Inspiration and connection

Hello dear Lean-Agilists!This story by Susan Stavitzski on Medium is one I often use to spark discussion among PMs and POs:https://medium.com/@susan_ski/the-three-kinds-of-product-managers-9aa398dbabd8“I like to think there’s three types of Product Managers: The technical PM, the customer centric PM and the business focused PM. You’re going to be one really well, maybe even two but never all three. If you feel like you fit strongly in one or two of those buckets, I say you go for it.”I think this holds true even for people who aren't PMs or POs (or project leaders/managers). A developer is often — and hopefully 😅 — strong on the technical side, and then they could also lean either towards UX or business. Same with UX designers: strong on user experience and maybe also business or tech. Agile coaches are often rooted in either tech (former engineers) or user experience (former UX designers).As a PM/PO, I consider myself fitting strongly in the Technical and Customer buckets but less so

Hi all, I’m looking for inspiration to spice up our Miro experiences. And I saw a couple of beautiful backgrounds coming by on LinkedIn, such as the ones below. Do you have any tips on where to get those awesome backgrounds? Thanks! 

After replying to multiple posts with details on how to share a board with any other Miro user, and then sharing a link to one of those replies, the time as come to write my own post on the topic. Sharing a board with any Miro userWhile paid/Education Plan team members are able to share a board by downloading the board as a .rtb file, Free Plan users are unable to upload .rtb files, so that solution will not work for everyone.The easiest way for almost* anyone registered Miro user to share a copy of a Miro board with another registered user is by sending them a link to the board and having them duplicate the board into their account.*There are a few caveats:If you are on the Enterprise Plan, the Sharing Policy must be configured to allow for public board sharing - you’ll know right away if it’s not if if you don’t have the Anyone with the link option. This method uses the Board Content Settings feature, which is only available to the board owner, and may need to be enabled for non-team

Hi Miro Community,I'm Mel Milloway from the Customer Education team here at Miro. We'd love to hear about course topics you'd like us to cover in the future.What topics would interest you or do you think others would like to see on Miro Academy? - Mel

I wanted to share a simple, yet effective technique for hiding content on a Miro board that I first saw used by Greg Kozera during his Virtual Miro User Group presentation: V-MUG03: How to add gamification to your facilitation with Miro.Throughout his presentation, Greg kept his talking points hidden under rectangles that were the same colour as their surrounding, and only revealed the content as he was ready to talk about it. After a while, I found myself curious and excited to see what was coming next!Not only I have started doing this when presenting my own content, but I also started using this approach to hide some objects on the board that I will use at some point, e.g., additional images or icons, but didn’t want them to make my board look “messy”.Here is an example in action: Tip: The default board/frame HEX colour is #F2F2F2 - add this to your colour swatch Related linksAbout Greg’s presentation → https://go.miro.com/gamification-with-miro Watch it here → https://youtu.be/AujO

Hi Miro Heroes  Anna here, your Community Manager. This March, we are celebrating Women’s History Month by hosting a special edition of the Miroverse Challenge, Womxn at Work, and highlighting the most inspiring female creators that contributed templates to our template library.  I’m super excited to share our conversation with @Regine, a Certified Professional in Talent & Development (CPTD). Regine is a prominent Miroverse Creator and longtime Miro Community Member who authored two useful templates — Virtual Winter Wonderland Village and Niching Down: Online Course Persona Empathy Map. It won Miro users over because of great design and potential to engage teams. We sat down with Regine to talk about her career path and get some tips & tricks for aspiring Miroverse Creators, and I’m excited to share her wisdom with the Miro Community.  TL;DR: Best advice for women going through a career transition: identify your North Star and chart out a path made up of manageable stepping sto

You work too much. You work too hard. And still, you could do better. But how?The answer is not working harder or longer - it’s working smarter.Join Alice Jakins and Belinda Murray who will share their top 5 findings from their experiences as consultants, running dozens of internal business audits for advertising, marketing, media and production companies. Sign up for this free webinar on April 5 here!  

  When you see me on a Zoom call, you’ll notice that I often put my hands on the arms of my chair and lift myself up for a moment, but you don’t see why. Below the video frame, I’m shifting my legs and adjusting my body so I sit cross-legged. Otherwise, I sit on my right foot while my left leg is bent, my left foot is flat on my seat, and my left knee isn’t far from my chin. That’s how I’m sitting now as I type this, with my left arm wrapped around my left knee to reach the keyboard. It sounds so bizarre as I write it out, but these two ways of sitting are the only ways that I can be comfortable while I work. Interestingly, sometimes these postures make me sit up straighter and lean forward so I look more energized on camera. In contrast, on the rare occasions that I sit with my feet flat on the floor, I look higher status because I take up more space in my chair, or I look uninterested and too cool for school because I lean backward and slouch like I’m in the front row at a movie thea

Miro loves startups, and Startups love Miro. The Miro Startup Program is scaling rapidly. Therefore we are looking for a part-time, remote (max 20 hours) marketing associate (contractor). The Miro Startup Program aims to build and engage a thriving startup community at Miro, executing partnerships with VCs and accelerators and evangelising Miro in the startup Ecosystem.Miro wants to continue to invest in this strategic audience. You will have a critical role in keeping the Program running and improving our Program. You will be responsible for scaling the operations to serve over 10K startups.What tasks will you do?A part-time role for a max of 20 hours per week Nurture our Startup Community by creating and sending the startups newsletter to startups and startup partners Production of the Startup Community events: create an event page, send invitations, and follow up after the event.  Work together with the program manager around strategic partnerships and lead the operational side,

Ummm are you supposed to look at the person on the screen? Are you supposed to stare into the camera?…. During the body language event today, we talked about how important facial expressions are on video calls because we can’t see the body of the person across from us. Even hand gestures are a different thing on video, so the face does the talking - literally and figuratively. Plus, eye contact is important to show someone that you’re listening to them and you care about what they’re sharing. But how do you do it? I find that if someone consistently looks at one part of their screen, it’s clear to me that they’re focused on me and we’re connected. I do the same - but I tend to put my video on the left side of my screen and notes on the right, so my head is slightly turned to the left when I’m talking to someone on video. Also, I’ll say it - it’s so obvious when someone keeps looking at themselves on video…it’s brutal but we all do it! So, what do you think? How can you make eye contact

This topic is about hosting in house meetings at your business location to learn about the use of Miro and to share knowledge.

Hi Miro Heroes  Anna here, your Community Manager. This March, we are celebrating Women’s History Month by hosting a special edition of the Miroverse Challenge, Womxn at Work, and highlighting the most inspiring female creators that contributed templates to our template library.  I’m super excited to share our conversation with @Johanna Torstensson, an Agile Coach and Scrum Master based in Karlskrona, Sweden. Johanna is a prominent Miroverse Creator and longtime Miro Community Member who authored one of the most popular templates of 2021 — Sailboat Retrospective. It won Miro users over because it’s a fun, easy, productive way to look back at sprints and identify what went well and what needs to improve. We sat down with Johanna to talk about her career path and get some tips & tricks for aspiring Miroverse Creators, and I’m excited to share her wisdom with the Miro Community.  TL;DR: Best advice for Agile coaches: coaching teams is not about you or what you believe is the way to go

Instead of these webinars, where it is strange to ask questions when you have set a tight plan. I would like to just go into Vimeo or Youtube and see how to do and get working. Or you could make interactive classes inside Miro as you do in the beginning.I would like to learn how to use Miro as a project planning tool. Inside a Scrum environment, or a Lean project framwork. I guess your projectleaders, developers already work with Scrum and Agile so it should be an easy one to teach newbees.Also weekly meetings and calendar integration would be nice to know more about, to get right into the best way to work with Miro and make it a productive tool that can help gaining profit and make the buisness thrive… 

We sat down with Matt Anderson from Think Startup and his colleague Rob to speak about why it’s difficult to align on customer value.  “Customers’ expectations are brutal and are showing no signs of slowing down. Customers are better informed than ever and have a more even playing field equipped with a keyboard and a poor experience. This is not going away any time soon.” Would you agree? Read the full blog post here. 

Hello out there! Anna here, your Community Manager. I’m excited to launch our new Monthly Community Roundups — every month, we’ll gather the best templates, events, and tips from the world of Miro!  Miroverse Challenge: Womxn at Work To celebrate the International Women’s Day, we are launching our first-ever challenge honoring women’s rights, women’s history, and workplace equality. We invite you to submit templates that forge inclusive work cultures where women's careers thrive and their achievements are celebrated.Are you working up to subject matter expertise and dreaming of being published in Miroverse — but aren't super confident with design? Match with experienced Miroverse creators to collaborate on a template together. Overheard in Miro Community Tips & tricks for using Miro as a project planning tool: In the forum, we are crowdsourcing best practices for project managers. Join @Lars09, @Richard Kasperowski, @Kiron Bondale, @Annie, @Paul Snedden, and @Ruslan Antipov and sha

Hi Miro Community,This week we’re highlighting a standalone video about linking objects.As you may already know, one of Miro’s super powers is that every object on a board has its own URL. This allows you to add hyperlinks inside the board itself, making it quick and easy to jump to a specific location with the click of a button. Watch the video in the standalone section at Miro Academy. How do you use linking in Miro? Let us know below!

Hello, dear Lean-Agilists!I recently stumbled upon an article that is almost 2 years old but still highly relevant:Failed #SquadGoalsSpotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model”and neither should you.The TL;DR version is that the Spotify model – based on matrix team structures – was never fully implemented at Spotify for a number of reasons, and yet it's being copied by many companies in various industries.A lot of things strongly resonates with me. Here are some excerpts:Autonomy requires alignment. Company priorities must be defined by leadership. Autonomy does not mean teams get to do whatever they want. Processes for cross-team collaboration must be defined. Autonomy does not mean leaving teams to self-organize every problem. Collaboration is a skill that requires knowledge and practice. Managers should not assume people have an existing comprehension of Agile practices. When a company becomes big enough, teams will need dedicated support to guide planning within the team and structure

I recently stumbled upon this very interesting piece by Mark Parnell on Medium about consistency in design.In short, consistency is not and cannot be the sole criterion of good design. Building a consistent design system is important, but over-zealous quests for consistency can be at the expense of other aspects of design.I really like the Google icon redesign example of a case where consistency is actually counter-productive:Funny ‘cause it’s true. What are your thoughts on this topic?

We are very curious to learn what the favourite templates are in our startup community. Here you can find the most used Miroverse Startup TemplatesPitch Board, bring your startup pitch to the next level Lean Canvas, build your business model and sharpen your value proposition MVP Validation, check wether you are on the right track or if you need to pivot Jobs To Be Done,  discover who your customer wants to be at the end of your solution MVP experiment, helps you with setting up a “quick and dirty” experiment to test your MVPThis last one is also my personal favourite. It helps me to validate the idea quickly without spending (much) resources. Please share your thoughts what are according to you the best Startup Templates?By the way if you made a template yourself you can easily upload it via this link

Do you agree that over the last 2 years, usual meetings have transformed into virtual workshops where every host is expected to act as a facilitator? If yes and you want to refine your skills of hosting workshops, this training from a Miro Expert STUDIO.WHY is for you!   

Let’s get opinionated! Is your underrated feature not listed here?  Comment to tell us what it is and why we should love it!  

Hi, everyone. I answer media requests and just ran across this one. If you are an agency owner who has used Miro and Mural, you could get featured in Cloudways.Deadline: 11:00 PM EST - 4 MarchQuery:Miro vs Mural: Which of these two do you, as an agency owner,use, and give solid reasons WITH screenshots (emailed tosadia.zia@cloudways.com) as to why you use it and which featuresappeal to you more?Requirements:1. Responses from agency owners only! 2. With high-qualityheadshots 3. Please send screenshots to sadia.zia@cloudways.com I’d be interested in seeing any replies submitted, but I am only the messenger. I don’t have any additional information about this media request.

Hello Miro lovers!  Some time ago, I created the Product Vision Cue template. It’s mainly for Product/Project Managers and Product Owners, but can be used by anyone who wants to coherently outline the vision of a specific product or initiative. The purpose of the canvas is to detail the specifics of any given product (or subset of product) on a general level and establish a data-driven approach to the development of said product.We have used it in my development team for about a year and it has been helpful for us in our quest to create magic together. I also wrote a story about it on Medium:https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/introducing-the-product-vision-cue-39c57cce6906Are you using a canvas or other kind of template when outlining the vision of a specific product/service or initiative in your team?

The forum is the hub for Miro community activities!  Find your people in Community Groups Check out Miro’s Community Groups, where you can attend events, connect with people who share your interests, and discuss what you love 24/7. When you find a group that interests you, click “join group” to stay connected and never miss out on top discussions or events.  Start by joining Community Groups like Miro for Digital Product Design and groups in your native language!   Connect and learn at free eventsYou’ll notice that Miro’s events have gotten a makeover. Now our events calendar lives directly in the forum and it contains more events than ever. With topics ranging from Designing Human-Centered AI to an improvised battle of Robots vs. Monsters, there will always be an event for you.