A company's success is directly determined by what its competition allows
Varun Parmar · An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro) · Apr 20, 2023 · at 24:48
Varun Parmar, Chief Product Officer at Miro, discusses competitive dynamics and his core philosophy on why companies succeed or fail.
0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Varun Parmar
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”