Varun Parmar
Chief Product Officer at Miro, formerly CPO at Box and Syncplicity
Where to hear and read about Varun Parmar1 episode or test
Varun Parmar is Chief Product Officer at Miro, and was previously CPO at Box and Syncplicity. The thing most worth learning from him is how he keeps a roughly 50-PM product org fast and high quality by treating every release as a gain or loss against competitors and by clearing blockers quickly.
you want to be the first one to hit the brick wall
An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)
Varun Parmar: the story and the lessons
1Varun Parmar's path to Miro
Parmar has watched category leaders meet rivals for 24 to 25 years. He is Miro's CPO, and before that was SVP and Chief Product Officer at Box. He saw how competition shapes growth at Adobe in Document Cloud and again at Box.
His pattern is that a leader grows at a steady clip, then entrants arrive and the growth rate changes.
He helped price Adobe's first Creative Suite bundle after the Macromedia deal. He worked on pricing and packaging for that bundle after Adobe acquired Macromedia. A pricing math problem from it is now his favorite interview question.
He has given it to seven or eight hundred people, so he knows how long it takes and where people get stuck. He sees a correlation with how people perform, though not a direct link.
He inherited Miro's structure and added a competitive lens to it. The AMPED structure existed before he arrived. Looking at everything through the competitive lens was one of the first things he started with.
Miro has about 1,800 employees and over 50 product managers. During his two years there, OKRs moved from quarterly to six-month cycles.
2Why Parmar treats every release as a chess move
Parmar scores every release as points won or lost against rivals. He holds that products either get better or get worse and never stay the same. Customers implicitly compare you with competitors, so each release moves you ahead or behind.
He says this idea drives an insane amount of clarity about what you are doing and what impact it has.
He believes competitors set much of a leader's growth rate. Three things matter: whether the rival's solution is good enough, how strong its distribution is, and how strong its pricing and packaging are. He saw growth speed up or slow at Adobe and Box depending on what rivals like Microsoft allowed.
A market with no rival is a Blue Ocean strategy, and he notes most products don't have that.
He wants Miro to look different, not like a better version of others. Differentiation means unique capabilities, packaged so the customer sees how the product coexists with the tools they already invest in.
When FigJam launched, many predicted Miro's end. That did not happen. He says Miro has not yet cracked how to operationalize tracking competitive moves.
He wants Miro to be the first to hit the brick wall. In his experience speed is the single biggest determinant of who ends up more successful. The first to hit the wall learns first that the path is wrong and can turn 10 degrees west or 30 degrees east.
He draws on Frank Slootman's Amp It Up. He grants that go slow to go fast has merit in some areas, but not for new experiences that may not resonate.
3How Parmar structures Miro's product org
Parmar defines the product org as AMPED, not just PM, design and engineering. AMPED stands for analytics, marketing, product, engineering and design. Product marketing is embedded in each stream so someone raises positioning, competitive differentiation and packaging while features are built.
PMs acting as product owners often skip that lens. Features built bottom-up can fail to capture the imagination they were meant to, and sellers need to pitch them to IT and line-of-business buyers.
Miro builds teams around personas, with horizontal streams on top. Enterprise serves IT admin, security and compliance users, and Platform serves developers. Horizontal streams cover growth and self-serve, core infrastructure, and data science, which powers Miro AI.
Mixed perspectives keep persona streams from drifting into feature sprawl. Customers range from two or three people paying by card to firms with 50,000 to 80,000 employees.
He sends small and medium work to Slack and big work to formal review. Small and medium items, with hypothesis, solution and proposed design, are posted to a Slack channel anyone can subscribe to. Big items go through a formal product review.
Enterprise needs are being turned into a checklist of about ten items that feature teams apply early. A product manager now leads that effort, and it is still a work in progress.
He builds empathy into daily habits because Miro is spread across continents. Product managers, designers and engineers sit in three European hubs, while go-to-market teams work worldwide. Product must understand what sales sees when it meets large customers elsewhere.
Miro has 12 hubs, four US offices and a presence in Asia. Founder and CEO Andrey instilled teamwork to bring silos down.
4How Miro measures speed and quality
One motto drives the org: deliver customer value faster with high quality. The sentence is part of Miro's evaluation rubric and measurement system. Value counts only when customers use what shipped, so PMs check which metric they meant to move and how far it moved.
Parmar likes it as a simple idea to rally around.
Miro tracks cycle time per stage and compares teams openly. Work moves through P Strat, P0 problem definition, P1 solution definition and P2 checking the metrics. Work is sized small, medium or large, and small means under a month.
Teams compare themselves with the average, median and variance across about 50 product teams, and a slow team can learn from a faster one. He says velocity is like golf, playing against yourself. The data could be more reliable, since work runs through meetings and Slack.
Design leaders judge shipped work as high quality or not, monthly. One designated design leader runs a monthly triage, and the reasons for each not-high-quality call are shared so designers can spot patterns.
Leaders had written very long documents on quality attributes, which felt too heavy. He compares the new approach to showing three examples of pink and three of red. Quality is also benchmarked against best-in-class apps, such as three apps studied for sharing flows.
5Planning at Miro: roadmap, OKRs and capacity
Parmar runs a rolling roadmap that is firm for three months, loose after. The first three months carry 80% precision and the next three about 50%, refreshed every three months. Teams can pivot on customer asks, competitor moves or LLM breakthroughs without being penalized.
Large enterprises ask for roadmap reviews, which he calls his favorite meeting. Every employee can read the annual strategy white paper naming the key bets, why they were chosen and how they ladder up to OKRs.
He moved OKRs from quarterly to six-month cycles. Six months gives teams enough time to push forward and avoids the overhead of replanning every quarter. The AMPED org reviews key results as traction every four weeks.
It took about two years of refinement to land on that cadence.
He splits capacity 70/20/10 across three horizons. About 70% goes to the core business, 20% to adjacent work paying off in 12 to 36 months, and 10% to next-generation work three to five years out.
Separately, 20 to 40% of capacity goes to technical work. Some platform teams spend 40 to 50% on architecture because Miro has over 50 million users. He calls it a rule of thumb, not a quota.
6How Parmar leads: blockers, questions and feedback
Parmar makes clearing blockers the leadership team's job. He argues PMs already want to move fast, so slowness comes from technical, organizational or priority roadblocks. Leads should be able to raise a hand instantly.
Each cleared blocker builds courage and pattern matching, so people solve similar ones alone. Someone who does things in a tenth of the time knows the code base, the team, the scope and what success looks like.
He asks how a decision was reached before judging it. In reviews he asks whether a choice came from market trends, competitor moves or customer feedback, aiming to find the insight behind each left or right turn. The default stance is to assume good intent.
He calls the questions leaders ask in reviews the strongest way to build empathy.
He holds peers accountable by posing concerns as questions. Every product leader wears two hats: driving accountability with peers on the leadership team, and improving their own persona stream. The team meets every Monday at 1 pm.
He frames concerns as can you help me understand, without complaining. The test is whether things are better today than yesterday.
He invites open feedback on himself at every leadership offsite. Each offsite includes a one to two hour session where eight to ten people give him honest feedback in the open.
He says it exposes his blind spots and builds trust. A recurring comment is that he is hard to reach and slow on email and Slack.
7Rituals and tools Parmar uses to keep teams in sync
Miro Connect lets teams find hidden expertise at a biweekly demo fair. Every other Friday, product teams demo work at tables in a trade-show style evening. It works best in person, and remote teams are hard to include by video.
At the Berlin hub a visiting engineer who had solved the same problem built in about three hours what the core team had estimated at three months. Parmar says it happens only once in a while, but it is the story he tells at every opportunity.
Zero-to-one teams run a five-day design sprint to validate concepts. Teams use Jake Knapp's sprint to mock up, prototype and validate. Showing the first Talktrack concept exposed that people want Miro for collaboration, and communication is only part of that.
Talktrack became a recording of a board's movement rather than a screen video, so viewers can add stickies and comments as it plays.
Miro runs on Miro, from user insight to final review. Boards carry interview recordings, brainstorming and workshops, then become the review presentation. Jira holds tickets and roadmaps, and Looker dashboards embed on boards and refresh.
Teams send a five to ten minute Talktrack in advance so the live meeting focuses on comments and consensus. No tool fully solves roadmapping, so each team picks its own, and he says bringing roadmap artifacts together at scale is not completely solved.
8How Miro grows under Parmar: templates, workshops and sales
Miro's early users came from communities, content and removed friction. Early adopters invited others, helped by content marketing, Capterra listings and early SEO. Product teams built viral loops and removed every barrier the data pointed to.
The model moved from a time-limited trial to a premium model, which sped growth further.
Workshops and templates are Miro's biggest accelerants beyond the core loop. One person runs a workshop and invites 10 to 300 people, who then sign up. Miroverse templates get indexed by Google and draw users.
A FIFA World Cup diagram template had over 100,000 views and about 15,000 copies, and ranked in Google results, becoming an acquisition channel of its own.
Parmar treats self-serve and sales as two channels of one product. Product marketing works across both, carrying enterprise and self-serve needs between them. The handoff runs from self-serve adoption to a hand raiser, rep qualification, then account expansion.
Enterprise provisioning of tens of thousands of users leads to hundreds of thousands of workshops that invite millions. He admits Miro can still streamline and act as a single unit.
An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)
Miro's CPO explains how a roughly 50-PM product org stays fast and high quality in a crowded collaboration market, through cross-functional AMPED teams, cycle-time tracking, a rolling roadmap and open-floor demo rituals. It also covers how Miro grows through product-led loops, templates and a sales motion layered on top.
Parmar has watched category leaders meet rivals for 24 to 25 years. He is Miro's CPO, and before that was SVP and Chief Product Officer at Box. He saw how competition shapes growth at Adobe in Document Cloud and again at Box.
His pattern is that a leader grows at a steady clip, then entrants arrive and the growth rate changes.
He helped price Adobe's first Creative Suite bundle after the Macromedia deal. He worked on pricing and packaging for that bundle after Adobe acquired Macromedia. A pricing math problem from it is now his favorite interview question.
He has given it to seven or eight hundred people, so he knows how long it takes and where people get stuck. He sees a correlation with how people perform, though not a direct link.
He inherited Miro's structure and added a competitive lens to it. The AMPED structure existed before he arrived. Looking at everything through the competitive lens was one of the first things he started with.
Miro has about 1,800 employees and over 50 product managers. During his two years there, OKRs moved from quarterly to six-month cycles.
Parmar scores every release as points won or lost against rivals. He holds that products either get better or get worse and never stay the same. Customers implicitly compare you with competitors, so each release moves you ahead or behind.
He says this idea drives an insane amount of clarity about what you are doing and what impact it has.
He believes competitors set much of a leader's growth rate. Three things matter: whether the rival's solution is good enough, how strong its distribution is, and how strong its pricing and packaging are. He saw growth speed up or slow at Adobe and Box depending on what rivals like Microsoft allowed.
A market with no rival is a Blue Ocean strategy, and he notes most products don't have that.
He wants Miro to look different, not like a better version of others. Differentiation means unique capabilities, packaged so the customer sees how the product coexists with the tools they already invest in.
When FigJam launched, many predicted Miro's end. That did not happen. He says Miro has not yet cracked how to operationalize tracking competitive moves.
He wants Miro to be the first to hit the brick wall. In his experience speed is the single biggest determinant of who ends up more successful. The first to hit the wall learns first that the path is wrong and can turn 10 degrees west or 30 degrees east.
He draws on Frank Slootman's Amp It Up. He grants that go slow to go fast has merit in some areas, but not for new experiences that may not resonate.
Parmar defines the product org as AMPED, not just PM, design and engineering. AMPED stands for analytics, marketing, product, engineering and design. Product marketing is embedded in each stream so someone raises positioning, competitive differentiation and packaging while features are built.
PMs acting as product owners often skip that lens. Features built bottom-up can fail to capture the imagination they were meant to, and sellers need to pitch them to IT and line-of-business buyers.
Miro builds teams around personas, with horizontal streams on top. Enterprise serves IT admin, security and compliance users, and Platform serves developers. Horizontal streams cover growth and self-serve, core infrastructure, and data science, which powers Miro AI.
Mixed perspectives keep persona streams from drifting into feature sprawl. Customers range from two or three people paying by card to firms with 50,000 to 80,000 employees.
He sends small and medium work to Slack and big work to formal review. Small and medium items, with hypothesis, solution and proposed design, are posted to a Slack channel anyone can subscribe to. Big items go through a formal product review.
Enterprise needs are being turned into a checklist of about ten items that feature teams apply early. A product manager now leads that effort, and it is still a work in progress.
He builds empathy into daily habits because Miro is spread across continents. Product managers, designers and engineers sit in three European hubs, while go-to-market teams work worldwide. Product must understand what sales sees when it meets large customers elsewhere.
Miro has 12 hubs, four US offices and a presence in Asia. Founder and CEO Andrey instilled teamwork to bring silos down.
One motto drives the org: deliver customer value faster with high quality. The sentence is part of Miro's evaluation rubric and measurement system. Value counts only when customers use what shipped, so PMs check which metric they meant to move and how far it moved.
Parmar likes it as a simple idea to rally around.
Miro tracks cycle time per stage and compares teams openly. Work moves through P Strat, P0 problem definition, P1 solution definition and P2 checking the metrics. Work is sized small, medium or large, and small means under a month.
Teams compare themselves with the average, median and variance across about 50 product teams, and a slow team can learn from a faster one. He says velocity is like golf, playing against yourself. The data could be more reliable, since work runs through meetings and Slack.
Design leaders judge shipped work as high quality or not, monthly. One designated design leader runs a monthly triage, and the reasons for each not-high-quality call are shared so designers can spot patterns.
Leaders had written very long documents on quality attributes, which felt too heavy. He compares the new approach to showing three examples of pink and three of red. Quality is also benchmarked against best-in-class apps, such as three apps studied for sharing flows.
Parmar runs a rolling roadmap that is firm for three months, loose after. The first three months carry 80% precision and the next three about 50%, refreshed every three months. Teams can pivot on customer asks, competitor moves or LLM breakthroughs without being penalized.
Large enterprises ask for roadmap reviews, which he calls his favorite meeting. Every employee can read the annual strategy white paper naming the key bets, why they were chosen and how they ladder up to OKRs.
He moved OKRs from quarterly to six-month cycles. Six months gives teams enough time to push forward and avoids the overhead of replanning every quarter. The AMPED org reviews key results as traction every four weeks.
It took about two years of refinement to land on that cadence.
He splits capacity 70/20/10 across three horizons. About 70% goes to the core business, 20% to adjacent work paying off in 12 to 36 months, and 10% to next-generation work three to five years out.
Separately, 20 to 40% of capacity goes to technical work. Some platform teams spend 40 to 50% on architecture because Miro has over 50 million users. He calls it a rule of thumb, not a quota.
Parmar makes clearing blockers the leadership team's job. He argues PMs already want to move fast, so slowness comes from technical, organizational or priority roadblocks. Leads should be able to raise a hand instantly.
Each cleared blocker builds courage and pattern matching, so people solve similar ones alone. Someone who does things in a tenth of the time knows the code base, the team, the scope and what success looks like.
He asks how a decision was reached before judging it. In reviews he asks whether a choice came from market trends, competitor moves or customer feedback, aiming to find the insight behind each left or right turn. The default stance is to assume good intent.
He calls the questions leaders ask in reviews the strongest way to build empathy.
He holds peers accountable by posing concerns as questions. Every product leader wears two hats: driving accountability with peers on the leadership team, and improving their own persona stream. The team meets every Monday at 1 pm.
He frames concerns as can you help me understand, without complaining. The test is whether things are better today than yesterday.
He invites open feedback on himself at every leadership offsite. Each offsite includes a one to two hour session where eight to ten people give him honest feedback in the open.
He says it exposes his blind spots and builds trust. A recurring comment is that he is hard to reach and slow on email and Slack.
Miro Connect lets teams find hidden expertise at a biweekly demo fair. Every other Friday, product teams demo work at tables in a trade-show style evening. It works best in person, and remote teams are hard to include by video.
At the Berlin hub a visiting engineer who had solved the same problem built in about three hours what the core team had estimated at three months. Parmar says it happens only once in a while, but it is the story he tells at every opportunity.
Zero-to-one teams run a five-day design sprint to validate concepts. Teams use Jake Knapp's sprint to mock up, prototype and validate. Showing the first Talktrack concept exposed that people want Miro for collaboration, and communication is only part of that.
Talktrack became a recording of a board's movement rather than a screen video, so viewers can add stickies and comments as it plays.
Miro runs on Miro, from user insight to final review. Boards carry interview recordings, brainstorming and workshops, then become the review presentation. Jira holds tickets and roadmaps, and Looker dashboards embed on boards and refresh.
Teams send a five to ten minute Talktrack in advance so the live meeting focuses on comments and consensus. No tool fully solves roadmapping, so each team picks its own, and he says bringing roadmap artifacts together at scale is not completely solved.
Miro's early users came from communities, content and removed friction. Early adopters invited others, helped by content marketing, Capterra listings and early SEO. Product teams built viral loops and removed every barrier the data pointed to.
The model moved from a time-limited trial to a premium model, which sped growth further.
Workshops and templates are Miro's biggest accelerants beyond the core loop. One person runs a workshop and invites 10 to 300 people, who then sign up. Miroverse templates get indexed by Google and draw users.
A FIFA World Cup diagram template had over 100,000 views and about 15,000 copies, and ranked in Google results, becoming an acquisition channel of its own.
Parmar treats self-serve and sales as two channels of one product. Product marketing works across both, carrying enterprise and self-serve needs between them. The handoff runs from self-serve adoption to a hand raiser, rep qualification, then account expansion.
Enterprise provisioning of tens of thousands of users leads to hundreds of thousands of workshops that invite millions. He admits Miro can still streamline and act as a single unit.
Miro