Planning—while crucial—often becomes one of the least enjoyable aspects of Product Development work. It can create a lot of unnecessary “process noise” without truly empowering teams.
The main thing to focus on when you want to improve this is to support meaningful discussions between teams and larger business units (which, at Miro, we call “streams”). Our recent experiments have revolved around exploring this very concept.
As we were finalizing our plans for the second half of the year, we faced a challenge while coordinating roadmaps for around 70 teams.
We found ourselves juggling two important principles:
1. Ensure transparency across teams.
2. Avoid unnecessary time spent with irrelevant information or lengthy discussions.
After all, when it comes to planning and operational tasks, teams often express feedback like, “I have no idea what team ‘x’ is up to,” while wondering, “Do we really need a meeting for this?”
How we discovered the right balance
We found ourselves wondering how to balance it all. Especially at the end of an intense planning phase and amidst various vacation schedules.
During discussions with cross-functional leaders from our core experience teams, the question it all boiled down to was:
How can we make the process of reviewing the roadmap as asynchronous as possible, while still ensuring that all teams stay engaged where it matters?
Enter our Async Roadmap Sharing Board: a simple template that prompts each team to provide:
- Their main goals
- Key initiatives
- Links to their roadmaps (on platforms like Miro, Jira, or Coda)
- A list of dependencies and collaboration points to showcase how teams connect
Crucially, teams are encouraged to accompany their submissions with a Talktrack voiceover to add context and nuance to their plans.
We gave everyone a week and encouraged them to reuse existing content to keep things efficient.
Distilling the feedback
As content started pouring in over the next few days, the board transformed into the central hub for discussions about our upcoming roadmap. Comments, questions, feedback, and adjustments were visible to all our teams and even neighboring ones.
What was once a top-down review of the roadmap led by leadership evolved into a collaborative dialogue. Many team members got to actively contribute to shaping and finalizing the plan, combining strategic rationale with metrics and initiative details—all in one Miro board.
Try the Async Roadmap Sharing Template
This Async Roadmap Sharing Template helps teams in scaled organizations share their priorities, roadmaps, and plans in a visual and easily consumable way. Get a copy of your own and give it a try with your team!
