ASOS is a London-based online fashion destination that prides itself on empowering self-expression and giving its customers the confidence to be whoever they want to be. Since 2000, ASOS has created and curated fun, stylish, and versatile fashion for any occasion.
To support the company’s mission to be “the world’s number one fashion destination for fashion-loving 20-somethings,” the product team is dedicated to creating a top-notch online shopping experience. As such, the ASOS website must fulfill two critical objectives: deliver the fashion that customers are looking for and provide the delightful user experience that shoppers demand.
By bringing teams together in Miro rather than using multiple tools, ASOS experienced:
71% more effective meetings
~50% less time spent on product planning
3.75 hours saved per Miro user per week
Story highlights
- ASOS product and engineering teams were using many different tools for ongoing planning, posing a risk of misalignment and delays
- Miro helped establish a unified planning practice that brought together over 60 Agile teams in one online workspace to align priorities and visualize dependencies
- Semester planning helps ASOS teams perform against business initiatives and improve the customer experience
Explore Miro for product planning
The problem: Teams planned in multiple tools, risking misalignment
The product teams at ASOS are extensive, covering all different stages of the online customer journey from acquisition to shopping, checkout, and returns.
Across these teams, a range of different tools were used for product planning and roadmapping, with a heavy reliance on Microsoft Office solutions like Planner, Excel, and Visio. This meant everyone was working in private workspaces, workflows could be disconnected, and separate backlogs sometimes caused challenges with dependency management.
With no single view of what everyone was working on each quarter, ASOS teams wanted to improve how they could prioritize, plan, and schedule work.
Improving alignment between teams and with leadership would boost team autonomy, innovation, and time to market. This was especially important for fashion businesses like ASOS, where releasing updates ahead of seasonally-driven deadlines is key to customer satisfaction.
The solution: One workspace where leaders and teams strategically plan together
To address these challenges, ASOS’ Director of Architecture and Engineering pulled together a small team with a clear mission to establish a new semester planning process to coincide with the start of the company’s fiscal year. In addition to its intuitive interface and deep capabilities, design teams were already using (and loving) Miro, making it the clear choice to help ASOS transform its planning practice – quickly.
In Miro, ASOS hosted hundreds of people across 60+ Agile teams to conduct their “semester planning.” Miro was used to facilitate the live portion of the planning event where collaborators simultaneously worked together in real-time, and also served as the “homebase” to document asynchronous work during the planning cycle.
The leadership provided pre-work on the board to give important context on business priorities for the coming quarter. Taking this into account, teams shared proposed initiatives, identified necessary resources, and documented decisions so that everyone was aligned on the work to be done.
Collaboratively mapping projects in Miro against a timeline helped ensure everyone was clear on cross-functional dependencies and key milestones crucial to achieving business goals. And when planning is conducted in one shared workspace, leadership can have visibility into the work being prioritized and the opportunity to weigh in before work begins. At the end of the quarter, teams can come back into the same Miro board to report on progress against the work that was agreed upon.
The result: Focus on the right initiatives to create an amazing customer experience
Miro gave teams across the world the chance to share insights and priorities and provided a platform for planning sessions to run smoothly – where conversations flowed, participants stayed on task, and teams aligned. In short, using Miro made it easier for the strategic and technical teams at ASOS to join forces and make the biggest impact possible. Visualizing and understanding dependencies saved ASOS hours of back-and-forth or syncing across different tools, and kept everyone on track to hit their goals.
“Being able to bring everyone together to plan in Miro ultimately means that the most impactful initiatives will happen at the right time – and customers will get the functionality they want.”
LUCY STARLING, Product Operations Lead at ASOS
Sharing customer feedback and prioritizing corresponding initiatives in Miro helped the most important projects cut through the noise and get needed buy-in. Leadership was given the ability to regularly get in front of the entire team, communicate big bets, and prevent individual Agile teams from getting tied up in less impactful work.
Lucy explains, “Since using Miro for planning, we’ve been able to deliver some major pieces of work much more quickly and easily than we did before.”
By bringing people together to align and plan during a focused time period, ASOS estimates they have reduced time spent on ongoing conversations and planning by 50% in a given quarter.
Miro for the enterprise: Empowering cross-functional collaboration
Beyond semester planning, Miro is a critical element of the product development team’s day-to-day work. Product designers take advantage of Miro for facilitating workshops, creating project hubs, and synthesizing research. Because it’s accessible and intuitive for any type of user, Miro allows design teams to collaborate with non-designers across the organization from product to engineering and external vendors to produce great experiences for customers.
Miro for user research
Product designers across ASOS agree that Miro is critical for user research – from creating discussion guides to note-taking to affinity mapping. In one particular case, Miro was used to create a verification flow for the student discount program.
Designers used Miro to conduct research and synthesize findings, helping them design a customer-centric user flow. Visualizing the data in Miro made it easy to spot common “surprises” or “pains” along the verification process. This helped create a smooth experience for students so they could quickly get their discount code and start shopping.
“Miro has removed so much friction from the process and made me a better designer. It takes me half the time to distill user research. The infinite workspace lets me spread out the data as much as I want and drill down into it
JILL MURPHY, Product Designer at ASOS
Miro as a project hub
The checkout experience team identified a gap in their process – it was often unclear where projects came from and where all the components were documented. Sean Conlon, a Product Designer on the team, created a template in Miro to ensure all project context was available in one place.
The template ensured visibility into each project’s business goals, customer goals, stakeholders, and potential constraints. Because ASOS is on the Miro Enterprise Plan, Sean was able to create this as a custom template that is available to anyone on his team directly within Miro.
“Miro is integral to collaboration, especially in the discovery process. It is the foundation of collaboration on my team.”
SEAN CONLON, Product Designer at ASOS
Miro for hybrid workshops
Planning and facilitating workshops in Miro means sessions with cross-functional teams can run as efficiently and effectively as possible. With tools like timer and voting, participants are kept on task, and all discussions are documented directly on the board.
The ability to create inclusive meeting experiences is crucial as ASOS has teams both in offices and remote, and wants to tap into the knowledge and creativity of all participants. The Miro board provides a venue to present findings, split up into breakouts, develop ideas, and leave feedback on different sections of the board with comments or sticky notes.
“When we need to collaborate through workshops or design critiques, we use Miro. It’s really the only platform that can do what we need.”
KATIE CHASE, Product Designer at ASOS
Due to its tremendous business impact on product development outcomes, ASOS decided to establish Miro as an enterprise-wide solution. Miro is now available for all ASOS employees, and an integral component of the company’s hybrid work strategy.
Miro’s Enterprise Plan provides the access and scale needed for ASOS to use Miro across their organization. It delivers advanced sharing options that ensure data privacy and confidentiality, user access management, and enhanced user permissions. The plan also allows ASOS to reduce the number of tools and IT overhead in projects. In fact, Miro has provided functionality that allowed ASOS to cut licenses for legacy diagramming software by 75%.
Overall, the organization has seen significant results in using Miro across the enterprise: users say Miro has made them more productive, and increased meeting effectiveness, and they estimate that Miro saves hours per user per week.
Improving cross-functional collaboration has allowed ASOS to find efficiencies in its work and align on strategic priorities. In using Miro for research, workshops, and semester planning, ASOS has strengthened its customer-centric approach – listening to customer feedback and designing delightful experiences.
