:07No, I think like that's that's the key of the growth. I think there are like specific use cases where they are uniquely sort of geared towards inviting a lot of net new people. So for example, Miro is loved as a workshopping tool and so generally one person is using Miro, but then 10, 15, 20, 50, 100, 200, 300 people to that workshop. So there are specific use cases where people get introduced to the product and then go and sign up for it and then start to use it for that use case or other use cases. I think the other sort of accelerant in all of this is the templates that we have in particular, the role that Miro verse plays in all of this.

1:13:48Just to give you an example here, like there was a template which was created around FIFA World Cup. So there was a FIFA World Cup diagram. Cornel X, he's the founder and managing director of a Canadian Strategic Service Design Consultancy firm. He created this Miro verse template and it had over 100 ,000 views and about 15 ,000 copies were made of this single template. Given the popularity of all of this, it actually got indexed by Google's when you went into search, you actually saw the Miro verse FIFA template show up when you were trying to search for FIFA World Cup. That was another acquisition channel top of funnel that actually drew a lot of users to it.

1:14:39So I think I would say the Miro verses is also like a key accelerant to this. If you had to think about the pie chart of how Miro grows, what percentage roughly would you say is word of mouth organic versus what you just described, which is essentially a CO versus sales app on sales. How do you think about is there a way to model that simply? Without getting into specific numbers and stuff, I would say fundamentally Miro is a product led growth company and product channels are one of the highest contributors for growth of users. As the business has evolved to serve the needs of some of the largest corporations in the world, the enterprise segment and the enterprise persona when they are trying to provision Miro for tens of thousands of users who then go conduct hundreds of thousands of workshops on Miro that invite millions of users on the platform is a key part of the flywheel that we are seeing.

1:15:45I would say product channels are probably very strong and increasingly enterprises a key part of that acceleration. A great segue to our final question, which is the idea that you started product like growth sounds like clearly it's a big part of growth today. But as every product like growth company does eventually, you have a large sales team I imagine. What have you learned as a product leader working with sales, especially at a product led growth company, but how to make that relationship work and have a product work effectively with its sales? There are sort of a few learnings and I would say maybe this is one area where we are working on how we could be doing better in terms of bringing ourselves closer to our high touch and bringing high touch closer to self -serve.

1:16:32In terms of how we operate overall, it's a lot of hard work. I would say first of all, basically, we've been able to these organizations together and you have to be very deliberate around the points of intersection and you have to make sure that these organizations don't consider themselves as competition. It's one product, one company, it's just two channels of how we are serving our customers. There are some things that we've done which is have the product marketing team that basically works across both of these functions and make sure that they are bridging what we are hearing from the sales organization in terms of what directly customers need on the enterprise side and then what do we need on the self -serve site?

1:17:23There's a full process in terms of how the handoff happens across the maturity of the account. It can start as a self -serve. It drives adoption and once there's adoption, there's a handraiser that happens and then there's a sales rep that gets engaged and you go through the qualification process and then you have an opportunity to expand the account. Over the years, architect it and build the entire funnel and what the process is and that's also a key part of how all of this operates. Like I said, there are a few areas where we could further streamline how we operate and think of it as one single unit.

1:18:05Imagine that it's true for every company out there. One maybe final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. What are some features that people look forward to that are coming with Mira? We recently, about a month ago, announced Miro AI, the backdrop of all the amazing work that's happening around generative AI and large language models and stuff. I think it was really exciting to see all of the community enthusiasm around the use cases that we launched. We're going to be taking it across the finish line and doing a general availability in the coming weeks and months. I think that's one big thing and we'll be adding more capabilities there.

1:18:46Just today, we actually announced a bunch of really deep enhancements and updates around how Mira can be used for team rituals and agile practices. So now you can actually do perspectives in Mira where you can have a private mode where while Lenny's typing his feedback during a retrospective, nobody else can see it. And then one click, you can reveal it. I just saw some of the results of the feedback and it was rated as the number one feature people saw. There's also some deeper integrations in terms of bringing an entire program board from Jira to start to do dependency mapping inside of Mira in a fun and collaborative way to use this dependency mapping along with program board to start to do the eye planning programming, programming, programming planning, which is essentially scum of scrums or big room planning that's happening.

1:19:37So there's some really amazing capabilities that we've added there, which is on the backdrop of some of the updates we've made in terms of estimation of sprint story points and so on and so forth. So now there's a whole plethora of capabilities and apps that are available as part of the platform that allow you to have your entire team conduct your team rituals in Mira and you can automate certain things, you can streamline things, you can do certain things in Async and then do the rest in synchronous ways. So I think that's been a big update as well. Amazing. With that we've reached our very exciting lightning round.

1:20:16I've got six questions for you. Are you ready? Yes. All right, let's do it. We're two or three books that you have recommended most to other people. One is I love this when Brett becomes here by Paul Kalanity. You know, it's like one of those really emotional books that at the end of the year you might have to use in your eyes. But really really amazing. We talked about Frank's statements, amp it up and then Satya Nadeela's hit refresh and I think philosophically like some of the things that we talked about today, you know, our inspirations that I found in some of these books. With a recent favorite movie or TV show, Ted Lasso, I don't know if it's a recent one or not, but like something.

1:20:57I've enjoyed a lot. I think it's like a very positive and uplifting message. I think the performance is huge. It's humorous. You know, the characters are well developed and so I think like overall it's a treat at least for me to watch. What's a favorite any of you question you'd like to ask? I actually ask a math problem. So for those of you who interview with me, I have this math problem which is based on how Adobe created its first creative suite bundle. And I was actually part of the team that came up with the pricing and packaging for the first creative suite post acquisition of macromedia.

1:21:36And it's a math problem that allows you very quickly to sort of figure out people in terms of their problem solving skills. And usually like I give that problem to people. I've given it to like I don't know seven, eight hundred people. So I now have like a very well established and a distribution of how long it takes for people. Where do they get stuck and where they've gotten stuck? For those people I've hired, like what evidence do I have in terms of like using that as a framework in terms of them being able to solve things? So that's my favorite question. And so you're saying you've mapped back people that have done a certain way on the problem with their success and you kind of found that it's a good signal of their performance.

1:22:17Yes, not directly but like yes, code of correlation and stuff. That's amazing. That's like one of the biggest problems with interviewing. You think you're asking all these amazing questions and it's such a good signal. You have no idea. No one goes back and like this person sucked, this person didn't. So that's really cool. They have that much data on that one question. Two more questions for you. What's something relatively minor that you've changed in how you do product development that has had a tremendous impact on your team's ability to execute? We talked about some of that like sort of removing the roadblocks.

1:22:47I think like having this motto of like you know, create customer value faster with high quality, just the simplicity of that. And you know, it's actually part of our evaluation rubric. It's part of how we measure ourselves and stuff. So I think like just coming up with these simple concepts that you can rally the organization around and I think it's still work in progress, but something that I believe is leading to positive outcomes. Final question. What's your favorite neuro template? It's the FIFA World Cup. Actually, I have so like fascinated with what was done. Yeah, it's it's the latest one, but I think like there's a bunch of them in terms of retro as well.

1:23:18And I think like your template as well. Amazing. We will link to all of those. Varune, this was amazing. Everything I expected and more your team is as interesting and unique as I thought. And I am excited for people to learn from you. And we're going to share a lot of links alongside this episode in the show notes. Two final questions. Working folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more. And how can listeners be useful to you? Thank you, Alene. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed our interaction. And you know, you folks can find me online on LinkedIn. I think that's probably the best way to connect with me.

1:23:56And I think like in terms of one or two things I can ask everyone is that one is if you are an existing mirror user and you use the product for something interesting, I highly encourage you to contribute it as a template as part of Mirrorverse. There's a lot of folks who use that. And we would love for you to contribute there. And the second thing is, you know, I know a lot of product development teams, PMs and designers, you know, are big fans of Lennie. So those are also the users that use Mirror. So if there's anything we could do to make the product better, there's things that you feel like we can expand the platform into.

1:24:30We would love to hear from you and you know, just reach out to me directly over LinkedIn direct message connect with me there. And yeah, and let us know you're here to see. Amazing. We're in. Thank you again for being here. Thank you, Lennie. Awesome. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lennie's podcast .com.

1:25:07See you in the next episode.