Building at Scale:
Miro's Product Playbook

Varun Parmar

Chief Product Officer, Miro

2024

The Framework

The Competitive Velocity Mindset

"Every single time somebody is pushing your code to production, you are making the product better or worse. With every release your competitor makes and every release you make, you are either gaining chess moves or going negative."

No product ever stays the same, each release is a competitive move
Framework: view every feature as +1 (gain), 0 (neutral), or -1 (loss) vs competitors
This drives clarity on impact and prioritization across the org

Team-Centric Strategy

Why Miro Wins in a Crowded Market

1,800+

global employees

450+

product managers

Multi-persona architecture: Built from day one for teams, not individual tools
Cross-industry adoption: Manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace, government, not just tech
Unique capabilities: Advanced workshop features, agile workflows missing in competitors
Community-driven growth: Community love is the fuel that powers Miro

The differentiation moatWhen you build for team collaboration from the foundation, you create capabilities that single-persona tools can't easily replicate without rebuilding.

Product Organization

Persona-Based Streams + Horizontal Functions

Enterprise Stream: IT admin, security, compliance personas with dedicated roadmap
Platform Stream: Developer install base, API integrations, marketplace apps
Growth Stream: PLG-led self-serve business and activation
Infrastructure Stream: Core systems and internal platform
AI Stream: Data science and Miro AI capabilities

The design sprint secret

Use 5-day Design Sprint framework to rapidly validate hypotheses. Example: Miro Talktrack emerged from testing synchronous board movement + video, not screen recording.

Cross-functional empathy

Practicing internal empathy with distributed go-to-market teams ensures product decisions reflect global customer needs and perspectives.

Measurement System

Velocity: Playing Golf Against Yourself

Track cycle time from insight → shipped value for each team
Classify work: small (<1mo), medium, large with stage gates
Share data openly: benchmarks, medians, variances across 50+ teams
P-strat → P0 (problem) → P1 (solution) → P2 (results)
Focus: Are you hitting original metrics post-launch?

The velocity principleVelocity is competing against yourself, not competitors. The goal: how much faster can we move while maintaining quality?

Quality Calibration

How Miro Defines & Maintains High Quality

✗Define quality in documentsINSTEAD →✓ Show examples: design leadership reviews every monthly ship as high/low quality, creating a visual library of "this is what great looks like."

✗Rely on subjective design opinionsINSTEAD →✓ Use reinforcement learning approach: classify examples until patterns emerge. Like learning colors, show, don't describe.

✗Compete on feature countINSTEAD →✓ Maintain architectural consistency across 450+ PMs and 12 hubs through centralized design leadership triage and shared quality standards.

✗Ship fast and ignore UX debtINSTEAD →✓ Balance speed with quality: internal product excellence function tracks both cycle time and design quality triage every ship.

Based on Varun Parmar's episode on Lenny's Podcast. All ideas on this page are from the episode.Watch on YouTube Follow @vparmar230 on X

GO DEEPER IN THE EPISODE

04:08 How Miro operates as a cross-cultural product team 07:22 How applying empathy helped Miro build Miro Talktrack 11:51 What makes Miro stand out 17:08 Miro’s AMPED structure 22:57 The benefit of having product marketing as a part of the cross-functional team 25:24 How competition affects growth and product strategy 31:43 Why speed is so important and how to improve it 34:21 How Miro ensures that their products meet quality standards 37:19 How to remove blockers 47:22 Miro’s product development process 53:34 How OKRs work at Miro 55:55 The product stack at Miro 1:01:20 Big bets vs. maintenance and bug fixes at Miro 1:03:44 The “three horizons” framework 1:04:30 The importance of accountability 1:10:46 How Miro got their first 1,000 users 1:12:33 Other growth levers at Miro 1:15:53 Adding a sales motion 1:18:08 Miro AI, and new updates and enhancements coming soon 1:20:12 Lightning round

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