Inside Miro's Product Machine: Empathy, Competition and a Biweekly Demo Party That Saved Three Months

Parmar says Miro's product organization sits in three European hubs while its go-to-market teams are worldwide, spread over 12 hubs. That split makes empathy a daily practice: not only for customers, but for sales and customer-success colleagues who meet large customers on other continents. The second cultural pillar, instilled by the founder and CEO, is teamwork across functions to break down silos.

The most effective tool he has seen is the questions leaders ask in product reviews. He wants to know what insight led a team to prioritize one thing over another, and whether it came from internal feedback, inbound customer signals, outbound conversations or an understanding of where the market and competitors are heading. Digging into those details is, in his view, how empathy gets practiced internally.

As an example, Parmar describes how teams working on zero-to-one ideas run five-day Design Sprints, a framework from Jake Knapp. For Miro Talktrack, which lets people record audio and video over a board asynchronously, the team could have captured a screen recording. Interviews showed that users wanted to collaborate, not just communicate, so Miro instead synchronized the board's movement with the video, letting viewers add stickies, comments and reactions while it plays.

Lenny recalls the doubts when Figma launched FigJam and asks why Miro kept thriving. Parmar points first to Miro's mission of helping teams create the next big thing. Many tools are built around one persona such as the designer and extend outward, whereas Miro takes a team-centric lens because innovation happens when cross-functional groups come together.

The second factor is breadth: beyond digital products, Miro is used in manufacturing, healthcare, architecture, engineering and construction, aerospace, and government agencies. Third are capabilities unique to Miro, such as advanced facilitation for workshops where some participants focus on one part of the board, and support for team rituals and agile practices. On top of that, he credits community love as the fuel that keeps the company going.

Lenny sums it up as a multi-functional architecture that is hard to copy, a wide spread of personas, specific hard-to-build features and community. Parmar agrees with that summary.

Miro has about 1,800 employees and over 450 product managers, according to Parmar. The team is organized mainly around personas in what Miro calls streams: for example, an enterprise stream for IT admin, security and compliance needs, and a platform stream for developers building apps. There are also horizontal streams for growth and self-serve, core infrastructure and data science, which drives Miro AI.

Lenny worries that persona-based teams keep adding features for their own users. Parmar's first answer is AMPED, which stands for analytics, marketing, product, engineering and design. When he says "product org" at Miro, he means all of those functions, with product marketing deeply embedded in each stream, so someone is always asking about end-user experience or enterprise requirements.

The second answer is transparency: work is classified as small, medium or high complexity, and smaller items are shared with the whole product org in a Slack channel that non-product colleagues can join. Big items go through a formal product review. Miro is also building a checklist of the ten or so enterprise requirements that every feature team should consider early, and a product manager now leads that charter.

The marketing link came before Parmar arrived. As he explains it, features built bottom-up by PMs can fail to capture imagination without positioning, competitive differentiation and packaging that help sellers show buyers the full vision.

One of Parmar's core beliefs, drawn from roughly 24 or 25 years in the industry, is that a company's growth or slowdown is directly tied to what competition allows. He has watched this in collaboration and productivity software, at Adobe's document cloud business and at Box, where a competitor with distribution and pricing power, such as Microsoft, enters a category. He lists three determinants: how good the rival's solution is, how strong its distribution and how aggressive its pricing and packaging.

Lenny notes this contradicts the common advice to ignore competitors and focus on customers. Parmar answers that the right response depends on the competitor's unfair advantage, and that customers must clearly understand your unique value, from capabilities to packaging and how you fit in their wider tech ecosystem. He adds that he respects one specific competitor and learns from how it makes bets.

His second philosophy is that products either get better or worse and never stay the same. From a customer's view, every release by you and by a competitor is a move in a chess match, scoring positive or negative points. He says this framing brings clarity on where to invest and how decisions ladder up to the market consolidation that eventually happens, though he admits Miro has not yet cracked how to operationalize it.

Parmar says he wants to be the first one to hit the brick wall. When a company is building experiences that do not exist elsewhere, he argues, speed is the biggest determinant of success because it lets you learn sooner that you need to turn ten degrees west. He admits the "go slow to go fast" view is controversial against his own and says it applies in certain areas, but not to uncertain new experiences. He cites Frank Slootman's *Amp It Up*.

On how to create urgency, he says product managers are people who want to move fast and are driven by challenge. What slows them are roadblocks, whether technical, organizational or about priorities. Leaders should make it easy to raise a hand, then resolve the issue quickly, which starts a virtuous cycle and builds pattern-matching that lets teams solve more on their own.

The product org's motto is a single sentence: deliver customer value faster with high quality, and it is embedded in performance and reward systems. Value counts only when customers use something, so PMs are asked which metric they meant to move and how much it moved. Cycle times from idea to pitch to ship to metric movement are measured and shared, and quality is benchmarked against best-in-class apps.

Each month Miro's design leadership team reviews what shipped and sorts it into a binary: high quality or not, with reasons recorded. Parmar says this is used to calibrate leaders on what quality means, and findings are being shared more widely. He compares it to describing pink versus red: showing three examples of each works better than a definition. After about a year of fruitless debate and long documents defining attributes, this approach felt lighter, and Lenny likens it to reinforcement learning.

For velocity, Parmar calls it a game of golf in which teams compete only against themselves. Miro's product process starts with a strategy pitch (P-strat), then P0 for problem definition, P1 for solution definition and P2 for checking the metrics after shipping. Work is sized small, medium or large, with small meaning under a month.

Cycle-time data for more than 50 product teams, including averages, medians and variance, is open to everyone. A team that spent unusually long on problem definition can go talk to a faster team, and a fast team can share why. A product excellence function collects the data, though Parmar says reliable collection from meetings and Slack could still improve.

Miro keeps a rolling six-month roadmap updated every three months. The first three months carry an 80% confidence level, meaning 80% of items should ship, and the next three months carry 50%. Parmar says this satisfies enterprise customers who ask for roadmap reviews while giving teams room to pivot for customer requests, competitor moves or LLM breakthroughs without penalty.

Underneath sits an annual strategy white paper available to every Mironeer that spells out key bets, the reasons and the expected outcomes tied to OKRs. Teams are otherwise autonomous in their rituals, with agile coaches on hand. OKRs begin at company level and are broken down by AMPED; Miro moved from quarterly to six-month key results, with monthly traction checks, to cut replanning overhead.

The signature ritual is Miro Connect, held every other Friday afternoon. In hubs such as Amsterdam, product teams sit at tables to show their work while people walk around with drinks. Parmar recounts one Berlin session where an engineer who had solved the same problem in a prior job offered help after hearing a team's three-month estimate. The engineer headed home, wrote the whole thing in a few hours, and a pull request was reviewed the next morning.

The product team's stack uses Jira for tickets and increasingly roadmaps, Confluence, Google Docs and Coda for specs and key results, and Miro for research insights, brainstorming, workshops and presentations. Parmar highlights Showtime, a presentation mode that lets viewers react and comment without disrupting flow, and Talktrack for sending five- to ten-minute asynchronous walkthroughs so live meetings can focus on consensus. Looker dashboards can be embedded in a board and stay refreshed.

On roadmapping, Parmar says no universal tool exists and teams pick their own; some use Miro's Kanban widget. The field organization is enabled with a customer-approved roadmap board containing short recordings from the leaders of enterprise, platform, end-user experience and AI.

For balancing innovation and maintenance, he gives rough rules: innovation takes about 60 to 80% of capacity, while 20 to 40% goes to architecture and technology work, driven by the CTO's roadmap as the platform scales past 50 million users. For longer horizons he uses the three-horizon model at roughly 70% for the core business, 20% for adjacent bets over 12 to 36 months and 10% for three-to-five-year ideas.

Parmar tells his leaders they play two roles. As members of the product leadership team, their top job is to drive accountability with one another. As stream leaders, their top job is to drive improvement for their persona, asking whether today is better than yesterday. He reminds people of this duality at the start of annual calibrations.

Accountability, he says, means open and constructive feedback focused on what is right for the business, delivered with empathy and posed as a question: here is what I see, but help me understand what I might be missing. That ties it back to Miro's empathy value.

He practices this himself. At offsites he holds a one-to-two-hour session in which eight to ten leaders give open feedback to him, which he says builds trust. The recurring comment, he says, is that people want more of his time and faster responses on email and Slack.

Although he was not there at the start, Parmar says Miro's first users came from a user-first approach, early adopters inviting other early adopters, content marketing, listings on sites such as Capterra, and early SEO. Product teams then focused on viral loops and removing friction, and the move from time-limited trials to a freemium model accelerated growth.

Collaboration use cases such as workshops bring in many new people at once, with one host inviting dozens or hundreds. Templates also matter, especially the Miroverse. He cites a FIFA World Cup template by a Canadian service-design consultancy founder that drew over 100,000 views and about 15,000 copies, and ranked in Google search. Parmar says Miro is fundamentally product-led, with enterprise provisioning increasingly part of the flywheel.

On working with a large sales organization, he says the teams must not see themselves as competitors because it is one product with two channels. Product marketing spans both self-serve and high-touch, and the handoff runs from self-serve adoption to a hand-raiser, a sales rep, qualification and expansion. He concedes there are still areas to streamline.

Looking ahead, Parmar says Miro AI was announced about a month earlier and is heading to general availability in the coming weeks and months. Newly announced updates for agile rituals include a private mode for retrospectives that reveals feedback with one click, Jira program-board integration for dependency mapping and program increment planning, and sprint estimation tools.

In the lightning round, he recommends *When Breath Becomes Air*, *Amp It Up* and *Hit Refresh*, and he enjoys *Ted Lasso*. His favorite interview question is a math problem based on how Adobe priced and packaged the first Creative Suite bundle after acquiring Macromedia; after giving it to roughly 700 or 800 candidates he has a distribution of how long people take and where they get stuck. His favorite Miro template is the FIFA World Cup one.