YouSaid · the spoken record

Varun Parmar

lines on the record: 87
first: 2023-04-20
most recent: 2023-04-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thank you, Lenny. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed our interaction. You folks can find me online on LinkedIn. I think that's probably the best way to connect with me. And I think in terms of one or two things I can ask everyone is that one is if you are an existing Miro user and you use the product for something interesting, I highly encourage you to contribute it as a template as part of Miroverse. There's a lot of folks who use that. And we would love for you to contribute there. And the second thing is, I know a lot of product development teams, PMs and designers are big fans of you, Lenny. So 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 just reach out to me directly over LinkedIn, direct message or connect with me there.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the FIFA World Cup, actually. I was so fascinated with what was done. Yeah, it's the latest one. But I think there's a bunch of them in terms of retros as well. And I think your template as well.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked about some of that, like sort of removing the roadblocks. I think having this motto of create customer value faster with high quality, just the simplicity of that. And it's actually part of our evaluation rubric. It's part of how we measure ourselves and stuff. So I think just coming up with these simple. Something that I believe is leading to positive outcomes.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually ask a math problem, so for those of you who interviewed with me, I have this math problem which is based on how Adobe created its first Creative Suite bundle. And I was actually part of the team that came up with the pricing and packaging for the first Creative Suite post-acquisition of Macromedia. And it's a math problem that allows you very quickly to sort of figure out people in terms of their problems solving skills. And usually I give that problem to people. I've given it to, I don't know, seven, eight hundred people. So I now have a very, very well-established standard distribution of how long it takes for people, where do they get stuck and where they've gotten stuck. But those people I've hired, like what evidence do I have in terms of using that as a framework in terms of them being able to solve things? So that's my favorite question.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if it's a recent one or not, but like something 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 humorous. The characters are well developed. And so I think overall, it's a treat, at least for me to watch.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is I love this when breath becomes air by Paul Kalanithi, it's like one of those really emotional books that at the end of it you might have tears in your eyes. But really, really amazing. We talked about Frank Switman's amp it up and then Satyan Adela's hit refresh and I think like philosophically like some of the things that we talked about today are inspirations that I found in some of these books.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's also some deeper integrations in terms of bringing an entire program board from Jira to start to do dependency mapping inside of Miro in a fun and collaborative way to use this dependency mapping along with Program Board to start to do VI planning 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 estimation of sprint story points and so on and so forth. So now there's a whole plethora of capabilities and apps that are available as part of the platform that allow you to have your entire team conduct your team rituals in 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.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recently, about a month ago, announced Miro AI on the backdrop of all the amazing work that's happening around generative AI and large language models and stuff. So I think it was really, really exciting to see all of the company enthusiasm around sort of the use cases that we launched. So we're going to be taking it across the finish line and doing general availability in the coming weeks and months. So I think 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 Mero can be used for team rituals and agile practices. So now you can actually do prospectives in Miro where you can have a private mode where while Lenny's typing is feedback during a 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 rated as the number one feature people saw.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An opportunity to expand the account. So over the years, sort of architected and like, you know, built the entire funnel and what the process is. And that's also sort of a key part of how all of this operates. But like I said, I think there are a few areas where we could further streamline how we operate and think of it as sort of one single unit.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These organizations don't consider themselves as competition. It's one product, one company, just two channels of how we are serving our customers. There are some things that we've done, which is have the product marketing team that basically works across both of these functions and makes sure that they are bridging what we are hearing from the sales organization in terms of what directly customers need on the enterprise side and then what do we need on the self-side, there's a full sort of process in terms of how the handoff happens across the maturity of the account. It can start as a self-serve, it drives adoption and once there's adoption, there's a handraiser that happens and then there's a sales rep that gets engaged and you go through the qualification process and then you have”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are sort of a few learnings, and I would say maybe this is one area where we're working on how we could be doing better in terms of bringing our self-closer to our high touch and bringing high touch closer to self-serve in terms of how we operate overall. It's a lot of hard work, I would say, first of all, basically to bring both of these organizations together. And you have to be very deliberate around the points of intersection. And you have to make sure that”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without getting into specific numbers and stuff, I would say fundamentally Miro is a product-led growth company and product channels are one of the highest contributors for growth of users. As the business has evolved to serve the needs of some of the largest corporations in the world, the enterprise segment and the enterprise persona. Tens of thousands of users who then go convert hundreds of thousands of workshops and we wrote that invite millions of users on the platform is a key part of the flywheel that we are seeing. So I would say product channels are probably very strong and increasingly enterprise is a key part of that acceleration.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Director of a Canadian Strategic Service Design Consultancy Firm. He created this mirrose template. And it had over 100,000 views and about 15,000 copies were made of the single template. And given sort of the popularity of all of this, it actually got indexed by Google. So when you went into search, you actually saw the Miroverse FIFA template show up when you were trying to search for FIFA World Cup. And that was another sort of acquisition channel, COPA funnel that actually drew a lot of users to it. So I think I would say the Miro versus is also a key Accelent to this.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that's the key of the growth. I think there are specific use cases where they are uniquely sort of geared towards inviting a lot of net new people. So for example, Miro is loved as a workshopping tool. And so generally one person is using Miro, but they invite 10, 15, 20, 50, 100, 200, 300 people to that workshop. So there are specific use cases where people get introduced to the product and then go and sign up for it and then start to use it for that use case or other use cases. I think the other sort of accelerant in all of this is the templates that we have in particular, the role that Miroverse plays in all of this. And just to give you an example here, there was a template which was created around FIFA World Cup, right? So there was a FIFA World Cup diagram Cornilex, you know, he's the founder and manager.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Loops as a key mechanism of driving growth once the traffic came in. And every interaction that actually introduced barrier, they looked at it and they looked at the data and they said, let's reduce this barrier, let's remove this thing so that the product could be effectively embraced. And it was an evolution over a period of time. There was also the fact that early on in the journey, some of the features were presented on a trial basis. And then later on, like sort of the model was evolved from a trial basis time limited to a premium model that further sort of accelerated the growth for the business. So I would say those were some of the approaches that were taken to get to the first thousand users or so.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the fundamental thing there is that we always had user first approach and reaching out to certain communities that were relevant to what was being a key sort of lighting the fire, if you will, the proverbial way, people to start to talk about the product. And given the collaborative nature of the product, some of the earctors invited people who were also early adopters and sort of the flywheel started to work. I've heard that We did a fair amount of content marketing and like, you know, listing the product on sites like Captera sort of helped. There was some early investments in terms of SEO and organic growth. So there was a focus there, which was the main source of driving traffic. The top of the funnel came through that. The product teams were very intensely focused on sort of building by”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think in general finding time with me tends to be a bit of a hard thing. And generally, there's always this feedback, which is like need more time, maybe more responsiveness over email or Slack or something like that. And that's an area that I'm constantly working on and improving. So yeah.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the time. When we do our off sites, this is actually a fun thing that every offsite that I do with my leadership team, usually there's a one to two hour session. It is feedback to Veron. And I actually do it openly. I will have about to 10 people in the room and I will force people to be very honest. And I want to show my vulnerabilities to everyone that I am not perfect and I have lots of areas to improve. And every time people do it, it's interesting that they open up in very amazing ways. And I think I love it because it helps me become better. It helps me identify my blind spots. But what it does is because I do it in an open way, it builds a lot of trust. It brings trust that I do it openly and I'm an open book and they can share whatever they want, not just with me, but openly in front of everyone.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's one of the things that we practice a lot at Mirosie, there are certain things that are happening, that it could be just me that I'm not seeing the other things. But what is it? Can you help me understand? Can you help me figure out why certain things are happening? Because I might just be missing the perspective. But because you bring it up, and that's part of practicing accountability in an empathetic way, it actually gets the entire team in the right mindset in terms of how they operate.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's basically practicing feedback in a very open and constructive way and focusing on what is important for the business and not shying away from having some of those observations and conversations not shying away from them. But it's all in the lens of what is the right thing to do for the business. And if you feel that one or more members of the leadership team are not living up to what needs to be done, then just voicing it. And it's not like you're complaining or anything. It's just like, I have this perspective. Is this the right perspective or not? Because actually it ties very”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always fun and so critical as a leader because it sets the tone for everything that you're going to do. And 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 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 once people sort of understand sort of that duality of how they need to operate across those two specific goals, it actually leads to a really high performing teams and teams that actually are able to create somewhat of a magic if they are open and there is trust that has been built in the team.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your number one metric, the number one goal that you have 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 yardstick you should think about. When you go sit in the product leadership team every Monday morning, every Monday afternoon at 1 in the afternoon, when we meet together, your number one goal is actually to drive accountability around this. And are you making sure that we as leaders in the organization are doing the right thing for the company? And I think that's a philosophical construct that I always remind people in terms of what they should be doing. So as an example, tomorrow we have calibrations. We have our annual sort of review cycle happening in the company.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of like product leadership and what we believe is the way we want product leaders to be developed. And I think it's more of a people philosophy. And so we have our product leadership, which constitutes of all of the folks who are running all of these streams. And I always tell them that you have two personas that you have to think about. Everyone who's on the product leadership team is a product leadership team member. And the fundamental thing that you have to do is drive accountability. So the number one thing that a product leader on the product leadership team needs to do is drive accountability with others in the product leadership team. The other persona that they have is that they are a stream leader. 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,”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've probably seen this framework of three horizon. It's quite popular in McKenzie and School and so on and so forth. It's like Horizon One business, which is what we are, you know, the thing that's delivering food on the table. Generally, there's about a 70% allocation of resources that we have, give or take. Then there is Horizon 2, which is an adjacent thing 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, three to five years, next generation things. And that's about 10% of the ratio. So it's like 70, 20, 10 across Horizon 1, 2, and 3.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“80%. So I would say about 20 to 40 percent of the available capacity at any given time is either getting allocated to architectural initiatives. There's a technology roadmap that our CTO is driving that we believe is extremely important as the platform scales. And 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 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.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have some rule of thumbs in terms of how we want to allocate our investments across these buckets. And I would say a lot of it, Lenny actually depends on sort of the state of the team. There are certain teams that have more tech-debt than others. There are certain teams that are actually working on some really big zero-to-one features than other teams. And so I think there is a variance, you know, the standard deviation actually is dependent on 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 meeting our objective around better board performance or any of the other things that we believe are important? And hence, we need to invest in those critical areas. But I would say in general, innovation versus not varies on a spectrum of anywhere from 60.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what happens is that we have our entire roadmap published out as a mirror board for enablement purposes. So that's an artifact that is approved to be shown to a customer. And what you will see is that you'll see five or six recordings in there. And 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. 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 by using Miro and this capability that we have.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think we've got a couple of tools for roadmapping, and our observation is that while those tools are great for the unique needs that they're solving, we haven't found a universal solution for roadmapping. So there are some teams that use Miro for roadmapping, and they would use the Kanban sort of widget in Mirode for that. What are they working on? What's coming next? What's in the backlog. But I would say it is a problem that is not completely solved in terms of how do we actually bring these artifacts together at scale. What we are starting to see, and this is actually a unique use case of Miro, is”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around most popular BI tools. So at Miro, we use Google Looker a lot. So a lot of our dashboards are in Looker. And what you would typically find is that our analyst Eman product teams will just grab a link to a Looker dashboard, put it on a Miro board, and it unfolds into a full visualization. And unlike a screen grab, you never have to go update it because right there on the Mirror board, it's always updated. And you can refresh that. So you basically have this experience where Miro acts as that single source of truth for a lot of the teams across the entire journey of product development where a single Miro board is meeting the needs of multiple sort of use cases there.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that you started to move some of our synchronous meetings into async review? So I talked about this talk track feature that we have. And a lot of teams, what they would do is that they would actually send you 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. And then you have this magical experience where you're sitting back and the Miro board is automatically moving because Lenny was like recording it like that. And then you have the video play and then you can pause it 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 synchronous sessions are a lot more deliberate and focused on driving outcomes or achieving consensus. So people are just focusing on the comments that were added as part of the async product review so that when they meet synchronously, they can use that. So Mira boards are used for that as well. And I would say now a lot of our dashboarding shows up in Miraboz now. We recently released data visualization capability.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the call can have reactions, 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”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“User experience interviews and stuff. We will record those and then those recordings get added to a Miro board. So Miro accesses the content hub or a team hub for a particular project. Once you capture all of those insights, then generally all of the brainstorming 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 is synthesized into a set of recommendations and outcomes, so when we go into these product reviews that we were talking about, Lenny, the same Miro board then gets manifested into a set of presentations. So we use Miro for presentations. We've actually made some really amazing updates in terms of our capabilities there and if 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”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of starting from the bottom up, like infrastructure up view. So all of our tickets are handled in Jira. And we're using some of the Jira newer capabilities in Jira in terms of coming up with roadmaps and coming up with the priorities and stuff. On top of that, all of the specs generally get recorded in Confluence. Having said that, we're actually a big fan of tools like Google Docs as well as Coda that allows us to track RKRs in a pretty effective way. On top of that, obviously, we use Miro a lot. I would say for a lot of our things, especially on the product and design side of the team, generally all of our insights get captured inside of Mirror Board. So when we are going and conducting”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. Because I think as you would expect, we run Miro on Miro. So there's a lot of things that we could share as templates in terms of how we are running things on Miro, not just as OKRs, but in terms of product reviews. And we have 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 definitely share out with the community how we do some of these things.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do it on a six month basis. However, we are doing traction on a monthly basis. So every four weeks as amped, we are looking at our KRs for the AMP organization on a monthly basis doing traction. However, the planning, the targets are done on a six-month basis.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, yes. Admiral, we practice OKRs, and it starts off at the company level and then those company level OKRs are taken by the AMP organization. Like we describe it's the AMP organization. And then we break it up. And I would say we have refined it over the period of time, the two years that I've been at Miro. And early on, we were doing OKRs on a quarterly basis and I would say more recently we've actually evolved to six month PRs. And what we found was that six month was the right cadence in terms of giving enough time for teams to basically push forward in executing these KRs and minimizing the quote-unquote overhead of doing replan every single quarter. And we found that it was much more effective and efficient for the entire organization.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, like right now, what we've figured out is that there is really hard to do these events over 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. That's usually how these things are operated.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 looks at the pull request, reviews the code, and says, yes, something that would have taken three months for this core team because they didn't have the expertise literally got done in three hours because there was another engineer that ran into them and said, I know how this is done. I can actually help you here and went ahead and did the right thing. And so we're trying to create these magic moments. It happens once in a while, but we have one success story. And I like to tell that in every opportunity that I get. But that's another sort of sort of unique thing that we've done in terms of bookending things around how we operate here.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if done right, like it happens once in a while, but if done right, it's magical in terms of the outcomes that you can get. So I'll tell you, there was a team that actually was presenting at our Berlin hub, and they were saying, we're working on this feature, and there's an engineer who walks over to that desk and says, what are you working on? And the team describes it, oh, you're trying to do something like this. And this engineer had actually worked on that particular problem in their prior life, like literally they had implemented this. So he says, 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 than a merrier, go ahead. So this person puts down there and says, okay, I'm having a good time. Let me just head back to my home. And in the next three or four hours, goes and quotes.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That teams have. And then I think on top of that, there are certain key, I would say, rituals that we do that maybe are unique. So for example, we have something called a miro connect, which happens every other Friday. And every other Friday, for example, in our Amsterdam office, you can go in there. And at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, four to seven or eight, and sometimes it goes really late. You've got a bunch of product teams 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 they're doing.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every year we publish a strategy white paper that gets published internally available to every single Murinaire across all functions that clearly articulates 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 OKR perspective as well as the overall business strategy that we have? So people take that product strategy, white paper or artifact, and then against that they are building their roadmaps, which get updated every three months. And then inside of the teams, we enable teams to be quite autonomous in terms of some of the rituals that they're doing. We want them to obviously embrace best practices. We've got a team of agile coaches that share best practices or are available to help if there are certain specific needs.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 roadmap, we have an 80% precision level, which means that 80% of the things that we claim to be on the roadmap will get done. That's the target. And for the next three months, because it's six months, so the first three months is 80%. The next three months is 50%. So we have a much lower level of resolution in the next 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 what we do. And that's all on the backdrop of an annual strategy that we publish.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there are certain things that I learned at Box that inspired some things that we do at Miro. And there are certain things that we've evolved. So one of the things that we've instituted is sort of a roadmap process, right? So that's sort of the first thing around how the different teams are looking at the things that they're going to work on. We have a rolling six-month roadmap. Seems large, but we've got, like I mentioned, a number of enterprise customers. And if I've learned one thing that large enterprises like is asking for a roadmap review. So that tends to be my favorite meeting of sitting down with 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”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can go in and you can say, Hey, I thought this was a small thing, and small thing is like something you can get it done in less than a month and so on and so forth. And there are like 50 other product teams that are shipping these features. And what's the average? What's the variance? 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, I actually did it really, really fast. And the reason why I did it fast was because of this. Let me go share this out with the broader team. And usually the product ops function, we call it product excellence internally, like sort of product excellence function is recording some of these things. I would say getting reliable data and then because we have some things that are going through meetings and there's some things that are going through Slack, like we could do better on some of those dimensions, but all of this data is available.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strate, which is a strategy, and then we go into P0, which is a 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. Are we hitting the metrics that we originally had defined up front before we decided to work on this? And you have all of these stage gates. And then we basically climb.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The core philosophy there is like velocity is more like the game of golf where you're just playing against yourself. It's not like if Lenny and Verona are out of the golf course, it doesn't matter. I'm not competing against you. I'm just competing against myself because that's the only I'm going to just hit the ball. So it's like how much better can we get? So I think our core philosophy is around that. And what we're trying to do is that on all the product teams, the feature teams that we have, we're just collecting all the information and we are 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, how long does it take for you to actually deliver that value? And we have a product process that we follow, which starts with the piece.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Defining. That's right. That's right. And I think it's worked decently well, I would say, with most things. 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 been a good start and now we are sharing this more openly with others in New York.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To 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 write documents, really long documents in terms of what are the attributes and how do we define those attributes and how do we measure those attributes and how do we enable people to do that. And it felt like it's a good thing because we are trying to codify it, but it also felt like it was a very heavy way of solving that problem. We just came up with this approach, which is like, what's great versus not great? And just start classifying it. And it's like modern AI systems are like classification systems. And we...”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's actually both. So, generally, what happens is that the design leadership team is doing this, and there's one particular design leader who's the designated person to make sure that this is happening on a regular basis. And right now, the way we're using it is that we are actually using it 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, you know, if you've never seen colors and I ask you, Lenny, describe pink and compare that to red. And like if you haven't seen color, how do you describe colors? You can. But 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 get why how pink is different than red. But if I try to describe it, it's...”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we are making it available to other designers so they can actually start to build sort of that telemetry in terms of like some things are more subjective, but you can start to see some pattern matching and say, hey, this is what looks like.”
2023-04-20 · Lenny's Podcast · An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source