Apr 20, 2023 · 1h 25m · lennys-podcast
An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)
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Varun Parmar, Chief Product Officer at Miro, provides an in-depth breakdown of Miro's product culture, organizational design, and execution principles for building market-leading software. He details how cross-functional AMPED teams balance rapid stage-gate execution, design quality calibration, and product-led growth to outpace competition.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 24.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 4.1 Guest teaching 6.1 Guest disagreement 0.7 Lenny pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 24:50 Company success is dictated by competition
Varun rejects the mainstream tech ethos of ignoring competitors, asserting that business trajectory is directly determined by competitor actions.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 26:55 Reframing competitor obsession vs customer focusLenny challenges the conventional advice to ignore competitors and asks Varun to substantiate how competitor awareness tactically alters roadmap choices.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 28:44 The Chessboard release points frameworkVarun lays out an original mental model explaining how every software release is a relative chess move altering the customer's perceived value against rivals.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 46:34 Lenny synthesizing the Miro stage-gate cycleLenny demonstrates deep operational domain expertise by precisely summarizing the P-strat to P2 framework and its benchmark variance tracking.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Miro's Global Distribution and Cross-Cultural Empathy | 3 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Lenny opens by inquiring about Miro's dual-hub structure in Amsterdam and San Francisco. Varun clarifies the company's broader footprint across 12 global hubs and explains how cross-cultural empathy drives their product development. | |
| Validating Hypotheses via Design Sprints and TalkTrack | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Lenny asks for concrete practices fostering empathy and teamwork. Varun provides an in-depth breakdown of using Jake Knapp's 5-day design sprint framework to build TalkTrack with synchronized board state rather than plain screen recording. | |
| Competing in Crowded Markets Through Cross-Functional Design | 5 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Lenny notes competitive threats like FigJam and asks what keeps Miro ahead. Varun outlines Miro's cross-functional team focus, broad multi-industry applicability, and specialized collaboration toolsets. | |
| Organizational Structure: Persona-Driven Streams | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Lenny asks about product org scale and organizational topology. Varun explains the persona-driven streams model covering enterprise IT, developers, growth, and horizontal platform infrastructure. | |
| Maintaining Cohesion with AMPED and Review Rituals | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Lenny asks how Miro prevents persona-based teams from fracturing the user experience. Varun details the AMPED model and open review rituals that keep cross-functional leaders aligned. | |
| Embedding Product Marketing and the Role of Competition | 4 | 7 | 2 | 0 | Varun introduces a core contrarian philosophy: company success is directly dictated by what competitors permit. Lenny asks to double down on this perspective given its contrast with conventional product advice. | |
| Navigating Incumbent Threats and Clear Market Differentiation | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Varun reflects on competing against giants like Microsoft, Adobe, and Box based on distribution, pricing, and packaging. Lenny synthesizes the takeaways around crisp positioning and differentiated moat building. | |
| The Chessboard Mental Model for Continuous Improvement | 5 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Varun presents his chessboard mental model: every production release either gains or loses relative ground against competitors. Lenny probes on how to operationalize this without falling into a feature-parity trap. | |
| Speed as an Advantage: Hitting the Brick Wall First | 4 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Varun advocates for high execution speed to 'hit the brick wall first' and uncover insights before competitors. Lenny connects this to Frank Slootman's urgency framework and asks how leadership resolves blocker bottlenecks. | |
| Miro's Product Motto and High-Quality Classification | 5 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Varun shares Miro's product motto—'deliver customer value faster with high quality'—and details their binary monthly design triage system. | |
| Sponsor Message: Linear Issue Tracking and Roadmaps | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Following the Linear sponsor break, Lenny likens Miro's binary classification heuristic to reinforcement learning. Varun elaborates on avoiding bureaucratic documents in favor of clear exemplars. | |
| Measuring Velocity Through Stage Gates and Product Ops | 6 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Varun explains tracking cycle times across stage gates from P-strat to P2, treating velocity like golf against internal benchmarks. Lenny demonstrates strong comprehension by summarizing the exact workflow taxonomy. | |
| Roadmap Planning and the Miro Connect Ritual | 4 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Varun details Miro's rolling 6-month roadmap with tiered confidence thresholds (80% first 3 months, 50% next 3) and shares an anecdote from the bi-monthly 'Miro Connect' demo day. | |
| Six-Month OKRs and Operating Miro on Miro | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Lenny and Varun discuss goal setting cadences, with Varun explaining their shift from quarterly to 6-month OKRs tracked monthly on Miro boards. | |
| Product Tooling Stack and Asynchronous Workflows | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Varun outlines Miro's internal tooling stack (Jira, Confluence, Coda, Looker) and how Miro acts as the unified presentation, dashboard, and async review hub via TalkTrack. | |
| Resource Allocation and the Three Horizon Framework | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Lenny asks for allocation formulas between tech debt, maintenance, and big bets. Varun details their 70/20/10 Three Horizons model alongside a 20-40% baseline for underlying infrastructure. | |
| Dual Leadership Roles and Radical Feedback Culture | 4 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Varun outlines the dual expectation for product leads: stream leaders drive improvement, product leadership drives mutual accountability. He shares how he runs live, open feedback sessions on his own performance. | |
| Miro's Growth Engine, Virality Loops, and Miroverse | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Varun reviews Miro's early acquisition loops, highlighting community virality, SEO, and the Miroverse template ecosystem (giving the FIFA World Cup template as an example). | |
| Bridging Product-Led Growth and Enterprise Sales | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Lenny asks how PLG companies navigate building an enterprise sales motion. Varun discusses aligning self-serve handoffs with sales qualification and embedded product marketing. | |
| Upcoming Innovations: Miro AI and Agile Workflows | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Varun previews upcoming product launches including general availability for Miro AI, private retro modes, and Jira PI planning dependency mapping. | |
| Lightning Round and Final Community Reflections | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | In the lightning round, Varun shares favorite book recommendations, his Creative Suite math interview problem, and final community invitations. |
Statements from this episode (24)
Miro's product and engineering teams are anchored across three European hubs
“Our product organization is actually based in Europe and our go to market organization is is worldwide. And you know, so our, you know, product management team, our designers, our engineers are located across three different hubs in, in Europe.”
Miro uses Jake Knapp's five-day design sprints for zero-to-one product initiatives
“Anytime we're trying to build a new experience, like one of the approach we want to take is like very quickly validate. That our original hypothesis you know, is that sound or not? And we are big fans of the design sprint framework, you know, so what Jake Knap…”
Miro employs approximately 1,800 people across 12 global hubs
“Give or take about 1800 employees at Miro globally across all of the 12 hubs.”
Miro's product team includes between 40 and 50 product managers
“And specifically in terms of the number of product managers, we are over four or 50 PMs in the team.”
Miro structures its product organization around persona-focused stream teams
“So I would say it's maybe a hybrid structure that we have but the sort of the foundation of the of the team setup is is around persona. So we have what we refer to as streams, you know, some companies refer to as domains, but essentially it's a set of individu…”
Miro structures its product organization as cross-functional AMPED units
“When we think about the product org, like, we call our org, it's called AMPED, A-M-P-E-D... AMP stands for like analytics, marketing, product, engineering, and design. And everything that we do in the product org, when we say the product org, we actually don't…”
A company's success is directly determined by what its competition allows
“The success of a company is a direct relation of what the competition allows you to do. I feel like not many people sort of talk about that, but in many cases in my professional career, and I've been at it for, you know, close to 24, 25 years, is that every si…”
Software products never stay static; every deployment improves or degrades them
“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 sin…”
Being the first to hit a brick wall yields a competitive advantage
“What you want to do is that you want to be the first one to hit the brick wall where you have this, 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…”
Ten-x speed comes from scoping and architecture, not working faster
“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 core 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 scop…”
Miro design leadership runs a monthly binary quality triage on shipped features
“Like when we ship stuff on a monthly basis, our design leadership team does a triage of everything that got shipped into, like, High quality or not high quality. It's just like a binary function, and we're doing that, and we're saying, hey, the reason why we b…”
Measuring product velocity is like golf; teams compete against their own baseline
“Velocity is more like the game of golf where you're just playing against yourself. Like, it's not like if Lenny and Varun are out of the golf course, like, it doesn't matter. Like, you know, I'm not competing against you. I'm just competing against myself beca…”
Miro runs product development through four stage gates from P-Strat to P2
“We have a product process that we follow, which starts with the P strad, which is a strategy, and then we go into P zero, which is you know, definition of the problem. Then we go into P one, which is definition of the solution. And then we go into P two, which…”
Miro uses a rolling six-month roadmap with tiered delivery precision targets
“And so what we do is we have a rolling six month roadmap that gets updated every three months. And the first three months of that, that roadmap, we have an 80% precision level, which means that 80% of the things that we claim to be on the roadmap will get done…”
Miro switched from quarterly OKRs to six-month key results
“Early on, we were doing OKRs on a quarterly basis. And I would say more recently, we've actually evolved to six month KRs. And what we found was that You know, six months was the right cadence in terms of giving enough time for teams to basically push forward …”
No universal tool exists to solve product roadmapping at scale
“Our observation is that while those tools are great for the unique needs that they're solving, we haven't found, like, a, like a universal solution for road mapping, so there are some teams that use Miro, you know, for road mapping, and they would use the Kanb…”
Miro publishes its entire customer roadmap internally as an async TalkTrack board
“We actually enable our entire field organization using TalkTracks. So what happens is that we have our entire roadmap published out as a Miro board for enablement purposes, so that that's an artifact that is approved to be shown to a customer and what you will…”
Miro allocates twenty to forty percent of engineering capacity to architectural initiatives
“So I would say about 20 to 40% of the available capacity at any given time is either getting allocated to architectural initiatives.”
Parmar: Miro has over 50 million users on its platform
“And, you know, now, as you know, we have over fifty million people on the platform.”
Miro allocates R&D resources using a 70/20/10 ratio across innovation horizons
“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 to overtake. Then there is horizon two, which is an adjacent thing, you know, with the next…”
Product leaders must balance stream improvement and holding peers accountable
“You have two personas that you have to think about. Everyone who's on the product leadership team is, is a product leadership team member, and the fundamental thing that you have to do is drive accountability. So the number one thing that a product leader on t…”
Varun Parmar takes open peer feedback from his leadership team at offsites
“Every offsite that I do with my leadership team, usually there is a one to two hour session where it is feedback to Varun. And I actually do it openly. I will have about eight to 10 people in the room, and I will force people to be very honest, and I want to s…”
Miro accelerated growth by shifting from a free trial to freemium
“Early on in the journey you know, some of the features were presented on a trial basis. You know, 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, you know, the growth fo…”
PLG and enterprise sales must view themselves as channels, not competitors
“You have to be very deliberate around the points of intersection, and you have to make sure that you know, these organizations don't consider themselves as competition. Like, you know, it's one product, one company. It's just two, two channels of how we are se…”