An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast

Varun Parmar, Chief Product Officer of Miro, discusses how Miro organizes its distributed product organization, competes against well-funded rivals, and balances speed, quality, and roadmap planning. The conversation covers team structure, competitive strategy, operating rituals like rolling roadmaps and OKRs, and Miro's product-led growth engine.

01Key learnings

• Organize product teams around personas rather than only outcomes, and embed cross-functional roles like product marketing and analytics in each stream so features get checked from multiple angles.
• Treat every release as a move in the competitive game: each shipped change either improves or weakens your position relative to rivals, which adds clarity to bet-making.
• Be the first to hit the learning wall in competitive markets, since speed of learning often determines who wins, even if that means moving fast before the path is fully clear.
• Make blockers visible instantly: encourage PMs to raise their hand when blocked and have leadership resolve issues quickly to build momentum and trust.
• Measure cycle times from insight to shipped value and benchmark teams against each other, using the data as a self-comparison tool rather than a competition.
• Calibrate quality by showing concrete examples of great versus weak work rather than writing lengthy definitions, then classify shipped work as high or not high quality on a regular cadence.
• Use a rolling six-month roadmap with decreasing commitment levels over time (roughly 80% for the first three months, 50% after), so teams can pivot without penalty while still giving enterprise customers visibility.
• Allocate investment across horizons roughly 70% core business, 20% adjacent growth, and 10% next-generation bets, with 20 to 40% of team capacity often reserved for platform and technical work.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.