Lenny's Podcast · Jan 19Miroverse, a library of user-created boards, ran about 18 months before getting metric expectations, then became both an engagement and acquisition engine. Starting its community with agencies and partners, on Atlassian advice, saved six to eight months.
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Lenny's Podcast · Apr 20Miro has about 1,800 employees, over 50 product managers and over 50 million users, and wins by building for whole teams and moving fast. Its product-led growth comes from workshops (one host invites 10 to 300 people) and Miroverse templates, and it runs a rolling six-month roadmap with six-month OKRs. Born from a five-day design sprint, it records the movement of a board rather than a screen video, so viewers can add stickies, comments and reactions while it plays. User interviews showed collaboration, not just communication, was what people wanted.
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- Build every product team as cross-functional AMPED, including analytics and product marketing▶ 20:17Miro added product marketing to the product org so features capture the imagination originally intended and sellers can position them to IT and line-of-business buyers.
- Run a design sprint to validate new concepts in five days▶ 10:23Interviews during the sprint led Miro to build Talktrack as a synchronized board-movement recording with audio and video, rather than a pixel screen recording, so viewers can add stickies and comments while it plays.
- Track cycle time per stage and benchmark teams against small, medium and large sizes▶ 44:15A small project is something that can be done in less than a month, with data compared across about 50 product teams.
- Use a rolling six-month roadmap with 80 percent precision then 50 percent▶ 48:47Eighty percent of items in the first three months are expected to ship.
- Rally the product org around one motto: deliver customer value faster with high quality▶ 37:58The motto is part of Miro's evaluation rubric and measurement system.
- Classify shipped work as high quality or not, in a binary way, to calibrate taste▶ 42:32The approach replaced long attribute-definition documents after about a year of endless conversations about what high quality means.
- Be the first to hit the brick wall by moving fast▶ 32:35Varun calls speed the single biggest determinant of success in his experience, drawing on Frank Slootman's Amp It Up.
- Make PMs raise blockers immediately and have leadership resolve them fast▶ 36:11This starts a virtuous cycle of wins that builds organizational competency in knowing what to build and who should be on the team.
- Hold a biweekly demo fair so teams find hidden expertise▶ 51:11At the Berlin hub an engineer who had solved the same problem before built in three hours what a team estimated at three months.
- Share small and medium product work openly and review big work formally▶ 19:50A product manager now leads the effort to codify enterprise best practices across feature teams.
- Allocate capacity 70/20/10 across three horizons and reserve 20 to 40 percent for technology work▶ 1:03:56Innovation versus other work varies from 60 to 80 percent depending on team state, with 20 percent always a given for technology work.
- Move OKRs to six-month planning with monthly traction checks▶ 54:22Six months proved the right cadence after about two years of refinement.
- Ask questions instead of making statements when holding others accountable▶ 1:08:07Leadership team members are asked to hold each other accountable every Monday, with the stream leader hat focused on driving improvement.
- Design for workshops and shareable templates to drive viral invites and SEO▶ 1:13:50A FIFA World Cup template had over 100,000 views and about 15,000 copies, and ranked in Google search.
- Bridge self-serve and sales with a clear handoff and shared product marketing▶ 1:17:17Enterprise provisioning for tens of thousands of users now feeds the flywheel with workshops that invite millions of users.
Lenny's Podcast · Oct 27Barbra Gago led the rebrand from Real-time Board at about a million users and a couple million in revenue. Miro unified 'online whiteboard', 'mind mapping' and 'diagramming' into the visual collaboration category, met G2 Crowd to get listed, and launched the new name at South by Southwest.
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Lenny's Podcast · Apr 30Users invite colleagues to their boards, which spreads the product far more cheaply than salespeople. Sales engage only after a threshold of users, sometimes 20 to 40 at an account, already pay by credit card.
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Lenny's Podcast · Apr 23Miro hired its first salesperson at about $5 to 7 million ARR and closed early deals through support. Its head of growth carried a self-serve target and a shared pipeline goal; volume is boards, and admin changes were a strong buyer signal. Enterprise contracts took 12+ months of usage.
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Lenny's Podcast · Apr 2Sets the standard for fast activation: sign-up asks a few use-case questions, then templates put users to work within about 5 minutes. Hila uses this speed to value as her test of a great PLG product.
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Lenny's Podcast · Sep 22Elena was interim CMO for 11 months, through the covid shift that forced full repositioning and new go-to-market tactics. It gives three free boards, and free users bring in other users. People adopt it bottom-up because they collaborate better with it.
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