LLenny's Podcast
← All episodes
Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)20 April 2023

An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast

9Frameworks
14Insights

Frameworks in this episode

Peak Performance4 steps

Binary Quality Calibration

Instead of documenting what 'quality' means, classify shipped work as high-quality or not — and let examples teach the bar.

Read →
Leadership4 steps

Deliver Customer Value Faster with High Quality

One sentence, three measurable attributes — the motto that drives Miro's entire product reward and measurement system.

Read →
Innovation4 steps

First to Hit the Brick Wall

In innovation, speed is the biggest determinant of success because you learn what doesn't work before anyone else.

Read →
Productivity4 steps

P-Stage Cycle-Time Benchmarking

Stage-gate every initiative (PStrat→P0→P1→P2), size it S/M/L, and benchmark cycle time against yourself like golf.

Read →
Strategy4 steps

Rolling Roadmap with Precision Tiers

A six-month roadmap refreshed quarterly, with 80% commitment in months 1-3 and 50% in months 4-6.

Read →
Leadership4 steps

The AMPED Cross-Functional Product Org

Redefine 'product org' as Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Design — all embedded in every stream.

Read →
Strategy4 steps

The Chess-Points Competitive Lens

Every release is a move against your competitor in the customer's mind — positive or negative, never neutral.

Read →
Leadership4 steps

The Two-Persona Product Leader

Every product leader wears two hats: as a leadership-team member drive accountability; as a stream leader drive improvement.

Read →
Leadership4 steps

The Unblock Virtuous Cycle

Teams don't want to move slow — they hit roadblocks; make leadership's job to clear them and speed compounds.

Read →

Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Hot Take· 3

Hot Take24:30

Your Growth Is What the Competition Allows

Varun's core philosophy pushes back on the common advice to ignore competitors and just focus on the customer. Across 24+ years he has seen a company's acceleration or deceleration track directly to competitive moves. The three variables that matter: how good the competitor's product is, the strength of their distribution, and their pricing and packaging.

  • Rejects 'don't worry about competition, focus on the customer'
  • Every acceleration or deceleration he's seen tracked to what competition allowed
  • Three competitive variables: product good-enough-ness, distribution reach, pricing/packaging
  • Microsoft-style entrants with distribution and pricing might can reset a category's growth

“the success of a company is a direct relation of what the competition allows you to do”

Varun Parmar · 24:30
#competition#growth#hot-take#strategy
Hot Take28:30

Every Release Is a Chess Move For or Against You

Varun argues products never stay the same: every code push makes the product better or worse from the customer's point of view. Because customers implicitly compare you to competitors, each release is a positive or negative 'chess point' move. Holding that framework in mind, he says, drives immense clarity about where and why to invest.

  • A product is always getting better or worse, never static, judged from the end-user's view
  • Customers implicitly compare your product against competitors on every release
  • Each release is a positive or negative 'chess point' move against rivals
  • This lens helps product leaders make higher-quality investment bets

“you are making the product better or you're making the product worse but the products never remain same”

Varun Parmar · 29:00
#product-philosophy#competition#prioritization
Hot Take32:00

Be the First One to Hit the Brick Wall

On speed versus caution, Varun takes the contrarian side against 'go slow to go fast' for innovation work. When you're building experiences that don't exist yet, speed is the single biggest determinant of who succeeds, because it lets you learn faster than anyone and course-correct sooner. Staying one to three steps ahead on insight keeps you ahead of the pack.

  • For genuinely new experiences, speed beats caution
  • Goal is to learn faster than anyone else in the market and course-correct
  • 'Go slow to go fast' has its place, but not for uncertain new bets
  • Cites Frank Slootman's 'Amp It Up' on creating urgency

“what you want to do is that you want to be the first one to hit the brick wall”

Varun Parmar · 32:30
#speed#innovation#hot-take#product-development

Explainer· 3

Explainer12:30

Why Miro Keeps Winning a Crowded Whiteboard Market

Varun explains why Miro has held its ground against entrants like FigJam. Unlike tools built for a single persona (e.g. designers), Miro takes a team-centric lens because innovation happens where cross-functional teams meet. That, plus broad cross-industry applicability and uniquely deep capabilities, is what makes the product hard to copy.

  • Most rivals are built for one persona; Miro is architected for whole cross-functional teams
  • Broad applicability across manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace, government, not just digital/design
  • A set of capabilities (workshops, agile rituals) exist uniquely in Miro
  • Community love is treated as a fourth pillar of differentiation

“we're not saying hey we're building a tool that just works for designers or hey we're building a tool that just works for engineers because…”

Varun Parmar · 13:30
#competition#product-strategy#differentiation#miro
Explainer48:30

Miro's Rolling Roadmap: 80% Then 50% Precision

To satisfy enterprise customers who want roadmap reviews without killing agility, Miro runs a rolling six-month roadmap refreshed every three months. The first three months carry an 80% precision target (80% of committed items ship); the next three carry 50%. This lets teams pivot on customer asks, competitive moves, or tech breakthroughs like LLMs without being penalized.

  • Rolling six-month roadmap updated every three months
  • First three months: 80% precision target; next three: 50%
  • Built to give enterprises the roadmap review they want
  • Lower resolution later preserves agility to pivot without penalty

“the first three months is eighty percent the next three months is 50 so we have a much lower level of resolution”

Varun Parmar · 48:30
#roadmap#planning#enterprise#agility
Explainer19:30

Why Miro Puts Marketing Inside the Product Org (AMPED)

At Miro the 'product org' is not just PMs, designers, and engineers, it's AMPED: analytics, marketing, product, engineering, and design. Product marketing is deeply embedded in each stream so positioning, competitive differentiation, and packaging are considered early, not bolted on after build. Varun says this cross-functional makeup lets teams course-correct and avoid shipping features that fail to capture their intended value.

  • AMPED = analytics, marketing, product, engineering, design
  • Product marketing is embedded inside each product stream
  • Positioning and packaging get considered up front, not downstream
  • Cross-functional voices catch enterprise and end-user gaps early

“amp stands for like analytics marketing product engineering and design”

Varun Parmar · 20:00
#org-design#product-marketing#product-culture

Story· 5

Story41:30

How Miro Defined 'Quality' Without a 50-Page Doc

Miro got stuck in endless debates and long documents trying to define 'high quality.' Instead, the design leadership now triages everything shipped each month into a binary bucket, high quality or not, with reasons attached and shared with other designers. Varun likens quality to describing the color pink: hard to define in words, obvious once you're shown examples, much like modern AI classification.

  • Long documents defining quality attributes felt heavy and didn't work
  • Design leadership does a monthly binary triage: high quality vs not
  • Reasons are attached and shared so designers build pattern-matching
  • Used to calibrate and align leaders, like showing examples of a color

“if I show you and I say Lenny these are three examples of what pink is and these are three examples of red is then…”

Varun Parmar · 42:00
#design#quality#product-culture#story
Story50:30

The Demo Ritual That Saved 3 Months in 3 Hours

Every other Friday Miro runs 'Miro Connect,' a trade-show-style event where product teams demo work at tables with drinks and music. At the Berlin hub, an engineer wandered up to a team, recognized a problem he'd solved in a past life, went home, coded the whole thing overnight, and opened a pull request. Work estimated at three months was reviewed and done in three hours.

  • Miro Connect happens every other Friday, informal and in-person
  • An engineer recognized a problem he'd already solved elsewhere
  • He coded it and opened a PR the same night; reviewed next morning
  • Three months of estimated work collapsed to roughly three hours

“something that would have taken you know three months for this core team because they didn't have the expertise literally got got done in in…”

Varun Parmar · 52:00
#rituals#collaboration#story#engineering
Story10:00

Why Miro Talk Track Records the Board, Not the Screen

When building Miro Talk Track, the team faced two paths: a conventional screen recording, or something different. Guided by a design-sprint insight that users want Miro for collaboration rather than just communication, they chose to capture the movement of the board itself alongside the audio/video. That lets viewers add sticky notes, comments, and reactions while the recording plays.

  • Talk Track enables asynchronous collaboration on a Miro board
  • Rejected plain screen recording in favor of capturing board movement
  • Insight: users want Miro for collaboration, communication is secondary
  • Viewers can add sticky notes, comments, and reactions during playback

“what we're doing is we're actually capturing the movement of the board that Lenny is going through along with the video talk track that's on…”

Varun Parmar · 10:30
#product-discovery#feature#collaboration#story
Story1:10:30

How Miro Got Its First 1,000 Users

Miro's earliest growth came from a user-first approach and reaching out to relevant communities to get people talking. Content marketing, listings on sites like Capterra, and early SEO/organic investment drove top-of-funnel traffic, while product teams obsessively removed friction in viral loops. Over time the model evolved from a time-limited trial to freemium, which further accelerated growth.

  • User-first approach plus outreach to relevant communities lit the fire
  • Content marketing and Capterra-style listings drove early awareness
  • Early SEO and organic investment fed the top of the funnel
  • Model evolved from time-limited trial to freemium to accelerate growth

“some of the early adopters invited people who were also earlier doctors and sort of the the flywheel started to uh to work”

Varun Parmar · 1:11:00
#growth#plg#acquisition#story
Story1:21:00

The Math Problem Varun Asks Every Candidate

Varun's favorite interview question is a math problem based on how Adobe priced and packaged its first Creative Suite bundle after the Macromedia acquisition, work he was part of. Having given it to seven or eight hundred people, he's built a distribution of how long it takes and where candidates get stuck, and correlates that with the performance of those he later hired.

  • Question is a math problem from Adobe's first Creative Suite pricing
  • Given to roughly 700-800 candidates over time
  • He tracks how long people take and where they get stuck
  • Results correlate with the later job performance of those hired

“I have this math problem which is based on uh how Adobe created its first Creative Suite bundle”

Varun Parmar · 1:21:00
#hiring#interviewing#story

Takeaway· 3

Takeaway34:30

A PM's Number One Job Is to Unblock the Team

Varun believes product people are intrinsically driven to move fast; what slows them is roadblocks, whether technical, organizational, or prioritization. His approach is to make product leads instantly raise their hand on blockers and have leadership resolve them quickly. Each unblocked win builds courage and pattern-matching, creating a virtuous cycle and an organizational competency.

  • PMs already want to move fast; blockers are the real drag
  • Blockers are technical, organizational, or priority-based
  • Leadership's job is to rapidly resolve raised issues
  • Solved blockers compound into pattern-matching and speed across the org

“the job of the leadership team uh the the product management team is to essentially go and quickly resolve those issues”

Varun Parmar · 36:00
#product-management#execution#leadership#speed
Takeaway37:30

Miro's One-Sentence Product Motto

The entire Miro product org runs on a single sentence: deliver customer value faster with high quality. It has three measured attributes: value (only counted when customers actually use it and a metric moves), faster (cycle times tracked across stages), and high quality (benchmarked against best-in-class apps). Performance, rewards, and measurement all ladder up to this one statement.

  • Everything, including reward and measurement systems, is based on one sentence
  • Customer value only counts when customers use it and the target metric moves
  • Cycle times measured from idea to pitch to ship to metric movement
  • Quality is benchmarked against best-in-class apps for each flow type

“deliver customer value faster with high quality that's it and everything that we do”

Varun Parmar · 38:00
#product-culture#metrics#operating-model
Takeaway1:04:30

The Two Hats Every Product Leader Wears

Varun coaches his leaders to hold two personas. As a stream leader, your number one goal is to drive improvement for your persona and customers, always asking whether today is better than yesterday. As a member of the product leadership team, your number one job is to drive accountability across peers, delivered empathetically by posing observations as questions rather than statements.

  • Stream leader hat: drive improvement, is today better than yesterday
  • Product leadership hat: drive accountability across peers
  • Accountability means open, constructive feedback focused on the business
  • Being empathetic means posing feedback as a question, not a statement

“if you do things with the lens that you are being empathetic then you pose it as a question as opposed to a statement”

Varun Parmar · 1:07:30
#leadership#accountability#product-management