At Miro, we’re obsessed with innovation. We’re dedicated to continuous improvement and are constantly seeking ways to add value to our products and our working practices.
While many different companies have many different definitions for innovation, to us it is the human process of applied creativity. We believe in the power of people coming together in repeatable ways to transform creativity into reality.
But we also know that innovation is hard and none of us are immune to its challenges.
For example, between 2020 and 2021, we were heavily focused on speed: maturing our products quickly to keep up with demand. Now, we’re in our next period of growth — a thoughtful and more deliberate approach to innovation. Each phase presents new challenges and opportunities to hold a mirror up to our working practices.
Here, I’ll introduce the four core competencies that innovative, collaborative companies exhibit and explain how we designed the Miro Ways of Working (MiroWoW) framework as a vehicle to practice and improve them.
4 key questions for innovative organizations
In re-architecting Miro’s ways of working, we drew on insights from internal engagement surveys and global surveys of external innovation leaders and product practitioners to better understand how teams within Miro and beyond are operating today. No matter an organization’s industry, product, or size, we discovered that there are commonalities across companies in the way they think about and approach innovation.
For example, most people — 91% of leaders and 90% of information workers — agree that innovating at pace is essential. Yet, many companies feel stuck putting their ideas into action.
We believe teams and companies can overcome this inertia by approaching innovation with an intentional mindset and by asking four key questions:
- Why are we doing it – and why now?
- What problems are we solving?
- How can we learn faster?
- Who do we need to work with?
Although we aren’t always able to answer all of these questions consistently at Miro, they’ve enabled us to identify points of friction and test solutions to become more innovative over time.
We believe our drive to reinvent ourselves internally and put continuous improvement at the heart of how we work is one of our biggest assets. This mindset has resulted in the Miro Ways of Working framework, or MiroWoW, which emphasizes the following four competencies:
Strategy: Why are we doing it – and why now?
Miro research reveals that 79% of leaders say that their company struggles to translate strategy into new products and services.
We’ve found that being clear about why we’re doing each project and following a North Star ensures each end product aligns with the organization’s mission and helps break the bigger picture down into more actionable and manageable steps for teams. When everyone is on the same page about where we want to go (and why we want to get there), it’s easier to work as one.
To better understand whether our strategy encourages autonomy internally, we ask ourselves:
- Does everyone have a shared understanding of our mission and strategy and the why behind it?
- Does our strategy enable teams to prioritize independently?
To keep everyone shooting for our North Star at Miro, we use a structured strategic planning process that guides us from ideation to execution:
We start by drafting clear mission and vision statements as the heartbeat of our strategy, accompanied by a three-year painted picture inspiring our Mironeers toward a shared future.
Our strategy brief brings our painted picture to life with context and clarity on our decision-making.
Finally, helping employees connect their day to day work with our OKRs provides the compass that keeps our people engaged and committed to our purpose.
At Miro, this information is readily available to everyone and updated weekly. Following this process ensures every initiative is deeply rooted in a clear understanding of why we’re doing it.
Customer-centricity: What problems are we solving?
Companies can only succeed if they effectively address customers’ needs, but companies often overestimate their customer-centricity. While 78% of global leaders insist that customer data forms the foundation of their companies’ innovation, a significant majority also admit that customer insights fall by the wayside during the product development process. This typically occurs because end-user feedback isn’t integrated early enough, leading to products that miss the mark.
To get to the root of this contradiction and truly ensure that our innovation cycle centers on our customers, we ask ourselves:
- Do we consistently practice empathy for our users, not just at the beginning of a project?
- Do we build in fast feedback loops and leave room for iteration?
At Miro, we address this by encouraging bold, unpolished ideas labeled as #badversions, which are starting points for discussion and iteration. For example, our AI Sidekicks (BETA) feature began life as a #badversion: a simple AI agent trained on data from our founder, Andrey, and Beyoncé’s lyrics. Though basic, it showcased the concept’s potential and quickly became a crowd favorite.
While we don’t roll out #badversions directly to customers, we use rough sketches and prototypes for early feedback. Internally, this approach has shifted our culture by creating a psychologically safe space for team members to prioritize learning and iteration over perfection. This results in products that are more aligned with customer needs.
Velocity: How can we learn faster?
Effective innovators need a strong operating rhythm to deliver meaningful work at speed. Team members need to gather perspectives from relevant people, make decisions fast, and learn from successes and failures.
But executing projects quickly is a challenge in busy organizations, and less than one in three information workers believe their ways of working actively encourage a quick or steady pace of innovation.
We ask ourselves these questions to ensure we’re fostering innovation:
- Do we drive work forward without establishing unrealistic and arbitrary deadlines?
- Do we optimize our decision-making processes to avoid unnecessary consensus?
To keep the momentum going at Miro, we implemented the concept of “a date for a date.” This means that, during one milestone teams determine a date for the next review to set clear expectations and keep pace.
With these dates in the calendar, it’s easier to communicate with adjacent teams like sales and marketing to bring our products to market. With visibility into when key discussions will take place, everyone can stay aligned with project progress and better plan their own activities around product launches.
Collaboration: Who do we need to work with?
Finally, no company can translate ideas into action without a connected, collaborative team working behind the scenes. Mironeers strive to play as a team to win the world, but of course, that’s not always easy. Like many companies with distributed, cross-functional teams, we know what it’s like to be slowed down by too many cooks in the kitchen and the occasional lack of clarity.
To ensure we aren’t working in silos, we ask ourselves these questions:
- Do our teams have useful rituals and working agreements in place — within the team and with their key stakeholders?
- Do teams take the time to continuously improve and share their learnings with others?
It’s a common problem — more than half of the people we surveyed (61% of information workers and 56% of leaders) also reported that collaboration is a core organizational value, but one that’s not necessarily reflected in their behavior.
Miro’s solution is surprisingly simple — we make sure that the core working team kicks off their project together. By aligning teams early, identifying key stakeholders, and talking through the project’s problems and goals, it’s easier for us to determine priorities and prevent initiatives from becoming tangential.
Take a moment, then dive in
Transforming the way you innovate will always be a work in progress as you continuously review, refine, and repeat — and Miro is fully committed to this process, even internally. We’re excited to try new strategies to see what helps drive us forward. Are you ready to join us?
