Here’s to a
Miro-aculous 2O2O
A few weeks into the new year, everyone at Miro is focused on what’s next for 2020. Ambitious goals. A roster of new product updates and improvements. More opportunities to learn and grow.
Andrey Khusid
CEO at Miro
But I also want to take a moment to step back and appreciate how far we’ve come as a company. After raising our Series A in late 2018, we continued our momentum:
- 3.5 million people use Miro
- 7 new investors and advisors joined us in 2019
- We were named a Best Place to Work by Built In LA
Here’s a recap of everything that happened last year. I’m incredibly proud of the team and feel so grateful to our users for all of their support and feedback. Keep it coming!
New brand:
So long, RealtimeBoard…
hello, Miro!
The days of RealtimeBoard already feels like a different era. We already had a product and brand that millions of users loved, but we knew that it was time to take our company to the next stage. While “RealtimeBoard” was functional, we wanted a name that extended beyond the whiteboard and was more aspirational.
To get there, we conducted a remote brand sprint across our four offices, which – along with an agile design process – enabled us to roll out an entirely new identity in only three months. In March 2019, we debuted our new identity as Miro. We’re thrilled with our brand and hope it continues to inspire users to collaborate across borders, unleash their creativity, and innovate.
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New features:
making Miro amazing
for our users
Our priority is always creating the best possible experience for our users. Our Product team released dozens of features and updates (and we also launched a changelog to keep you informed about everything that’s new). We also made a huge push toward enterprise readiness, by fully revamping our user management so it will work seamlessly at scale.
From new flexible frameworks like User Story Mapping and Kanban, to integrations with Zapier and Azure DevOps and the beta of our open platform – the year was all about bringing users what they wanted. Read about everything we shipped in 2019.
New spaces:
Play as a team
to win the world
We added 97 new team members in 2019, with leaders hailing from Salesforce, Segment, Dropbox, Drift, and SurveyMonkey. With our numbers growing, we expanded into new offices in two locations: Los Angeles and San Francisco.
We brought everyone together at our annual global offsite, which was a productive (and extremely fun) way to collaborate cross-functionally, learn from each other, and be inspired.
New investors and advisors: Validating our vision
Our vision – to help distributed teams work as if they’re sitting in the same room – received some major backing last year. We were thrilled to add a new angel investor in late 2019: Quentin Clark, CTO at Dropbox.
Quentin adds his deep expertise in the collaboration space to our already stellar roster of angel investors and advisors who joined us earlier: Des Traynor and Eoghan McCabe, co-founders of Intercom; Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath; Andrew Filev, founder and CEO of Wrike; Sherali Karimov, an experienced executive coach previously at Atlassian and Optimizely; and Alex Estevez, former CFO of Atlassian and now Accel Venture Partner. We’re so fortunate to be able to leverage their wisdom and insights in 2020 and beyond.
New virtual summit:
Distributed 2O19
Remote teamwork continues to gain traction with time. That’s why, for our very first large conference, we decided to do something a bit different: host the whole thing virtually. Distributed 2019 was a 3-day, free online event with more than 35 speakers and 14,000 attendees representing 86 countries. It was so successful that we’re betting on virtual events as a growing trend for the foreseeable future.
We also experimented with a new format, visual notetaking on Miro boards, which made our panel discussions more engaging and left attendees with unique visual artifacts to reference post-conference.
New learnings:
Sharing our expertise
(and our community’s expertise)
Virtual Miro User Groups (V-MUGs)
Last year, we started facilitating monthly Virtual Miro User Groups (V-MUGs), where Miro users – or anyone who’s curious – can come together to get tips, tricks, and inspiration on how others use the product. It’s a fun way to share ideas and also network with other Miro Heroes!
After a few North American V-MUGs, we launched them for our European users. We’ll be continuing these into 2020, and we’ll be sharing the recorded sessions on the Miro YouTube channel.
Meetups
As part of the Reshaping Teamwork series, our meetups brought together the community of product managers, UX researchers, and designers to share insights and best practices for cross-functional collaboration. Thought leaders from Dropbox, Pinterest, Salesforce, and more spoke about their experiences and shared helpful tips-and-tricks on how to:
We also collaborated with notable orgs. like SF Design Week and Product School to bring more value to the community.
Beyond our own meetups, we sponsored local events hosted by Just Mad and Design Sprint Boston to show our support; we hope to collaborate with more organizations in the new year.
Academy
We launched the first version of the Miro Academy! Across all channels, our educational videos received over 90,000 views. The first three courses of the academy were all launched last year, including Getting Started with Miro, the Company Admin Handbook, and Agile Workflows.
Miro employees share their insights
On the Miro Blog, our employees shared a ton of useful information: from how to be more eco-friendly through online collaboration to an exploration of how to visualize collaboration. We released our first Remote Work Report and shared our own frameworks for remote one-on-ones, how to give feedback on a distributed team, and how to measure successful collaboration.
And now,
on to 2O2O!
Like what you see? We’ve got a bunch of open roles in LA, SF, Austin, Amsterdam, and Perm – join us to create the next big thing!
We can’t wait to see what’s next.
