With the growing trend of remote work, especially in digital industries, product managers are faced with the challenges of managing distributed teams while accommodating visual thinking (Scrum or Agile), maintaining team alignment and comfort and delivering expected outcomes faster.
To help you succeed in this challenging environment, we created Miro, which over the past few years has become the leading visual collaboration platform, helping product teams brainstorm and visually communicate ideas, flows and product stories to drive alignment across teams and deliver against roadmaps.
Let’s have a look at some core use cases and solutions where Miro empowers remote product management.
What do product managers do at Miro?
Affinity mapping of customer requirements
Live user story mapping sessions
References mood boards
Iterating on prototypes
Go-to source for designers and developers
Daily/Weekly/Monthly syncs
Why do they choose Miro for these tasks?
1. PMs and their teams get things done faster by collaborating in real time or asynchronously.
No matter how many people are in your team or where they are located, Miro can become a digital meeting point, just like a regular meeting room but available 24/7. Even if you work in the same office, when you go your separate ways after a meeting, you become a distributed team that needs to work together. Simply add teammates to the board and organize communication around the assets. You can watch their cursors moving as ideas grow in real time or asynchronously.
Leave comments and @mentions to fire up the discussion.
See collaborators’ cursors live and get a helicopter view of the progress.
Embed files, pdfs, images, videos, web pages and other project artifacts right to boards. With auto synchronization, your Google Drive or Sketch file widgets will always represent the most recent version.
Our team can decide on required changes for design 20% faster since Miro. It has successfully helped us to ship multiple large-scale product releases. That 20% is significant to us since we have multiple projects in development simultaneously, and we need to allocate our resources accordingly.
Kevin Yang, Product Manager at Instapage
2. PMs build effective teams by letting everyone speak a common language.
Designers, developers, coaches, marketers and other talented professionals in product teams work together to build great things. However, they are all different and speak many languages: data, pictures, spreadsheets, tasks, charts and more. If someone prefers Jira and another uses Sketch for daily tasks, the only way to share progress was to post links. Following a link and landing in an unfamiliar product causes frustration and confusion. Miro combines all these pieces in one familiar place where everyone can establish a comfortable workflow, helping your team work together as a whole.
Infinite Canvas as a one-stop shop for everything: customer insights, mockups, story maps, interview records, workflows, versions, plans and project management
Bi-directional integrations with CA Agile Central, Jira, Confluence, Slack, Sketch, InVision, Adobe Creative Cloud, Google Drive and other tools
Teammates can customize their own toolbar by adding their most frequently used tools and add-ons.
Now every Upworker is able to use Miro.
Shipra Kayan, Director of Product Design Research at Upwork
3. PMs can help create more valuable products by letting the team build on each other’s ideas.
As cross-functional organizations, product teams can make better decisions about what they should build next when the voice of every professional is heard. Since PMs depend on different functions, giving and receiving feedback on iterations is crucial. Miro provides the perfect environment to make feedback clear, to the point and empowered by associated activities like voting or presentations.
The voting addon will help you invest in ideas that the majority of your team believes in.
Allow your team to access Google Docs to comment and edit them within boards.
When on the board, use presentation mode to present your work to others.
For team collaboration, this is as close as I’ve ever seen to a physical whiteboard for distributed teams. I facilitate a lot of distributed meetings, and this is my new favorite tool.
David Frink, Agile Coach at Ipreo
4. PMs can structure a complex idea flow to make better product decisions.
After gathering different information like competitor research, analytics, feedback analysis and business and product visions, it’s necessary to brain-dump all the knowledge, structure it for clarity and store it as easy-to-access pieces. Miro is equipped with lots of built-in frameworks that help product managers and their teammates organize thoughts. User story maps, customer personas, mind maps and other templates are easy to use and completely customizable.
40+ visual templates and frameworks
Create custom templates and save them to a personal or team library.
The Miro environment allowed me to customize templates for my current project. I like its completely open flexibility to create any board possible.
George Metrick, Social Media Listening Consultant at Cisco
