Varun Parmar: commitment

Transcript context

…Shifting a little bit, it sounds like you guys are doing Scrum in some form. Can you just talk about just broadly the product development process? How long you or your sprints, how long do you plan for in the future, in detail specifically just like high level, how does the product development process work? There are certain things that I learned at Box and that inspired some things that we do at Miro, and there are certain things that we've evolved. One of the things that we've instituted is our roadmap process, so that's sort of the first thing around how the different teams are looking at the things that they're going to work on. We have a rolling six month roadmap, it seems large, but we've got, like I mentioned, a number of enterprise customers. If I've learned one thing that large enterprises is asking for a roadmap review. That tends to be my favorite meeting of sitting down with the enterprise leaders and walking through what we are working on. What we've done is we've tried to architect something which actually allows our customers to get what they're looking for, but at the same time does not remove the agility that is so important for us to deliver value faster. What we do is we have a rolling six month roadmap that gets updated every three months and the first three months of that roadmap, we have a 80% position level, which means that 80% of the things that we claim to be on the roadmap will get done. That's the target. For the next three months, because it's six months, so the first three months is 80%, the next three months is 50%, so we have a much lower level of resolution in the next three months after that. What that allows the product teams to do is actually have flexibility, which is based on what the customers are asking for and based on what the competitive moves are, based on some technology breakthroughs that happen around large language models, they can pivot and they can pivot and move towards that and they won't get penalized either by the customer or internally in terms of doing that. That's what we do and that's all at on the backdrop of an annual strategy that we publish. Every year we publish a strategy white paper that it gets published internally available to every single Mironeer across all functions that clearly articulates the key bets that we want to make. Why do we want to make those bets? What is the expected outcome and how does that ladder up into the overall business outcomes that we are trying to drive from an OKR perspective as well as the overall business strategy that we have. So people take that product strategy, white paper or artifact, and then against that they're building their roadmaps which get updated every three months. Then inside of the teams, we enable teams to be quite autonomous in terms of some of the rituals that they're doing. We want them to obviously embrace best practices. We've got a team of agile coaches that share best practices or are available to help if there's certain specific needs that teams have. Then I think on top of that, there are certain key, I would say, rituals that we do that maybe are unique. For example, we have something called as Miro Connect, which happens every other Friday. ave. Then I think on top of that, there are certain key, I would say, rituals that we do that maybe are unique. For example, we have something called as Miro Connect, which happens every other Friday. Every other Friday, for example, in our Amsterdam office, you can go in there and at 4:00 in the afternoon, 4:00 to 7:00 or 8:00, and sometimes it goes really late, you've got a bunch of product teams sitting around tables and it feels like, "Oh, it's like a pitch or something." And people are coming in, they're having a good time, you've got a drink in your hand, there's maybe some light music playing in the background and you're going from table to table and you have teams that are actually showing all the amazing work that... If done right, it happens once in a while, but if done right, it's magical in terms of the outcomes that you can get. I'll tell you, there was a team that actually was presenting at our Berlin hub and they were saying, "We're working on this feature, and there's an engineer who walks over to that desk and says, 'What are you working on?'" The team describes it, "Oh, we are trying to do something like this." And this engineer had actually worked on that particular problem in their prior life, literally they had implemented this. So he says, "So how are you going to implement this?" And the team, the engineer that's sitting there, says, "This is the approach I'm going to take and it's going to take me three months." He's like, "Oh, would you mind if I go and help you with this?" They're like, "Sure, more the merrier. Go ahead." So this person puts down their beer and says, "Okay, I'm having a good time. Let me just head back to my home." And in the next three or four hours goes and codes the entire thing, makes a poll request. Next day in the morning one of the engineers from this core team that was exhibiting at Miro Connect looks at the poll request, reviews the code and says, "Yes, something that would have taken three months for this core team because they didn't have the expertise literally got done in three hours because there was another engineer that ran into them and said, "I know how this is done. I can actually help you here," and went ahead and did the right thing. We are trying to create these magic moments. It happens once in a while, but we have one success story and I like to tell that in every opportunity that I get. But that's another sort of unique thing that we've done in terms of book-ending things around how we operate here.…

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