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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“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 collaboration experiences. So we are always, always getting inspired by what we find in applications and experiences that we see around us. And we are saying, hey, when it comes to designing sharing flows, we believe that these are the three apps that have best in class sharing flows. When it comes to designing some synchronous capabilities, these are the best in-class apps that we should look at. So we are always trying to make sure that we are benchmarking ourselves against that. And we have a design team on a regular basis. Like when we ship stuff on a monthly basis, our design leadership team does a triage of everything that got shipped into 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,”
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 would say we are trying to sort of systematically ingrain this in the culture of the organization. So we have a motto in the Single sentence Deliver customer value faster with high quality. That's it. And everything that we do. And when I say everything, everything, Lenny, like from 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. 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 is being made available to the organization. And you can say, hey, if it was a small, medium, or large, what's the average? What's the medium?”
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 those issues, then what it does is it actually starts a virtuous cycle where you can actually start to see those wins. And once you see those wins, you actually create that courage to do more things. And maybe because you've seen how that specific roadblock was solved and you have a pattern matching that you've developed now, you can solve a lot of those things on your own. And it's the next level of challenge that you're now going to raise your hand. And what that does is it starts to build this organizational competency in terms of how you can figure out what to build. And we all find these people in our organizations where there's someone somehow is able to do certain things in one-tenth 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”
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
“Prove that they can solve this challenge and do something amazing. So I think fundamentally, 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 roadblocks that we run into. And those roadblocks can manifest themselves into technical challenges. They can manifest them in cells of organizational challenges. They could be priority challenges and so on and so forth. So my fundamental sort of approach to solving that is to ensure that the product leads who are working on these capabilities can instantly raise their hand and call out that there are challenges that they are running into. And then the job of the leadership team, the product management team, is to essentially go and quickly resolve those issues. And I think like if we are able to resolve”
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
“My fundamental sort of belief here, Lenny, is that every product manager, I can talk to product managers because there is reason certain because in my view, it's like one of the most thankless jobs. You get to do. And it's like you have to do this. And there's, but it attracts a certain personality. And that personality is driven by challenge. And that personality wants 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
“Talks about this a lot in his book. And how can you accelerate? And I think for me, from a product perspective, the fundamental concept is like, can you be the first one to hit the brick wall 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 west or I need to do 30 degrees east. And I think as long as you're like one or two or three steps ahead of everyone else in terms of uncovering or discovering those insights, then I think you can continue to be ahead of the pack in terms of building your product and business.”
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 reason for that is that if you consider yourself as an innovation centric company and you believe that you are building experiences that fundamentally don't exist anywhere else and you're sort of paving the way for the rest of the folks to basically get inspired with how you are building these experiences. Speed is the single biggest determinant in terms of, in my experience, in terms of who ends up being more successful versus not. And I think like this, I don't know, maybe this is a little bit controversial where people say like, you know, go slow to actually go fast. And I think I have a lot of respect for that and there are certain areas you should do that. When you are trying to figure out new experiences and stuff and you don't know if it's going to resonate or not, speed is something that you should accelerate for the organization. I think like Frank Slootman.”
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
“This is all related to it. It's like a string of pearls. I think there's maybe one more pearl we can actually thread into the needle right here. Which is we talked about sort of how do you ladder this up and stuff. And then the question is, okay, how do you know that everything that you're doing is that in the right direction or not? And like, you know, should you move slow and be much more mindful about the things that you're doing or should you move fast and make certain bets and then decide certain things and stuff? And I think there are two sort of views that are out there. My personal sort of 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 this is particularly true when you are in a market that is competitive.”
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'll be honest, I don't think we've figured it out. We haven't cracked the nut in terms of how to operationalize this. I know you are based more than me on some of these things, so maybe we can work on this. And come up with something.”
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
“Which is better versus not. And so with every release that your competitor is making and every release that you're making, you either making chess points, moves against them, positive points, or you're going negative. And I think that framework, if you have in mind, it actually drives an insane amount of clarity in terms of what you're doing and what the impact is going to be. Because every single move that you're making, the customer has that sort of in their mind, if not explicitly, implicitly, that they are actually comparing these things. And I think it brings a level of focus in terms of where you need to invest and why you need to invest and why this is going to make those decisions. And so I think it allows at least for”
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
“Exactly. And I think the other thing I would say there's another core philosophy I have, which is products either get better over a period of time or they get worse. Products never remain the same. And I think you can take that philosophy to a bunch of things in life. But I'm going to take the lens of products, which is my core philosophy is like every single day, every single time somebody is pushing your code to production and you're releasing a feature or an enhancement, you are making the product better or you're making the product worse, but the products never remain same. And the lens for this, Lenny is actually from a customer's perspective, from the end user perspective. And the thing is that if you are a player where there's no one else in the market, that's one thing, right? So that's great. Like, you know, kudos to you for actually identifying a blue ocean strategy and sort of executing to that. But most markets, most products actually have either direct or indirect competitors that are available. So from the customer's mind, 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.”
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's right. Yeah. And I think it sort of comes down to how do you think about your unique place relative to all of these players. And in your customers' mind, are they able to clearly understand what is the unique value that you deliver relative to everything else? And part of that is the unique capabilities you provide. Part of that is how you're packaging those unique abilities to them and making sure that they, in their mind, can see how you coexist in this overall sort of tech ecosystem that they might be investing in to enable their employees or to enable them to operate. And so I think it's sort of looking at that from that lens.”
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 depends on who the competition is and what is their unfair advantage here. And 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.”
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 has the might of distribution and the might of pricing. And that's just like a direct example. And I think I've seen that multiple times, first at Adobe, where I was part of the document cloud business. Clearly saw that at Box as well. And I think you can in general sort of look at every single category and you can say, you know, there was a category leader and they were growing at a certain clip or a certain pace. And all of a sudden, there were a bunch of entrants that get in. And what happens to your growth rate? And it's all dependent on how strong is the competitor in terms of providing a good 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.”
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
“For those of us who've been in the collaboration space and I've been doing collaboration and productivity apps for over 20 years or over two decades, at some point you have companies like Microsoft that get really attracted to a space. And you can see the trajectory of a business that's growing at a certain clip. And then all of a sudden there's a competitive product that enters.”
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 feel like not many people sort of talk about that. But in many cases, in my professional career, and I've been at it for close to 24, 25 years, is that every single instance when I looked at a company accelerated their growth or there was a deceleration of growth, it was a direct relation to what the competition allowed you to do. And obviously, you have to do everything that you should be doing. But competition is that the biggest variable that allows you to figure that out.”
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 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 when you're thinking about a market that we are increasingly in that 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, is that everything that we are doing has to be looked through that lens. 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.”
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, this was done before I got here, and I wish I could take credit for it, but I can't. And I think this was the result of an observation, which is quite similar to what you were saying, which is while we might be developing a lot of the features and PMs are sort of thinking bottoms up in terms of what we are building, we might find that what we have built might not be able to capture 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 you going to package it up so that the sellers that are out there are able to position it in a way that the customer, you know, in this case, the buyer might be an IT professional, you know, might be a line of business leader, can basically see the full vision of where we are going. And I think by having product marketing as part of AMP, you know,”
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
“Encapsulated in a set of 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, 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 more focus and energy and there's a product manager who's now leading that particular charter.”
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 product org. In fact, 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 what the core hypothesis is, like what is the solution for that, what is the proposed design for it, like what 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 it's up to 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, as Miro has sort of scaled the spectrum of companies all the way from 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 50,000, 80,000 employees, all of them are using Miro. We've come to realize that at some point the deep enterprise requirements need to be in”
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
“Marketing team is deeply, deeply embedded inside of each of these streams. What we do is that we have different perspectives that come in where they say, oh, wait a second, did you think about the end user experience? And if you think about the end user experience, you have someone in the team that says, wait a second, did you actually think about the enterprise requirements or what's needed in the largest corporation? So I think the unique setup of bringing these cross-functional folks allows us to sort of course correct. The second thing is sort of the ways of working that we have these product reviews that happen. So we generally classify anything that we are doing in terms of its complexity around small, medium, or high complexity and anything that's being worked on is actually being shared with the entire organization. If it's something that's small to medium, it's actually shared with the”
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
“Architecturally, like there are two sort of things that we have done that allow us to not sort of pigeonhold ourselves into that specific way of working. And I completely agree with you. You could lead to that. The first one is actually when we think about the product org, we call our org, it's called AMPT, A-M-P-E-D. And this is actually going back to our earlier point, Lenny, we had around like what's unique about the product culture, what's unique about Miro. We talked about teams coming together, removing barriers or silos across functionally. So AMP stands for 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 AMP function. And by having this cross-functional representation where product...”
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 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 there are a couple of other streams like that. And then finally, there are some just like horizontal sort of streams, if you will. We have a big focus given that we are a PLG-led company around growth and self-serve business. We've got a stream that's actually focused on our core internal infrastructure. We've got a stream that's actually focused on data science. that's doing all of the magic that we started to release in terms of miro ai etc 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 you know solving problems and creating value for that persona”
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 would say it's maybe a hybrid structure that we have, but the sort of the foundation of the team setup is around persona. So we have what we refer to as streams, some companies refer to as domains. But 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 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, you know, for that audience. There's another stream which is called platform, where we are going after the developer install base, 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.”
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
“Give or take about 1,800 employees at Miro globally across all of the 12 hubs. And specifically in terms of the number of product managers, we are over 50 PMs 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
“By teams that are creating these innovative products. And we actually have broad applicability across industries and verticals. So while some tools might be hyper-focused on sort of digital experiences, and Biros has great sort of offerings there in terms of core capabilities, what we find is that Miro is used equally by companies in manufacturing, by companies in healthcare, by companies or in architecture and engineering and construction functions, by companies that are in aerospace, governmental agencies and medical agencies and so on and so forth. So I think the platform is actually much more agnostic in terms of its capabilities and what we offer that actually makes it more accessible and appealing to organizations that want to go beyond just like digital experiences. And then I would say finally.”
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 what's unique about our product, and we can talk about the capabilities and roadmaps 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 different and our customers see value in that, right? And I think that's probably one sort of big macro aspect of how we think about sort of our capabilities and products and why our customers think of us differently. So that's one point. I think the second thing is Miro is actually used, you know, obviously.”
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
“If you look at the mission for Miro, we empower teams to create the next big thing. And our focus is to enable teams that are innovating. And generally, innovation happens at the intersection of a bunch of cross-functional folks coming together, like we discussed, folks in product management or design or engineering or analytics or product marketing or research. And what we find, Lenny, is that there are a lot of tools out there. And those tools are generally sort of focused on a particular persona. And 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 sit at the adjacency of extending that core use case. The fundamental value that Miro provides is that we enable teams”
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
“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 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 original concept. And we evolved and built on top of 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
“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 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 down was we basically synchronized the movement of a board. So let's say Lenny's presenting a board, some template he's created in terms of best practices for PMs. But he wants to have some sort of a talk track on top of it and audio videoped. And what we're doing is we're actually capturing the movement of the board that Lenny's 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. What our users want to do is they want to use Miro for collaboration. While communication is an important aspect of how teams come together where we believe R sweet spot is that we want people to use Miro for collaboration. And by making sure”
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
“Maybe there are certain things, like, for example, anytime we're trying to build a new experience, like one of the approach we want to take is very quickly validate that our original hypothesis, you know, is that sound or not? And we are big fans of the design sprint framework. So what Jake Knapp has done, I think, is really amazing in a short five-day window. You can get a small set of people to quickly mock up a concept, converted 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 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, 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 allows you to asynchronously 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
“And was it something that was done through interactions they've had with folks internally or externally? So I think it's a question, the set of questions to ask in terms of like how did they get to where they are today and was it informed by understanding of the insights that collectively the organization has? Was it informed by their understanding of where the market is evolving, 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 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 make a left turn or a right turn is where I think is the most powerful way to make sure that those things are informed through practicing empathy internally and externally.”
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 of the most powerful sort of things that I've seen work is the questions that you ask, the questions that you ask when you're going through product review or you're trying to sit down and talk to someone.”
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, 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, how do we in the product organization understand their perspective and bring that perspective into how we design, prioritize, and build products. So I think that's one thing that's unique. I would say the other thing that's less to do with the location, but I think is sort of the core cultural value or philosophy that Andre, who's the founder and CEO, has instilled in all of us, is practicing sort of teamwork. How do we actually come together as a team and bring down sort of the silos that might exist across functions? 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, co-create the outcome that the customer is looking for.”
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 thing that's really interesting, Lenny, around the way Miro is set up, is that our product organization is actually based in Europe. And our go-to-market organization is worldwide. So our product management team, our designers, our engineers are located across three different hubs in Europe. And what that sort of leads to is a couple of practices that we have as part of our culture. So the first one is 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, a lot of our Kodu market teams, folks in sales and marketing and customer success are in different continents or geographies, we have to make sure that we actually practice that internal.”
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 company is a global company, so we've got 12 different hubs. So we have multiple offices in US, four different offices. Multiple hubs in Europe as well and presence in Asia Pac as well. So I think right now we have a global footprint.”
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 single day, every single time somebody is pushing your code to production and you're releasing a feature or an enhancement, you are making the product better or you're making the product worse, but the products never remain same. And so with every release that your competitor is making and every release that you're making, you're either making chess points moves against them positive points or you're going negative. And I think 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.”
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