Lenny's PodcastAn inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Inside Miro’s Product Machine: Culture, Competition, Speed, and Quality
- Chief Product Officer Varun Parmar breaks down how Miro structures its product organization, balances global collaboration, and builds in a highly competitive market. He explains Miro’s persona- and stream-based org design, the AMPED model (Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Design), and how they operationalize quality, speed, and customer value. Varun shares his philosophy on competition, why products never stay the same, and why speed to “hit the brick wall first” matters. He also dives into rituals like Miro Connect, their roadmap and OKR cadences, how PLG integrates with enterprise sales, and how Miro itself is used to run product development.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasMake competition a first-class input, not an afterthought.
Varun argues company success is tightly coupled to what competitors allow you to do, so Miro consciously tracks competitor moves, clarifies its unique value, and doubles down on differentiated, team-centric use cases instead of pretending competition doesn’t exist.
Treat every release as making the product strictly better or worse.
Miro operates under the belief that products never stay the same; every push to production either gains or loses “chess points” versus competitors, which forces sharper prioritization and more deliberate impact thinking.
Embed a truly cross-functional product org (AMPED) to avoid siloed decisions.
By structuring product as AMPED—Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Design—Miro ensures PMs aren’t working in isolation, and positioning, data, design, and GTM perspectives shape decisions from the start.
Operationalize speed and quality with explicit metrics and visible benchmarks.
They measure cycle times for every phase (idea to shipped and impact), classify work by size, and openly share medians/variances so teams can benchmark themselves, while design leadership regularly classifies shipped work as high- or low-quality to calibrate standards.
Use simple, universal mantras to align behavior at scale.
Miro’s product org runs on one sentence—“Deliver customer value faster with high quality”—which informs performance reviews, processes, and decision-making, making priorities obvious without heavy process docs.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesEvery single time somebody is pushing your code to production, you are making the product better or you're making the product worse, but the products never remain the same.
— Varun Parmar
The success of a company is a direct relation of what the competition allows you to do.
— Varun Parmar
We call our org AMPED: analytics, marketing, product, engineering, and design. When we say ‘product org’ at Miro, we don’t mean just product managers.
— Varun Parmar
You want to be the first one to hit the brick wall, so you get the learning faster than anyone else in the market.
— Varun Parmar
Our motto is very simple: deliver customer value faster with high quality. Everything we do in the product org is based on this one single statement.
— Varun Parmar
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