every single day every single time somebody is pushing your code to production and 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 same and so with every release that your competitor is making and every lease that you're making you're either may you know making chess points moves
against them positive points or or are you going negative and I think like that framework It actually drives an insane amount of clarity in terms of what you're doing and what the impact is going to be welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-winning experiences building and
growing today's most successful products today my guest is Varun Palmer Varun is Chief product officer at Miro and prior to Miro he was senior vice president and chief product officer at box as I share with Varun at the start of our chat I've always been really curious about the product culture at Miro partly because everyone I've ever met Romero has been
super interesting and super smart and partly because they've been able to grow as a business and a product in an incredibly competitive market in our conversation we get really deep into the product values and principles at Miro their product development process how Varun approaches competitive threats how a bi-monthly company-wide product demo ritual led to saving months of
engineering work on a feature plus insights into how Miro got started how they grow today and what their product team has learned about working with a large sales org maroon is amazing I learned a lot and I hope you find it as interesting as I did with that I bring you Varun Parmer after a short word from our sponsors today's episode is brought to you by
Nero an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours I have a quick request head on over to mymeraldboard at miro.com Lenny and let me know which guests you'd want me to have on this year I've already gotten a bunch of great suggestions which you'll see when you go there so just keep it coming and while you're on the mirror board I encourage
you to play around with the tool it's a great shirt space to capture ideas get feedback and collaborate with your colleagues on anything that you're working on for example with Miro you can plan out next quarter's entire product strategy you can start by brainstorming using sticky notes live reactions a voting tool even an estimation app to scope out your team's Sprints then your
whole distributed team can come together around wireframes draw ideas with the pen tool and then put full mocks right into the mirror board and with one of miro's ready-made templates you can go from Discovery and research to product roadmaps to customer Journey flows to final mocks all the in Miro head on over to miro.com Lenny to leave your
suggestions that's miro.com Lenny this episode is brought to you by braintrust where the world's most Innovative companies go to find Talent fast so that they can innovate faster let's be honest it's a lot of work to build a company and if you want to stay ahead of the game you need to be able to hire the right Talent quickly and confidently Brain Trust is the first
decentralized talent Network where you can find hire and manage high quality contractors in engineering design and product for a fraction of the cost of agencies Brain Trust charges a flat rate of only 10 percent unlike agency fees of up to 70 percent so you can make your budget go four times further plus they're the only Network that takes zero
percent of what the talent makes so they're able to attract and retain the world's best tech Talent take it from doordash Airbnb plaid and hundreds of other high growth startups that have shaved their hiring process for months to weeks at less than a quarter of the cost by hiring through braintrust network of 20 000 high quality vetted candidates ready to work whether you're
looking to fill in gaps upskill your staff or build a team for that dream project that finally got funded contact Brain Trust and you'll get matched with three candidates in just 48 Hours visit usebraindress.com Lenny or find them in my show notes for today's episode that's usebraintrust.com Lenny for when you need talent yesterday Varun welcome to the podcast thank you
Lenny so excited to be here thanks for having me I'm really excited to have you here I've been looking forward to having a chance to dig into miro's product culture and the way mura works for a while we've actually had a few guests xmiro mirror nears is that what you call yourselves yes okay mirror mirrors uh so we had Elena Vernon on the podcast who's
amazing and Barbara who I think worked in marketing and everyone I've always met from Miro has been just like really smart and really interesting and it just feels like you guys have a really interesting product culture that I haven't felt like has been shared a lot and so I have a bunch of stuff I want to dig into there and one one question I have with the bat you guys have a really
interesting history and specifically the way your company is structured which is that you're co-located in Amsterdam and San Francisco so first of all is that is that correct the company is a global company so we've got 12 different hubs so we have multi offices in U.S you know four different offices and then multiple hubs in in Europe as well and presence
in Asia back as well so I think like right now we have a global footprint uh yeah got it so a question I wanted to ask off the bat is just how has that cross-cultural approach to product teams impacted the way that you guys built product in the way the company operates the one thing that's really interesting Lenny around uh the way Miro is set up
is that uh you know our product organization is actually based in Europe and uh and our go to market organization is is worldwide and uh you know so our you know product management team our designers our Engineers are located across three different hubs uh uh in in Europe and what that sort of leads to is uh you know a couple of like practices
that we have as part of our culture so the first one is uh practicing empathy to gain insights and it's not just practicing empathy in terms of customers and figuring out what customer pain points and problems we can solve but given our distributed nature in terms of having a global footprint and a lot of our go to market teams you know folks in sales and and marketing and customer
success are in different continents or geographies we have to make sure that we actually practice that internally so when we are interacting with folks let's say in San Francisco and those folks are out there meeting some of our large customers and stuff you know how do we in the product organization understand their perspective and bring that
perspective you know into how we design prioritize and build products so I think like that's that's one thing uh that's unique I would say the other thing that's less to do with the location but I think is is sort of the core you know cultural value or philosophy that that Andre who's the founder and CEO has instilled in all of us is practicing sort of teamwork you know how do we
actually come together as a team and uh and bring down sort of the silos that might exist across functions right and I'll talk a little bit around how we are structured in the product organization so that it's a cross-functional perspective that we bring to everything that we're doing because we believe the best work happens when we bring different diverse perspectives to the
problem and then you know go create the outcome that the customer is looking for I want to pull on these threads actually real quick so you talked about this value of empathy and the importance of having empathy across because you guys are locating different locations and have different cultures and also this idea of teamwork what's something that
you've done that helps you do that either build empathy and maintain empathy across teams or make sure that people work in in teams and not like hey there's this other team over there doing something else one of the most powerful sort of uh things that I've seen work is uh is the questions that you ask the questions that you ask when uh you know you're going through uh product review
or you're running to sit down and talk to someone and trying to understand why did they prioritize something over the other and uh and was it something that was uh done through interactions they've had with folks internally or externally so I think it's the questions the set of questions to ask in terms of like how did they get to where they are today and
was it informed by uh understanding of uh the insights that collectively the organization has was it informed by their understanding of where the market is involving uh you know where the competition is going was it informed through the series of insights they have either through inbound feedback that's coming through our different channels where customers are giving feedback or
you know some outbound interactions that they've had so I think sort of just like trying to double click and getting to the details in terms of what Insight LED them to recommend certain things or or make a left turn or a right turn is is where I think think is the most powerful way to to make sure that you know those things are informed through through
practicing empathy internally and externally got it so there's this kind of cultural uh value of just assuming good intention and asking questions to understand where someone came from I don't know if you'll have something off the top of your head but is there a story or an example of that comes to mind where that was done well or not done well I don't know and something you
you recently were building maybe there are certain things like for example uh anytime we're trying to build a new experience like one of the approach we want to take is like very quickly validate that our original hypothesis uh you know is that sound or not and we are big fans of the design Sprint framework you know so uh what Jake Knapp has done
I think is is really amazing in a short five-day window you can get a small set of people to uh you know quickly mock up a concept you know convert it into some sort of a prototype and then go out there and get some sort of a validation so oftentimes when we're working on some of these new things we have are our product teams that are focused on zero
to one initiatives run this five-day initiative and at the end of it we say you know oh this is great like uh you know who did you sort of get insight from so there's a capability that we recently released it's called Miro talk track which essentially uh allows you to asynchronously do a uh you know do asynchronous collaboration by recording audio video on top of a mirror board and
we had sort of two fundamental choices we could make one we could go down the path of what everyone's doing where you could do like a screen recording and then you know spit out a series of videos like pixels being captured or what we did was we actually went down a different path and the path that we went on was we basically synchronized the movement of a board so let's say you
know Lenny's presenting a board you know some template he's created in terms of best practices for PMS but he wants to have you know some sort of a talk track on top of it and all the audio video feed and what we're doing is we're actually capturing the movement of the board that Lenny is going through along with the video talk track that's on top
and the reason why we did that was because we had an Insight that came through some of our interviews with what what our users want to do is they want to use Miro for collaboration uh while communication is an important aspect of how teams come together where we believe our sweet spot is that we want people to use Mira for collaboration and by making
sure that they could actually use a video recording and while the video recording is playing they could add in a sticky note they could add in a comment they could actually you know give a reaction we were able to develop this Insight by practicing empathy as part of the design Sprint framework when we went and started to show our additional concept and we evolved and built on on
top of that that is a really cool story and that came out of this Sprint framework these five-day Sprint approach that's right that is cool I gotta have that guy on this podcast uh Jake nappy said right yes yes yes I I can text him right now and I can make the introduction so let's uh let's pull them right into this podcast live exactly tell us how the Sprint process works
that is awesome some this connects a little bit to another question I wanted to ask around the top is you guys are in really competitive space it feels like Mira was very early in online collaborative whiteboarding space and then I think during covet it just became a huge you know the remote work exploding list like holy everyone needs this immediately and I over the
years many companies have come into the space the URL in and it feels like mirror continues to do extremely well like I remember when figma launched fig Jam there was a lot of just like neroes dead and figma's getting into the space their Juggernaut game over clearly that's not been the case and it just feels like I don't know what it is internally that you all do that
continues to allow you to compete and continue to innovate in the space and I'm curious just like is there something to how Mira approaches competition and also just uh I don't know the way they approach these sorts of challenges that is unique or interesting that you can share if you look at the mission uh for Miro uh you know we Empower teams to create the next
big thing and our focus is to enable you know teams that are you know innovating and and generally Innovation happens at the intersection of of a bunch of you know cross-functional folks coming together you know like we discussed folks in product management or design or engineering or analytics or product marketing or research and what we find
uh Lenny is that you know there are a lot of tools out there and those tools are generally sort of focused on a particular Persona and you know maybe they're trying to solve the needs of a designer and a designer has a workflow that they're trying to do and they're using a specific tool and they they sit at the adjacency of extending that core use case the fundamental value that
mural is that we enable teams and and I think like what's unique about our product and and we can talk about the capabilities and road maps and use cases that we are investing in and we already have as part of the product is that we take a team-centric lens right so we're not saying hey we're building a tool that just works for designers or
hey we're building a tool that just works for engineers because we fundamentally believe that Innovation happens when cross-functional teams come together and when you look at the problem through that lens you realize that you have to actually architect Your solution you have to think about the use cases and you have to go and prioritize certain experiences that are are
different and our customers see uh value in that right and I think like that's probably one sort of big macro aspect of how we think about sort of our our capabilities and and products and why our customers think of us differently so let's say I'd say that's one point I think the second thing is Miro is actually used you know obviously by by teams that are creating these
these these Innovative products and and uh and we actually have broad applicability across Industries and verticals so while you know some tools might be hyper focused on sort of digital experiences and and and and miros has a great set of offerings there in terms of core capabilities you know what we find is that Miro is used equally by companies in manufacturing by
companies in healthcare uh you know by uh companies uh you know our architecture and engineering and construction functions functions by companies uh you know that are in Aerospace uh you know uh you know governmental agencies and medical agencies and so on and so forth so I think uh the platform is actually much more agnostic in terms of its
capabilities and what we offer that actually makes it more accessible and appealing uh to organizations that want to go beyond you know uh just like you know digital experiences and then I would say finally uh there are a set of capabilities that are available very very uniquely to Miro that are valued you know by uh by our users that again is a big reason people come to Miro so
for example if Lenny is trying to conduct you know a big workshop for with a bunch of product folks and he wants to facilitate that workshop and wants to uh you know have uh you know certain folks focus on one part of the board and what others focus on the other part you know then there are some Advanced sort of uh capabilities that enable certain use
cases like workshops or you know if you want to use uh uh you know Miro for some team rituals or from some agile practices they're sort of core set of capabilities uh you know that you could use the product for that are missing in some of the other capabilities so I would say a combination of all of those three things uh you know continue to sort of Drive uh differentiation and I
would say on top of that uh you know we are uh you know we are a big fan of our community and we believe that Community love is is what drives uh you know us you know that's the fuel that sort of keeps uh keeps us going every single day awesome so just to kind of summarize him as taking notes as you're chatting just thinking about what allows you all to
continue to do well in the market considering all the competition constantly coming at you one is you mentioned just there's kind of like a innate multi-functional architecture which is hard for someone to copy if they weren't built from that without the start so it sounds like you're focusing on a much like a wide spectrum of personas and it's not just Tech
employees basically also just there's like specific features that end up being really important that maybe people have have a hard time building and then and then this last piece of the community awesome yeah let's dig into the product team a little bit and understand how y'all build product and structure product team how many PMS are there at Miro and then just
broadly how many employees just to give people a set of a little bit of context give or take about 1800 employees at Miro uh globally across all of the 12 hubs and uh specifically in terms of the number of product managers we are we're over over 50 PMS in the team and then how are the how's the product team structured is it like outcome oriented is it product area oriented is it user
Persona oriented is it something else how do you how do you think about the structure of the product team yeah so I would say it's it's it's maybe a hybrid uh structure that we have uh but uh the sort of the foundation of the uh of the team setup is uh is around Persona so uh we have what we refer to as streams you know some companies refer to as domains
but uh essentially it's a set of individuals that are focused on solving the problems for a key Persona so just to give you an example we have a stream uh that's focused on Enterprise and in Enterprise we are looking at the it admin Persona we're looking at the security Persona or the compliance Persona so you know there are a set of folks who are creating a roadmap and
innovating in that uh you know for that uh audience uh there's another stream which is called platform where we are going after the developer uh you know install base uh you know folks that want to use Miro as a platform and build apps that they can actually make available either on the marketplace for everyone to use or they could be developers that are inside of a
large organization and they're trying to integrate Miro with their specific use cases and workflows and Business Systems so that's another sort of stream that's focused on that and and there are a couple of other streams like that and then finally there are some some just like horizontal sort of streams if you will like you know we have a big Focus
given that we are a plg let company around growth and self-serve business we've got a stream that's actually focused on our core internal infrastructure you know we've got a stream that's actually focused on data science that's doing all of the magic uh that we started to release in terms of Miro AI et cetera Etc so I would say it's a combination of those at the heart
of it is we are focused on personas and we are sort of aligning people around uh you know solving problems and creating value for that Persona that is really interesting one of the downsides of a Persona based approach I imagine is that products just features keep getting added that solve that user's pain points what have you learned about keeping the
product consistent and having kind of a holistic perspective on the experience how do you how do you address those challenges architecturally like sort of like two sort of things that we have done that allow us to not sort of pigeon hold ourselves into that specific way of working and and I completely agree with you like uh you know like you could lead
to that the first one is actually when we think about the product org like uh we call our or it's called Amped Amped and this is actually going back to our earlier Point planning we had around like what's unique about the product culture what's unique about Miro and we talked about like teams coming together you know reduce you know removing barriers or silos cross-functionally so
amp stands for like analytics marketing product engineering and design and everything that we do in the product org when we say the product org we actually don't need product managers we actually don't mean product managers designers and Engineers what we mean by product org in Miro is this amped function and by having this cross-functional representation where product marketing
team is deeply deeply embedded inside of each of these streams what we do is that we have you know different perspectives that come in where they say oh wait a second you know did you think about the end user experience and if you think about the end user experience you know you have someone in the team that says wait a second did you actually think
about the Enterprise requirements or what's what's needed and the largest corporation so I think uh the unique setup of bringing these cross-functional folks allows us to sort of course correct the second thing is uh sort of the the ways of working that we have you know we have these product reviews that happen so you know we generally classify anything that we are doing uh
you know you know in terms of its complexity around like you know you know small medium or or high complexity and anything that's that's uh being uh you know worked on is actually uh being uh shared with the entire organization if it's something that's small the medium it's actually uh you know shared with the entire you know product org in fact
like if you are non-product you can actually subscribe to that slack Channel as well so everybody sees what the product org is working on everybody sees like what the core hypothesis is like what are what is the solution for that like what is the uh proposed design for it like what how are we thinking about the capabilities and then anything that's big actually goes through a
formal process like a product review where there's a meeting and like a bunch of us are in there and uh and it's up to uh sort of us including the product leaders to basically make sure that we are connecting the dots in terms of having a much more holistic perspective and I would say lastly you know as Miro has sort of scaled like the spectrum of
companies you know all the way from you know a team that might have two or three people and might be taking out their credit card and using Miro for their own team all the way to a large corporation that might have fifty thousand eighty thousand employees all of them are using Miro uh you know we've we've come to realize that at some point like you know
the Deep Enterprise requirements need to be encapsulated in a set of uh you know requirements or best practices and we need to make sure that those get democratized across all of the feature teams so when I'm thinking about building a new feature you know I have a checklist in front of me where I can say here are the 10 things that I need to think of that I need to incorporate
early on in my thinking in the architecture in the definition of the process so that it doesn't come Downstream I would say that's an area where we're still working on and more recently we put like more focus and energy and there's a product product manager who's now leading that particular Charter I love all these details uh so this amped structure I
love that so there's analytics it's a product marketing Amazon marketing and then product engineering design it's it's rare that you see marketing as a part of teams as a leadership kind of part of the leadership group do you have a sense of what impact adding that had on the team or where that came from like or is that just historically been something Nero has prioritized marketing
and product marketing so this was done uh you know before I I got here and I wish I could take credit for it but I can't and uh and I think this was uh you know uh the the result of an observation which is quite similar to uh what you're saying which is you know while we might be developing a lot of the features and PMs are sort of thinking Bottoms Up in
terms of what uh we are building we might find that what we have built might not be able to capture uh the imagination of what we originally thought it would and a big part of that is how are you going to think about positioning how are you going to think about competitive differentiation how are we going to package it up so that you know the sellers that are out there
are able to position it in a way that the the customer uh you know in this case the buyer uh might be an I.T professional you know might be you know a line of business leader can basically see uh the the the full vision of where we are going and I think by having product marketing as part of amp uh you know we now bring that unique perspective that may be missing in
certain teams PMS are more acting as product owners or more focused on like core sort of problem and solution but not thinking about positioning because that's so important especially uh you know when you're thinking about a market that we are increasingly in that uh that there is uh there is competition there and that's one of the first things we
started off with and that's top of mind for you as well uh is that everything that we are doing you know has to be looked through that lens and and one of the core philosophies that I have Lenny is that the success of a company is a direct relation of what the competition allows you to do I feel like not many people sort of talk about that but uh
but in many cases in my professional career and I've been at it for you know close to 24 25 years is that every single instance when I looked at a company accelerated their growth or or there was a deceleration of growth it was a direct relation uh to what the competition allowed you uh to do and obviously you know you have to do everything that you that you should be
doing but competition is that the biggest variable that that allows you to figure that out I want to hear more about your core product philosophies that was but uh let me dig into the one you just shared yeah so what you find is that uh the way you grow or stop growing is often a direct result of your competition is there an example that comes to mind like I'm guessing maybe
box versus Dropbox is an experience you had there or if not what what's an example of that that you've experienced to make it a little more concrete even uh you know for those of us who've been in the in the collaboration space and I've been doing collaboration and productivity apps for over 20 years or over two decades you know at some point
uh uh you know uh you have companies like Microsoft that get really attracted to uh to a space and and you can see the trajectory of a business that's growing at a certain clip and then all of a sudden there's there's a there's a competitive product that enters that has the might of distribution and the might of uh of pricing uh and that's just like
a direct example and I think I've seen that multiple times uh first at Adobe where I was part of the document Cloud business clearly saw that you know at box as well and uh 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 there was a category leader and they were growing at a certain clip or a certain pace and all
of a sudden there were a bunch of entrants that get in and and what happens to your growth rate and it's all dependent on how strong is the competitor in terms of providing a good enough Solution that's one and 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 I 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 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 could leverage and to how they're approaching their product strategy it uh it 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 going to write a book on them I feel we'll have to come back to talk about that that's right yeah uh and uh and I think like it's it it sort of comes down to you know uh you know how do you think about uh your unique place you know relative to uh you know all of these players and uh and in in in in your customers mind are they able to
clearly understand what is the unique value that you deliver relative to everything else and uh part of that is is is uh is the unique capabilities you provide part of that is how you're packaging those unique abilities to them uh and and making sure that they in their mind can see how you coexist in this overall sort of ecosystem that they might be investing in to enable their
employees or you know to enable them to to operate and so I think it's it's sort of looking at that from from that lens yeah got it so I'm hearing is be very clear about 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 or worse version of this thing right here's why we're different in making sure that's really clear exactly and I think the the other thing I would say like there's 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 gonna take the lens off products which is uh my core philosophy is like every single day every single time somebody is pushing your code to production and 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 same and and the lens for this
Lenny is actually from a customer's perspective from the end user perspective and and the thing is that you know if you are a player where there's no one else in the market that that's one thing right so that that's great like you know kudos to you for actually identifying uh a Blue Ocean strategy and and sort of executing to that but most markets most
products actually have uh you know either direct or indirect competitors that are available so from the customer's mind you know you're doing something the competitor is 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 and so with every release that your
competitor is making and every lease that you're making you're either may you know making chess points moves against them positive points or or are you 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 uh 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 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 and so I think it allows at least for product leaders to make some
high quality decisions around the pets that they're making and how they're going to play out in terms of like eventual uh you know once the dust settles you know and 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 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 essentially what you're saying is that you find that being very close to and understanding the competition really well is 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 we operationalize that to kind of track that and then also just like how do you not over obsessed with we'll just catch up get more features that kind of thing like how do you find that balance I'll
be honest like I I don't think we've figured it out we haven't cracked the nut in terms of how to operationalize this but I I know you are based smarter than me on on some of these things so so maybe on this end and then come up with something all right that'll be uh that'll be something we work on yeah um any other product philosophies that uh
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 it's fed into the needle right here which is uh uh you know we we uh we talked about sort of how do you ladder this up and stuff and and then the question is okay how do you know like you know that uh
you know everything that you're doing is that uh 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 or should you move fast and like make certain bets and then decide certain things and stuff yeah and and I think like there are two sort of uh views that are out there you
know my 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 uh you know this is particularly true when you are in a market that is uh that is competitive um and the reason for that is that uh you know if you consider yourself as an innovation Centric company and and and
you believe that uh uh you know you are building experiences that fundamentally don't exist uh 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 speed uh is is the single biggest determinant in terms of uh in my experience in terms of uh you know who ends up being more successful versus not
and I think like this uh that 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 uh I have a lot of respect for that in certain areas you should do that but when uh 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 uh you know speed is something that you should accelerate for uh for the organization you know I think like Frank's footman uh you know talks about this uh you know a lot in his book and 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 to see 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 uh you know West or I need to do 30 degrees uh 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 uh those insights then uh then I think you know you can continue to be ahead of the pack in terms of you know building building your product and business you'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 slootman'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 in show notes but yeah what have you found helps
create urgency and generally helps your teams move faster other than just like move faster everyone my fundamental sort of uh belief here Lenny is that uh every product manager I can talk to product managers because uh 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 thankless
jobs like you get to yeah and it's like why why do you have to do this and there's like uh uh but like it it it attracts a certain personality and that personality is driven by Challenge and that personality wants to prove that they they can solve this Challenge and and and and and and and do something amazing so I think fundamentally you know uh the product Persona actually
wants to move fast I think the reason why in some cases we are not able to move fast is because of uh 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 uh can can instantly raise their hand and and call out that there are challenges that they are running into and then the job of the leadership team uh the the product management team is to essentially go and quickly resolve those issues right and I think like if you are
able to resolve those issues then what it does is it actually starts a virtual 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 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're now going to raise your hand and what that does is it X starts to build this organizational competency in terms of how you can figure out you know what to build and you know we all find these people in our organizations where there's someone somehow is able to do certain things in one tenth the 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 code 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 formula in terms of like hey we are able to deliver faster I really like this topic what I'm hearing is one of the biggest roots of slowing slowdown in a company and product development is is blockers not being unblocked and I always feel the same thing like I feel 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 he's talked 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 that
helps you do that it's like connected I would say we are trying to sort of systematically like ingrain this in the culture of of the organization so we we have a motto in the in the product order it's 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 lady
like from like you know performance 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 so anytime as a PM at Miro 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 and you can say hey if it was a small medium or 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 of it 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 uh you know in in applications and experiences that we see around us and we are 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 close when 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 our 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 it's 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 a b c d e and we're making it available to other designers so they can actually start to build sort
of that 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 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 it 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 linear is designed for the way modern software teams work what users love about linear are the powerful
keyboard shortcuts efficient GitHub Integrations cycles that actually create progress and built-in project updates that keep everyone in sync in short it just works linear is the default tool of choice among startups and it Powers a wide range of large established companies such as versel retool and cash out see for yourself by product teams
described using linear as magical visit linear.app Lenny to try linear for free with your team and get 25 off when you upgrade that's linear dot app slash Lenny okay 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 yeah 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 these are not high quality yeah so it's actually both uh so generally what happens is that uh the design leadership team is is doing
this and there's one particular design leader who's the the designated person to make sure that this is happening on on a regular basis and and right now the way we're using it is that we're actually using it to to calibrate and align around the design leadership around what we mean by high quality because it's one of those things right it's like uh
you know if you've never seen colors and I ask you Lenny describe pink and and compare that to red and like if you haven't seen like color like how do you describe colors you can 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 but if you show specific examples it's very clear oh I get it I I get why how pink is different than red but if I try to describe it it's gonna be very hard so we got into these endless conversations at some point about a year ago where we were 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 how do we Define those attributes and how do we measure those attributes and how do we enable people to do that and it felt like it's 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 AI systems are like classifications that's right that's right and uh and I think it's worked uh uh worked decently
well I would say like with most things like uh 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 but I think it's it's it's been uh it's been a good start and now you know obvious we are sharing this more openly with the with others in the
in the org when I said that I imagined you uh from the outside you have a very unique culture and approach your product that's a great example of that I've never heard of a process like this so what I'm hearing is essentially you're 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 PM's 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 of moving faster and then you track and measure that somehow can 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 the there is like uh you know velocity is more like the game of golf uh uh where you're just playing against yourself like it's it's not like if Lenny and Verona are out at 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 gonna just hit the ball so it's like how better how much better can we get so I think our core philosophy is around that and what we're trying to do is that you know on 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 are 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 uh you know how long does it take for you to actually deliver that value and you know we have uh you know we have a product uh process that we we follow which starts
with with the p strad which is a strategy and then we go into P0 which is uh 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 you know are we hitting the metrics that we originally had uh defined up front before we we decided to work on this and
you know you have all of these stage Gates and then we we basically classify everything that we're doing in small medium large you know and 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 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 actually 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 with the broader team and uh and usually like the product Ops function uh we we call it product Excellence internal like sort of product Excellence function uh is is recording some of these things uh I would say uh 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 on some of those Dimensions but all of this data is available and uh we uh we provide it openly and folks can Benchmark themselves again that so cool okay save this P Strat he called it document which is kind of like an initial concept and
then it's interesting is the p0rp1 which is often for bugs but it's cool that you use it for defining your products so pstrad is just like an idea pitch P0 is a spec basically like a one pager for the product and then P1 and PT 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 yeah exactly wow that is extremely cool uh 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 this stuff and maybe you just plug and play the more the merrier yes shifting a little bit it sounds like you guys are doing scrum in some form you just talk about just broadly the product development process like how long do you or your Sprints how long do you plan for in the future in detail specifically just like high level how does the product development process work so
there are certain things that uh you know I learned at box and uh you know that inspired uh some things that we uh we do uh at Miro and there are certain things that we've we've also like one of the things that uh We've instituted is sort of you know a roadmap process right so that's sort of the first thing around uh how uh the different teams uh are are
looking at you know the the things that they're going to work on so we have a rolling six month roadmap uh it seems large but uh we've got like I mentioned a number of Enterprise customers and if I've learned one thing that large Enterprises like is is asking for a roadmap review so that tends to be you know my favorite meeting of sitting down
with the Enterprise leaders and walking through what we are working on so what we've done is we've 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 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 eighty percent of the things that we claim to be on the roadmap will get done that's that's the target and for the for the next three months because it's six months so the first three months is eighty percent the next three months is 50 so we have a much
lower level of resolution in 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 and 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 so that's that's what we do and that's all at uh on the backdrop of an annual strategy that we publish so every year uh you know we uh 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 okrs 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 roadmaps which get updated every three months and then inside of uh of the teams we uh you know enable teams to be quite autonomous in terms of uh some of the rituals that they're doing we want them uh you know to obviously Embrace best practices we've got a team of agile coaches uh that uh you know share best
practices or you know are available you know to to help if there are certain specific uh uh you know needs uh that 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 maybe are unique so for example we have something called as Miro connect you know which happens every other Friday and uh and uh you know every other
Friday you uh 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 and sometimes it goes uh really late you've got a bunch of product teams uh you know sitting around tables and it feels like oh it's like a trade show or something and you just people are coming in
they're having a good time you've got a 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 and it 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 uh Hub and uh they they were saying we're working on this feature you know and there's an you know there's an engineer uh 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 uh you know something like this and uh 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 and
they're like sure more the merrier go ahead so this person you know uh you know puts down their beer and says okay I'm having a good time let me just head back to uh to my home and in the next three or four hours goes and coats the entire thing makes a pull request and next day in the morning one of the engineers from this core team that was exhibiting at mural connect you know
looks at the pull requests you know reviews the code and says yes something that would have taken you know three months for this core 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 I know how this is done I can actually help you here and and went
ahead and and did the right thing and so we're trying to create these magic moments it happens once uh once in a while but we have one success story and uh I like to tell that in every opportunity that I get but that's another sort of sort of unique thing that we've done in terms of uh bookending things around how how we operate here that story is like a dream
for any PM just imagine at least saving months of work with one conversation I imagine people were like how do we replicate this on often I love that with the uh these meetings just understand if their team is in 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 yeah I
mean like right now what we've figured out is that uh it is really hard to do these events uh you know over uh 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 uh that's usually how uh these
things are operated yeah got it okay so you have six month rolling road maps you have a yearly Vision strategy for the company two weeks Sprints is there also a quarterly okr sort of process or is it yes or no there is okay can you just talk a little bit about how that works yes yes yes at Miro we practice okrs and you know it starts off at the company
level and then uh you know those company level okrs are taken by the amped organization like we describe it's the amped organization and then we break it up and uh you know I would say like we have refined it over the period of time the two years that I've been uh at Miro and and uh early on we were doing uh okrs uh uh on uh on a quarterly basis and I would say more recently we've
actually evolved to six month KRS and what we found was that you know six month was the right Cadence in terms of giving enough time for teams to basically push forward uh in in executing these KRS and minimizing uh the quote unquote uh overhead of uh of uh uh of doing replan every single quarter um and uh and 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 amped you know we are looking at our KRS for the amped organization on a monthly basis doing traction however the planning uh the targets uh are are done on a on a six month basis I love how ok ours could just be anything like it could be every
six months could have objectives could have key 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 it's great that is so true um and again if there's any templates that your team could share of the way you do that stuff that would be amazing and we'll include that in the show notes
yeah absolutely because I think like as you would expect like we run mirror on mirror so so there's like a lot of uh things that we could share as templates in terms of how we are running things on on Miro not just as okrs but in terms of product reviews and you know we have a ways 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 awesome and that's a great segue to another question I was going to ask is just what other tools what's in a stack of the product teams uh workflow so Miro obviously maybe talk about like what you use mirror for but then what else is in
there like what do you use for task management book tracking things like that design sort of starting uh from the bottom up like infrastructure up view like so we uh all of our uh tickets are are handled in uh in in jira and uh you know we're using some of the jira newer capabilities in jira in terms of uh coming up with road maps and you know
coming up with the priorities and stuff uh on top of that the uh all of the specs uh you know uh generally get recorded uh in Confluence having said that we're actually a big fan of you know tools like you know Google Docs as well as Coda uh you know that allows us to track our KRS in a in a pretty effective way you know on on top of that obviously like we we use Miro a lot uh I
would say uh for a lot of our things uh especially on the on the product and and design side uh of the team you know generally uh all of our uh insights get captured inside of mirror 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 mirror board so Miro
access the content Hub or a team hub for a particular project you know once you capture all of those insights then generally uh you know all of the brainstorming uh and and team ideation happens on the mirror board as well so Miro is actually also used as a tool to facilitate meetings and workshops once all of that you know is 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 mirror 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 I 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 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 top track feature that we have and a lot of teams what they would do is that they would actually send you uh you know five minute 10 minute talk track in advance
and it's just a link to a mirror 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 mirror 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 anytime 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 so people are just focusing on the comments that were added as part of the async product review so that when they meet uh synchronously they can use that so mirror boards are used for that as
well and I would say now a lot of our dashboarding shows up in mirobos 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 are in looker and what you would typically find is that our analyst team and product teams will just grab a link to a
local dashboard put it on a mirror board and it unfolds into a full visualization and unlike a screen grab you never have to go updated because right there on the mirror 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 in across the
entire journey of product development where a single mirror board 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 the each seems roadmap or do you use something like jira yeah so I think like we've got a couple of tools uh for for Road mapping and our observation is that while those tools are great for for for
The Unique needs that they're solving we haven't found like a like a universal solution for Road mapping so there are some teams that use Miro you know for Road mapping and they would use the kanban sort of uh widget in in we wrote 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 uh you know these 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 Talk tracks so what happens is that we have our entire roadmap published out as a mirror board for enablement purposes so
that that's an artifact that is approved to be shown to a customer uh and uh what you will see is that you'll see five or six recordings in there and uh 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 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-serve sort of meet your needs uh by by using Miro and then this capability that we have that'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 jira
or Miro for their roadmap 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 at mirror specifically of just like the how to balance investments in these two buckets or maybe three buckets you know bugs incremental work and then just big bets how do you think about that so uh you know we have some uh some rule of thumbs in terms of like how we want to allocate
uh 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 uh 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 are important and hence we need to invest in those uh in those critical areas but I would say in general you know uh Innovation versus not uh you know you know varies on a spectrum of anywhere from 60 to 80 percent uh so I would say about 20 to 40 percent of the available uh capacity at any given time is either
getting allocated uh to uh to architectural initiatives you know there's a 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 a critical part of the component and there are other teams that are maybe more end user focused and are more UI focused where that allocation is lower but I think general rule of thumb is 20 is always a given but it can go as high as 40 to 50 percent
on bigger bets and longer term thinking yeah 22 20 to 40 uh goes on the technology related initiatives oh got it I mean like uh infrastructure maintenance making sure everything's there exactly yeah and then what about just a big long-term bets that you're not expecting to pay off anytime soon do you have a heuristic of just what percentage of say total resources you put there
you've probably uh seen this uh you know the framework of like three Horizon like it's uh it's quite popular in like McKenzie like Carson school and so on and so forth is like Horizon one business which is what we're you know the thing that's delivering uh food on the table uh generally there's about a 70 allocation of resources that we have to overtake then there is a ryzen 2
which is an adjacent thing uh you know over the next 12 to 36 months we believe it's material usually that tends to be around 20 of the allocation and then there's Horizon 3 which is like three years out you know three to five years you know next Generation things and that's about 10 of the ratio so it's like 70 2010 across Horizon one two and three awesome
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 Miro in which you've learned about growing in terms of like product leadership and like uh uh what you know what we believe is is is is is is the way we what we want product leaders to be developed and
I think it's like more of a people philosophy and so you know we have our product leadership which is which constitutes of all of the folks who are running all of these uh streams and I always tell them that you have two personas that uh you have to think about everyone who's in the product leadership team is 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 they're 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 is Drive Improvement so 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 art stick 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 as leaders in the organization are doing the right thing for the uh for the company and and 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 uh tomorrow we have calibrations we have our annual sort of review cycle happening in the company always fun and so critical uh you know
as a leader because it sets the tone uh 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 just hold each other's 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 uh to 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 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 is 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 uh
practicing uh feedback in a very open and constructive way and uh focusing on what is important for the business and not shying away from having uh some of those uh those observations and conversations you know not shying away from them uh but it's all in the lens of like what is the right thing to do for the business uh and and if you feel that uh that one or more members of the
leadership team are not living up to what needs to be done than just voicing it and it's not like you're complaining or anything it's just like I have this perspective is this the right perspective or not because 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 that 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 you know in terms of how they operate has anyone uh 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 oh oh all the time you know all the time I I I when we do our offsides this is actually a fun thing is that every offsite that I do with the leadership team usually there's a one to two hour session where it is feedback to Veron and I actually do it openly I will have about eight to ten people in the room and I
will uh 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 like it's it's interesting like that they open up in in very amazing ways and I think I I love it because it helps me become better it helps me identify my blind spots but
what it does is because I do it in an open way it builds a lot of trust it brings trust that uh you know I do it openly and I'm I'm an open book and they can share whatever they want not just with me but openly in front of everyone are you uh 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 like
finding uh time with me tends to be a a bit of a hard thing and and you know generally there's all always like this feedback which is like need more time you know maybe more responsiveness over email or slack or something like that and that's that's an area that I'm constantly working on and improving so yeah that feels like a cop-out like 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 unblock 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 sites I don't want to keep you too long sure the first is something I'm 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 I 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 you know I think like the the fundamental thing there is that we always had like user first approach and 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 to start to talk about the the product and and given the collaborative nature of the
product uh you know some of the early adopters invited people who were also earlier doctors and sort of the the flywheel started to uh to work uh you know I've heard that we did a fair amount of content marketing and like you know listing the product on on sites like captera sort of helped there was uh you know some early investments in terms of uh uh uh SEO and and organic growth
so you know there was a focus there uh which which was the the main source of driving you know traffic the top of the funnel came through that the the product teams were uh very intensely focused on sort of building viral Loops as a key mechanism of driving growth once the the traffic came in and every interaction that actually introduced barrier you
know 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 uh you know the product could be effectively embraced and it was an evolution uh over a period of time uh you know there was also the fact that uh early on in the journey uh you know some of the features were presented on a
trial basis uh uh you know and then later on like sort of the model was evolved from uh from a from a trial basis uh time limited to a premium model that further sort of accelerated you know the growth for the business I would say like those were some of the approaches and uh that were taken to get to you know the first thousand users or so so you talked about how mural grows
where it has 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 and then they start using it and then they share with people that they want to work with and create this Loop of growth and I imagine that's how Miro mostly grew initially and continues to grow is
there anything surprising or unintuitive about how mural grows that is beyond that I imagine sale is a part of it and we can talk about that but is there anything else that is interesting that is worth mentioning no I think like that's that's the the key of uh of the growth I think they're like specific use cases where uh 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 they invite 10 15 20 50 100 200 300 people to that Workshop so there's 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 for that use case or other use cases I think the other sort of accelerant in in all of
this is uh is the is the templates that we have in particular you know the role that uh mirroverse plays in all of this and uh you know just just to give you uh an example uh here like there was a template uh you know which was created around FIFA World Cup right so there was a FIFA World Cup diagram uh Cornell X you know he's the founder and managing
director of a Canadian strategic service design consultancy firm he created this mirrorless template and uh you know it uh you know it had over 100 000 views and about 15 000 copies were made of this single template and you know you know given sort of the popularity of all of this like it actually got you know indexed by uh by Google so when you went
in the search you actually saw the the mirror verse FIFA template show up when you were trying to search for uh your you know uh FIFA World Cup and that was another sort of acquisition Channel copper funnel that actually Drew uh a lot of users to it so I think I would say uh you know the the mirror versus uh is also like a key Excel rent to uh this if you had to think about the pie chart
of how mirror grows what percentage roughly would you say is Word of Mouth organic versus what you just described which is essentially SEO versus sales outbound sales how do you think about is there a way to kind of model that simply without getting into specific uh numbers and and stuff like I would say like fundamentally uh Miro is a product-led
growth company and product channels are one of the highest contributors for growth of users you know as the business has evolved you know to uh to serve the needs of uh some of the largest corporations in in the world you know the Enterprise segment and uh the Enterprise Persona when they're trying to provision uh Miro for uh you know tens of thousands of users who then go
can convert you know conduct hundreds of thousands of workshops on Miro that invite like you know millions of users on the platform is a key part of of the flywheel uh that we are seeing so I would say product channels are probably uh you know very strong uh and increasingly Enterprise is a key part of of that acceleration hey great segue to
our final question which is the idea that you start a 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 like Road company but how to make that relationship work and have a
product work work effectively with a sales org there are sort of a few learnings and I would say maybe this is one area where uh you know we're working on like how how we could be doing better in terms of bringing our ourselves uh closer uh you know to our high touch and bring High touch closer to uh to self-serve in terms of uh how we operate overall you
know it's a lot of hard work I would say first of all basically to bring about these organizations uh together and you have to be very deliberate around the points of interest intersection and you have to make sure that uh you know these organizations don't consider themselves as as competition like you know it's it's it's it's one product one company it's just two two channels of how we are
are serving uh our customers you know there are some things that we've done which is uh you know have the product marketing team uh you know that basically Works across both of these functions and and make sure that uh you know they are are bridging uh you know what we are hearing from the sales organization in terms of what directly customers need uh on the Enterprise side
and then what do we need uh you know on the on the South Side uh you know there's a full sort of process Us in terms of how the handoff happens across the maturity of the account you know it can start as a self-serve you know it drives adoption and once there's adoption you know there's a hand raiser 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 so we've we've over the years sort of architected and like you know built the entire funnel and and what the process is and and that's also sort of a key part of how all of this operates but like I said like I think like there are
a few areas where we could uh we could further streamline how how we operate and think of it as sort of one single unit I imagine that it's true for every company out there yes one maybe final question before we get to a very exciting lightning round what are some features that people could look forward to that are coming with Mira we recently about a month ago announced uh you know
Miro AI um on the backdrop of uh all the amazing work that's happening around generative Ai and large language models and stuff so I think uh you know it was really really exciting to see all of the the community enthusiasm around sort of the use cases that we learned so we're going to be taking it across the finish line and doing a general availability in
the in the coming weeks and months so I think like that's one big thing and we'll be adding more capabilities there just today we actually announced a bunch of really deep enhancements and updates around how hero can be used for team rituals and agile practices so you now uh you know you can actually do perspectives in Miro where you can have a private mode where while Lenny is
typing his feedback during retrospective nobody else can see it and then one click you can reveal it and I just saw some of the results of the feedback and it was created as the number one feature people saw there's also some deeper Integrations in terms of bringing an entire program board from from jira to start to do dependency mapping inside of
Miro uh in a in a fun and collaborative way to to use this dependency mapping along with program board to start to do AI planning program program increment planning which is essentially scrum of scrums or big room planning that's happening so 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 uh you
know estimation of Sprint story points and so on and so forth so now there's a whole uh plethora of capabilities and apps that are available as part of the platform that allow you uh to uh to have your entire team uh you know conduct your uh your team rituals in in Miro 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 like that's been a big update as well amazing with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you are you ready yes all right let's do it what are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people one is I love this uh when breath becomes here by Paul kalaniti uh
you know it's like one of those really emotional books uh that at the end of that you might have tears in your eyes yeah but really uh really amazing we talked about Frank sukman's amp it up and then Satya nadella's hit refresh and I think like philosophically like some of the things that we we talked about today you know are Inspirations that I I
found in 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 uh Sunny season yeah I've enjoyed a lot I think it's like a very positive and uplifting message you know I think the performance is huge it's it's humorous you know the characters are well developed and you know so I think like overall uh it's a
treat at least for me to watch what's a favorite interview question you'd like to ask I actually uh asked a math problem so for those of you who interviewed with me I have this math problem which is based on uh 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 uh post
acquisition of macromedia and it's it's a math problem that allows you very quickly to sort of figure out uh people in terms of their problems solving skills and uh and usually like I 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 very well established standard distribution
of how long it takes for people where do they get stuck and and where they've gotten stuck or those people have 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 uh that's uh that's my favorite question and so you're saying you've uh 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 yes not not directly but like yes 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 it's like no 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 I 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 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 is leading to positive outcomes final question what's your favorite Nero template it's the FIFA World Cup actually I have so like fascinated with what was done uh yeah it's it's the latest one but I think like there's a bunch of them in terms of Retros as well and I think like your template as well amazing we will link to all of those
Varun this was amazing uh everything I expected and more your team is in 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 finding online if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you thank you Eleni uh it was
it was a lot of fun I I enjoyed the our interaction uh and uh you know you folks can find me online on on LinkedIn I think that's probably the best way to uh to connect with me and I think like in terms of uh you know one or two things I can ask everyone is that one is uh 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 miraverse there's a there's a lot of folks who use that and uh 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 you Lenny so uh those are also the users that use Miro so if there's anything we
could do to make the product better if there's things that you feel like we can expand the platform into we would love to hear from you and you know just reach out to me directly over at LinkedIn uh direct message or connect with me there uh and uh yeah and let us know you're here amazing Varun thank you again for being here thanks buddy awesome bye everyone
thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast 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 lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode