Varun Parmar: preference

Transcript context

…Got it. A question I wanted to ask off the bat is just how has that cross-cultural approach to product teams impacted the way that you guys built product and the way the company operates? The one thing that's really interesting, Lenny, around the way Miro is set up is that our product organization is actually based in Europe and our go-to-market organization is worldwide. Our product management team, our designers, our engineers are located across three different hubs in Europe. What that sort of leads to is a couple of practices that we have as part of our culture. The first one is practicing empathy to gain insights. It's not just practicing empathy in terms of customers and figuring out what customer pain points and problems we can solve, but given our distributed nature in terms of having a global footprint and a lot of our go to market teams, folks in sales and marketing and customer success are in different continents or geographies, we have to make sure that we actually practice that internally. When we are interacting with folks, let's say in San Francisco, and those folks are out there meeting some of our large customers and stuff, how do we, in the product organization, understand their perspective, and bring that perspective into how we design, prioritize and build products? I think that's one thing that's unique. I would say the other thing that's less to do with the location, but I think is sort of the core cultural value or philosophy that Andre, who's the founder and CEO has instilled in all of us, is practicing teamwork, how do we actually come together as a team, and bring down the silos that might exist across functions? I'll talk a little bit around how we are structured in the product organization so that it's a cross-functional perspective we bring to everything that we're doing because we believe the best work happens when we bring different diverse perspectives to the problem and then co-create the outcome that the customer is looking for. I want to pull on these threads actually real quick. You talked about this value of empathy and the importance of having empathy across... because you guys are located in different locations and have different cultures, and also this idea of teamwork. What's something that you've done that helps you do that, either build empathy and maintain empathy across teams or make sure that people work in teams and not like, "Hey, there's this other team over there doing something else"?…

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