Miro CEO on Leading AI Product Expansion Without Losing Focus

Seven years ago. Wow.

Yeah, almost 15. We started the company in 2011. Some people don't even know that there was a previous name before Miro.

First of all, thank you for having me again after seven years. So seems like we're onto something big still and appreciate all the opportunity to meet all of you. It's been a great journey so far and we had to evolve and reinvent the company several times on that journey. So we started with this simple idea of bringing whiteboard into a browser in 2011. It was not a thing. There were a couple small startups who were trying to do that but it was quite a new idea because all this visual communication was happening mostly offline. That was the first step. And then 2016, 2017, before we actually met at ProductCon, I realized that there is a big opportunity to bring visual collaboration to the tool stack of bigger companies. Because at that time there was this rise of Slack, which was a messaging app, and Zoom was already popular with the video and audio communication. There was this missing piece of visual collaboration. And at that point of time, the market was focused on best of breed solutions. Now it's quite a different market. It's best of suite solutions. But at that time it was best of breed. So everyone was trying to do their job best-in-class and the enterprise would buy all that. And also another thing that was quite big at that time was product-led growth. Obviously, enterprises were not blocking apps that were kind of organically used by users inside those enterprises and we had that momentum that Zoom, Slack built. So we built our viral loops. So that was our second big chapter, big shift. Last year we introduced Innovation Workspace where we went beyond visual collaboration and we brought in structured workflows like we built in data tables, roadmaps, diagrams, Kanban, all other capabilities so people can stay in the product. But obviously this year we are relaunching our product next week with the AI Innovation Workspace because now it's not just humans who have to create the next big thing. It's humans and AI working together. So it's been, I would say, four product chapters so far and the one that we're launching next week for me is the most exciting one to be honest.

This is the one, you know. But it's funny because as a founder I resonate with that. You go through those pivotal moments to refound your company and I think the concept of product-market fit being a moving target and not just a one-time event is important.

Yeah, I always start thinking from the market actually, not from the product perspective, because the market is shifting, especially now it's shifting quite fast, and you need to understand what market you are playing. Are you playing on best of breed or best of suite market, for example? And now as I said, we are playing on best of suite market if we are talking about this broad platforms that enterprises and smaller teams bring in. But at the same time, this market is quite weird because on one hand there is a massive consolidation going on and CIOs are pushing to consolidate on less number of platforms. At the same time, there is this AI experimentation where a lot of things can get budget just because they're AI and can drive significant impact for the business, and not just incremental improvements but major improvements for the business outcomes. So the market dynamic is weird, but I anticipate that in a couple of years it will be more and more consolidation. So you need to understand what's the market you are playing, what's your best guess how long this market will last in terms of the dynamics, and then where you have permission not just to play but actually permission to win, because the permission to win is critical. You can't just build stuff without understanding what's the strengths you're betting on and what's the expectations from the rest of the chessboard on the marketplace. So that's how I think about that market part. And then there is a messaging part. So messaging part is about not just what you build but how you can sell it, because the same platform can be solved so many different ways depending on what problems customers are trying to address and what urgency they have around it.

Yeah, reinvention is critical and my general approach is day one thinking. Day one thinking is: if I would start this company today, how would the product look like and how would we position this product and what market we want to play? That's the question that I'm asking myself every day. And depending on the answer, is it a small evolution or a quite critical rebuild? We are aligning and making decisions because again, you have to be relevant to the market and the market needs. And the challenge today, and we all kind of understand that, is that you can't predict for a long time, but you can operate on first principles with all the market shift we are seeing with the AI and agentic workflows, how things would generally evolve. And that's where you need to understand: okay, are you up for the next wave of this market or you are completely irrelevant?

Yeah, I mean, in general, in any transformation, you will have people who believe in it. And on average, speaking with people who did a lot of transformations in their life, you would expect 25% who will stay behind this, around 50% who will support but watch how it all develops, and 25% who will push back and will not align to that. That's kind of a reality. Now, obviously, in any transformation you go, you need to see people who believe in that vision as much as you believe. And if we think about this, when startups are building companies, the majority of people would not join their companies because they don't believe in that vision. 99 out of 100 investors would not put money in those companies because they don't believe in their vision. And then those who survive, they make the big companies out of that. A lot die, obviously, not reaching product-market fit. But in reality, it's all about conviction. It's all about the way you communicate to the organization and it's about people who you see are as excited about this opportunity as you are, creating that team and going in together, and then the rest start to follow over time.

I mean, number one choice is to accept that the next few years would be messy, to accept that some revenue growth can slow down, to accept that some customers may churn. And this is hard to accept because all of that is a big trade-off. And also you don't know, obviously you are making your best guess, you are making your best bet, but you don't know how the market will evolve. And again, when I'm thinking about all this, it's all about going back in my mind to early days of the company and what I was doing in early days when the team was like 10 people sitting in the same room. I was ruthlessly prioritizing in customer and user empathy. And what I mean is you spend a ton of time on the calls, demoing the prototypes, looking at the data, quality of quantitative signals, zooming out, trying to separate that signal from the noise that will give you the best conviction or the best insight into what to do and what not to do. And that's what you can share with the broader org. So for example, now in the last 6 to 8 months, I literally spend most of my time on customer meetings, customer calls, demoing the product, validating the direction, talking about the go-to-market, how we can serve the customers better with this product, because you need to get that firsthand insight when you bet the whole company on the next horizon.

1,600 people now.

Customer size, we have 250,000 customers and several thousand big enterprises and a long tail of smaller companies. But we're not completely redesigning the product. Obviously, we're building the next level of the product apps.

Yeah.