An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)

Every single day, every single time somebody is pushing your code to production and, and you're releasing a feature or an enhancement, you are making the product better or you're making the product worse, but the products never remain same. And so with every release that your competitor is making and every release that you're making, uh, you're either ma- you know, making chess points, moves against them, positive points, or, or, or you're going negative. And I think like that framework, it actually drives an insane amount of clarity in terms of what you're doing and what the impact is going to be.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Varun Parmar. Varun is Chief Product Officer at Miro, and prior to Miro, he was Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Box. As I share with Varun at the start of our chat, I've always been really curious about the product culture at Miro, partly because everyone I've ever met from Miro has been super interesting and super smart, and partly because they've been able to grow as a business and a product in an incredibly competitive market. In our conversation, we get really deep into the product values and principles at Miro, their product development process, how Varun approaches competitive threats, how a bimonthly company-wide product demo ritual led to saving months of engineering work on a feature, plus insights into how Miro got started, how they grow today, and what their product team has learned about working with a large sales org. Varun is amazing. I learned a lot, and I hope you find it as interesting as I did. With that, I bring you Varun Parmar after a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours. I have a quick request. Head on over to my Miro board at miro.com/lenny and let me know which guests you'd want me to have on this year. I've already gotten a bunch of great suggestions, which you'll see when you go there, so just keep it coming. And while you're on the Miro board, I encourage you to play around with the tool. It's a great shared space to capture ideas, get feedback, and collaborate with your colleagues on anything that you're working on. For example, with Miro, you can plan out next quarter's entire product strategy. You can start by brainstorming, using sticky notes, live reactions, a voting tool, even an estimation app to scope out your team's sprints. Then your whole distributed team can come together around wire frames, draw ideas with the pen tool, and then put full mocks right into the Miro board. And with one of Miro's ready-made templates, you can go from discovery and research to product roadmaps, to customer journey flows, to final mocks, all in Miro. Head on over to miro.com/lenny to leave your suggestions. That's miro.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Braintrust, where the world's most innovative companies go to find talent fast, so that they can innovate faster. Let's be honest, it's a lot of work to build a company. And if you want to stay ahead of the game, you need to be able to hire the right talent quickly and confidently. Braintrust is the first decentralized talent network, where you can find, hire and manage high-quality contractors in engineering, design, and product for a fraction of the cost of agencies. Braintrust charges a flat rate of only 10%, unlike agency fees of up to 70%, so you can make your budget go four times further. Plus, they're the only network that takes 0% of what the talent makes, so they're able to attract and retain the world's best tech talent. Take it from DoorDash, Airbnb, Plaid, and hundreds of other high growth startups that have shaved their hiring process from months to weeks, at less than a quarter of the cost by hiring through Braintrust's network of 20,000 high-quality vetted candidates ready to work. Whether you're looking to fill in gaps, upscale your staff, or build a team for that dream project that finally got funded, contact Braintrust and you'll get matched with three candidates in just 48 hours. Visit usebraintrust.com/lenny or find them in my show notes for today's episode. That's usebraintrust.com/lenny, for when you need talent yesterday. Varun, welcome to the podcast.