Breaking Barriers in Collaboration with Jeff Chow, CPTO at Miro

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Jeff Chow, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Miro, about all the ways they're reinventing themselves from the inside out. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) Jeff, Joel. How you doing, buddy?

(Jeff Chow at 00:00:20) I'm doing alright. Doing alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) Where are you calling in from?

(Jeff Chow at 00:00:24) I'm in Boston. How about yourself?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) Nashville, Tennessee.

(Jeff Chow at 00:00:28) Hey-o. Yeah, that's a fun spot. I used to work in the travel industry, and it was in 2015, and we could see Nashville starting to do the climb, and then it really hit. So it was very interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) So that was before Freehand?

(Jeff Chow at 00:00:47) Yes. I was heading up product and design at TripAdvisor. Oh, very cool. Yeah. So we could tell, oh, it's Iceland, it's Nashville is starting to hit the zeitgeist a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:01) And did your experience there help you come up with the idea for Freehand?

(Jeff Chow at 00:01:04) Well, so Freehand, or InVision, I joined as a CPO. I was sort of the steward of the business, and then I became CEO. So I took it over from the founder. But my entire career is mostly around ways of working. How do you get engineering, product, and design working better together to create magic? Right? And so a lot of what InVision does, Freehand, Miro, it's all about that. Right? It's how do you get everyone to have a seat at the table, problem solve together, boogie together a little bit better. So I think that's generally the value I was providing for that organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) And how did you connect with Miro? At what point were you at Freehand and then you decided I'm gonna go do better work over at Miro?

(Jeff Chow at 00:01:50) Well, Miro bought Freehand. So we were basically competitors, frenemies, if you will. And so I met Andrey, the founder CEO at Miro, and we realized we had complementary technologies, completely matched visions of where we can take this. So we decided to join forces.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:11) Oh, very cool. So it divested from InVision?

(Jeff Chow at 00:02:14) Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, InVision is an amazing platform. It kind of started and put design and digital product design on the map. But Figma basically disrupted it. Right? InVision was a bridge technology. Right? There was this great tool called Sketch, where teams would—it was a Mac app—you do a lot of design, and InVision was one of the first cloudifying collaboration. Right? It'd be like, okay, let's take your localized designs, and how do you get cross-functional teams to collaborate, give feedback on the web? Right? And then so it was amazing. It was a great company, amazing founder, amazing team. But ultimately, then, Figma came around and was like, what if the design tool and the collaboration was all on the web? Right? And so, yes, that is the culmination of the migration from local apps to cloud-based apps.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:11) And it's not like people didn't have that idea. It's we had to wait for the technology and all these different areas to improve and improve and improve, and then we finally got to the point where we were like, alright, it's there. Now we can do it.

(Jeff Chow at 00:03:22) Kudos to Figma as they toiled in that space and had that vision well before the GPUs and WebGL was fully cranking. And then once it did and once it was there, then, you know, they could start running even more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:41) Yeah. And by the way, I'm a software developer, been using InVision since it existed. I remember the day it came out in my world as far as the day I learned about it. My buddy Derek's like, "Dude, check this out." And I was like, "No way. Oh, this is so cool." You can link things and make these interactive prototypes, which is so much better than what we were doing.

(Jeff Chow at 00:04:01) Same. I was the biggest fanboy of the tools. I was stoked to join the organization. It's a—and it's everything you would imagine with a bunch of creatives within the organization. It's just a fantastic place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:15) Yeah. Freehand, I saw Freehand come out, but it was never, for whatever reason, something that—

(Jeff Chow at 00:04:21) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:22) I mean, it's so hard to not get typecast as a product. It's like, okay, InVision does this, and that's how it fits into my life. And then I have Miro for my boards, and that's how it fits into my life. And then it's very, very clear what I'm using. So I'm actually a customer of Miro.

(Jeff Chow at 00:04:38) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:38) And I'm also—well, I don't know if I still maintain that $10 a month thing at InVision. But when I was actively building and developing and scaling applications, I was using InVision. And then, you know, when the podcast got popular, I just stopped doing it on an everyday basis.

(Jeff Chow at 00:04:56) Yeah. I hear you. I hear you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we thank you for your $10 a month. Yeah. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:02) I still keep it active. I have projects there with 500 screens. It's ridiculous. I have so many projects in there from the years.

(Jeff Chow at 00:05:10) I think there's still a future. You know, a lot of what we think about at Miro is this—can you create an interface that is a home for everyone? Right? And do you actually tease out better feedback because of it? Right? When you're in a design tool and you know you're in a design tool. Right? You're seeing the layers and the panels and the components. And if I'm going in, I'm gonna give very different feedback in different collaboration because I'm the visitor at the house of the designer. Right? And so a lot of what we still get feedback at InVision around prototypes is just it's much more equitable. It's like, yeah, you don't need to be a rocket scientist or an all-star varsity designer to be able to do this. It's like, drop some images, link them together, and then you can validate with the customer. It's dead simple. So I still think there's a great market there. We have some prototyping tools that are AI-generated on Miro that's coming out soon. So it's a lot of excitement around that. So same concept. Super democratized. It's not about the crafted design—that's 100% Figma. A lot of what we're trying to do is just make sure that a product manager, engineer, and a designer can sit down and be like, okay, this is a problem to solve. Right? And how do we do it together?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:29) Yeah. And that's, I think, something—is that newer? Because I know Miro for I interact with my marketing team on whiteboards. That's how we use it.

(Jeff Chow at 00:06:41) So two weeks ago, we announced what we're calling the Innovation Workspace. Right? And it's basically, honestly, listening to a lot of what our customers have been asking for, which is you have this amazing energy of Miro. Right? It's the cursors, the, you know, everyone feels like they're working together to solve problems. And then you go on to the definition phase and you've lost that. Right? You're now in some sort of soulless tool to track the work, or you're in the word processor tool. You're doing all this other stuff. And so we actually launched our next-gen platform, which is helping you navigate those unstructured, destructured phases, leveraging AI. Right? So you can have a workshop, and you can hit a button, synthesize this into a product brief, does it in a second. And then it's a new format, so a rich text multiplayer documentation. Same thing for task tracking. So we have a new table format. And then we also have a new—obviously, we have diagramming and that turns into AI to diagram and then ultimately prototypes as well. So all these new formats are basically when we look at how people work together, it's a lot of unstructured work, then you lead to structured work. But then what happens when you're pushing down a little bit further on that phase of delivery? You usually hit a twist and turn that you got to go back to unstructured to solve the problem, work the problem. Right? And that dance and those context switches are very costly for organizations. And so we're saying, like, how do we make that more seamless? And that's a lot of what we've introduced.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:16) I really do like you mentioned the arrows and feeling like you're a part of the document. I noticed myself Miro is probably the first tool that when somebody starts sharing their screen, I tell them to stop and send me the link. Yeah. Because it's a better experience for me to open the page and follow their cursor. Exactly. And it is for me to have them share their screen.

(Jeff Chow at 00:08:38) Exactly. And then all of a sudden, you feel more immersive. Right? You're looking at each other, and you're working as opposed to, you know—there's a very—yeah. It's a chemical change when somebody shares their screen and all of a sudden you're tiny and you're watching. It still feels broadcast, not immersive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:57) Yeah. To summarize my feelings on that, that's my favorite thing about your product.

(Jeff Chow at 00:09:02) Love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:04) So, oh, man, that's great. Now if people wanna use Miro, if they wanna learn more, if they wanna try it, where do they go? What do they do?

(Jeff Chow at 00:09:13) Yeah. I mean, I think they can just go to miro.com. That introduces the Innovation Workspace, all the various new aspects, how AI is integrated throughout the experience, and they can join a community of 80 million knowledge workers and 250,000 customers, all pushing the balance on how we are trying to work differently to drive the pace of innovation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:37) Now where was the exact moment in time where you realized that what you're doing is not building a whiteboarding tool? What you're doing is removing the friction from the innovation process?

(Jeff Chow at 00:09:50) Yeah. I mean, I think as a point in time, when you're living and breathing kind of canvas-based technologies, it becomes very clear. Right? And this is a little bit of, as a student of technology that's lived enough of these patterns, there's always the starting point, which is the digital analog. Right? That's the, I mean, it's like the first iPhone. Right? It's the leather stitching for notes, you know, and stuff like that. You need something that's relatable. So stickies is very clearly a nice relatable thing. And then the technology of making it an infinite canvas, it's like, oh, wait, I don't need—I'm not confined by a conference room. That's fantastic. But when you start working on it and seeing how teams are more energized and then listening to customers saying, like, okay, wow, that was a record scratch moment. We had this amazing workshop and then everyone was happy, our employees were finally engaged. And then we left, and then we are sad again. Why is that? Right? That's the problem we wanted to solve. And so we believe the canvas is an incredibly magical thing. And so we started talking to customers and saying, like, hey, maybe five years ago, if you were to ask Miro or even Freehand, you'd say, hey, what do you use Miro for? And they'd be like, whiteboarding. And you'd have to have five sentences later say, like, whoa, no, seriously, what are you using it for? You know, you would have said, like, oh, I'm doing my production schedule, and how we would roll this out. Others would be like, you know, 10,000-person organization. They're like, oh, no, we're doing our entire fiscal year strategy planning using Miro. Right? And we're like, why didn't you say that? You said whiteboarding. You know? So now they're actually naming it by name. They're saying that we do our product roadmap planning. We do our sprint planning. We do our PI planning. We do our customer journey maps. And with that, we sat down with them and said, okay, let's walk through this. And basically, when we look at the ways of working, it's usually a discovery phase. That's the brainstorming and ideation. The definition phase, that's the synthesis and decisioning of what are we actually gonna build, and then there's that delivery phase, all about the execution. And we realized that they used us meaningfully in the discovery phase, wished we could be in the decisioning phase, the definition phase, and would love to be close to the delivery phase. So when you learn something new, it wasn't so far away that you weren't, you know, like, teams would be able to solve the problem in real time as opposed to have long waterfall approaches. And so that was really the crystallizing moment for us to say, like, oh, this is all about getting teams to shift how they work into a more agile, fluid way. What is it gonna take for us to do that? Right? And so amazing customers going on the journey with us. We came up with some very interesting things. And then, obviously, in the last year and a half, AI accelerating that phase between those discover, definition, delivery phases gave us even more permission to push even further because that's when you saw the instead of a 2x productivity return, you saw a 10x productivity return, which is pretty powerful when you start going to organizations that scale out to 200, 2,000 teams.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:11) And how are tech leaders adopting this? Do they hear about it? I mean, let's just say you've got a normal tech leader. They've got their Jira or their ticketing system. They've got their whiteboarding sessions with whatever generic whiteboarding tool they use. How do you help them bridge this gap where you're like, hey, we've got this new Innovation Workspace concept. It's going to make your life easier, but how do you connect what they already know with what that is?

(Jeff Chow at 00:13:36) Well, you know, I think we have the benefit of being the start of the process. Right? And so when somebody's brainstorming and ideating, they're generally using Miro. Right? And so when they're starting there, and you will have people breaking down their development tasks. We'll have people working on journey maps or technical architecture. And so they're already doing it. Right? What we're saying is like, hey, we're actually making this a little bit more efficient, a little bit more inclusive. And so we introduced things like bidirectional integration with Jira. Right? And our new technology, the Canvas SDK, makes it—makes the entire canvas tactile and interactable. So every object on the canvas is aware of each other. So I can take a person object and drag it onto the Jira card. And if I, when I let go, it assigns it back to Jira. So it keeps it completely in sync, but it makes it logical, user-friendly, tactile, real-time multiplayer. And then, and so the same, you know, director of engineering that we would be talking to, if they're doing a PI plan or, you know, a director of product, they would say, like, yeah, we're already using you for this. Oh, you're saying, if I can actually continue the journey, make it less context switching, and you're gonna keep my systems of record up to date, fantastic? Sign me up. Right? It's not a hard sale. Right? And, but, you know, one thing that we do do is pilot it. Right? So we'll have one team doing one sprint plan, validate it, and then it gets very viral fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:16) What's the most unexpected way you've seen teams use this Innovation Workspace?

(Jeff Chow at 00:15:22) The cool part about what we announced, and we have—we've announced a lot of these AI kind of workflow generators. We call them AI action buttons. But, effectively, you can craft an AI button that has its own prompt and then turn it into a custom template and scale it out to the full organization. Right? So every knowledge worker doesn't need to be a prompt engineer.

(Jeff Chow at 00:15:47) They can just hit a button and it does something, right? And we've been focused a lot on product briefs, research synthesis, technical design documentation. And what we found is a lot of our community members are like, "Oh, this should be our sales QBR. This should be my first OKR strategy deck. This should be..." And you're like, "Oh, wow, okay." You're really kind of remixing this in ways that we never thought, which was fantastic. So there's a lot of that. Our heart and soul is about collaboration.

(Jeff Chow at 00:16:23) So we have interactive widgets. We have a new spinner widget. We have these reaction stickers that people can plus one, and it actually morphs. So it's like a heart to a bigger heart to a heartsplosion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:34) I want the heartsplosion.

(Jeff Chow at 00:16:36) Yeah, you've got to have the heartsplosion. And so we've seen some people, we're like, "Oh, this is the fun brainstorming phase." And they actually add it to a very senior level stakeholder review, right? And you're like, "Oh, wow." And it's like, "Oh, wait, this is fun." We have one of the largest Japanese manufacturers using our platform. And, you know, culturally you would just imagine very serious. And we showed them these interactive stickers, and I glanced by it when I was demoing. I was like, "Yeah, you probably don't..." And he goes, "Wait, stop, go back. This is absolutely what we need. We need to have more fun in our work so we can actually innovate faster." And I was like, I cannot... Talk about my biases. I was like, I assumed that, you know, this is, they're all serious. And even they believe in the fact that you have to loosen up even in the most serious phases to have some fun. So never a dull moment in terms of surprises and uniqueness of our value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:42) They've got some crazy cartoons too, so I know they've got it in them.

(Jeff Chow at 00:17:46) That's true, exactly. That's probably the real key. It's anime adjacent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) There you go. Canvas first approach—was that an intentional thing? Have you guys ever thought about deviating from that and you're like, no, we're really certain this is the way?

(Jeff Chow at 00:18:04) We've certainly deviated. I would say that it's in a healthy way. We've had moments where the team has said, you know, it's easier just to have a table product and a document product and another product, and these are different SKUs. But what we've really always come back to is the canvas is the connective tissue throughout the experience, right? It's the thing that binds the teams. When we started thinking about where does actual work happen, the actual work is not just to code or to design or to write. It's actually that muck, you know, teams are working together, figuring stuff out, working the problem together. It's like that movie with Apollo 13, when they tossed everything onto the table and they're trying to solve the problem. That's really where we believe the real work is. And so what we wanted to do is canvas first is making sure that, yeah, you need to track the work, yeah, you need to communicate the work, but there's always a moment that you need to figure something out, right? And if you embrace the messiness of work a little bit more and just make it closer in proximity to the tracking and the talking of the work, then speed of innovation just goes faster, right? And so we really believe that that's the center of gravity. It's also competitively differentiated, right? A lot of our competitors just have different tools, and you have to buy different tools, and you have to then adopt different tools, and you context switch through different tools. And it's just basically exacerbating productivity, right? It's just more share links, more context switching, and more this than the other. And so we believe in a different way, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:54) Was there anything that you've got wrong that you're like, oh, I think this is going to work really well, but then you realize, oh man, this isn't good?

(Jeff Chow at 00:20:01) So many, obviously, right? I think there's, you know, with 80 million users as well, there's always a little bit of... We moved one of the frames navigation button and layers, which we just introduced for diagramming, and we stacked them together because, logically, from a UX standpoint, it made sense. And boy, did the pitchforks come out. They're like, "How dare you?" And I was like, "Yeah, it's actually pretty fair." That's a really good "how dare you," actually. This is not the, we changed the shape of the button and the petty reverb. This was legit. And so, you know, there's a lot of these things. And, you know, it never, a day goes by that there's a constant reminder that we're stewards of large organizations that are using us in critical ways, and we can't slow them down, right? And so it's always good to get the spice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:00) Don't you change that border radius.

(Jeff Chow at 00:21:04) Exactly, exactly. And they'll know. They'll know too. They'll be like, "That is five degrees less than before. What did you do? What did you do?"

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:14) Oh no. That's good. That's good that you're learning a lot and trying things. Wow, 80 million users. That's a lot, man. That's a lot of people. No matter what you do, you're most likely going to frustrate some people. So how do you balance that? Do you have this way that you look at different larger user groups and you're like, alright, here's our three core user groups that spend the most amount of money with us, we need to build towards that? How do you make these decisions?

(Jeff Chow at 00:21:43) Yeah, you know, I think we have a really, really strong large enterprise base, right? The majority of the Fortune 100 use us, right? And that's a completely different rhythm than a lightweight agency that's using us, you know, and it's a five person team. And so it is a diversity of use cases that is exciting. It's really exciting to see. We generally try to, though, boil it down to kind of the jobs to be done, the use cases, where there's commonality and just say, okay, we have to be intentional about this. In the swinging pendulum of change, there's always a moment where you get too beholden to listening to and doing exactly what customers are asking for. And you wake up one day, you have 53 buttons on your main screen, and you're like, "How did that happen?" Right? And so we have a very strong culture of—our tenets are "refreshingly simple, deceptively robust," right? Which means it always has to be something that's super simple. And to do that with a lot of our ambitions, it has to be very intentional where you place things and very intentional how to move things and very intentional about all of these experiences. And we're pretty open and transparent with our community to say, this is why we made this change, this is how we do it. And that doesn't mean they can't take their gloves off and throw haymakers back at us. But, you know, generally we feel like we communicate pretty well. And then we are receptive. You know, when we make a mistake, we own up to it and we just say, "Yep, that was a bad move. Here's what we're doing to change it."

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:24) If I've taken anything from this conversation, it's that I am using 0.01% of your product's features.

(Jeff Chow at 00:23:32) I would agree, probably, and I'm happy to walk you through it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:38) But it works, though. Here's the important part. I'm using less than 1% of your features, and it's still valuable enough to pay for it.

(Jeff Chow at 00:23:46) Yes, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:46) It's still, we still need it. And so, you know, I think that's a huge win. How cool is it that you have a product that somebody can only use 1% of your features and they're crushing it?

(Jeff Chow at 00:23:57) Yeah, exactly. No, and I think there's, you know, this whole industry, the thing that we're always keeping our eye on is this entire industry is hitting this... Most project management tools hit their product market fit maybe ten years ago, and they've been adding more and more features ever since, right? And that's a little bit of what the SaaS industry tends to do. And so things tend to be overbaked. What we try to keep a keen eye on is we are adding new things to unlock new workflows and new opportunities. So it's not that we're saying your brainstorming could be done way better if you use all of our other features. It's like, great, you nailed brainstorming or you nailed planning. Awesome. But did you also know you could actually use this to synthesize your talk track of pre-rolls or do whatever? And it's like, "Oh, for me to do that, I would need these three new capabilities." And so our focus is mostly around, we want you to expand the types of things that you use Miro for, and therefore you use our new features, right? As opposed to, we really hope you use all of our really cool features. It's about our success is if you intentionally use a new use case, right? And that's ours to prove, honestly. It's not... And so another UX principle is we should not make you feel dumb. A lot of times, we get sad when I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:26) I feel dumb all the time.

(Jeff Chow at 00:25:29) Whenever a customer is like, "Yeah, it's really cool. It's just so robust," you know, we cry ourselves to sleep because that means we didn't succeed. That just means we built a complex tool, you know, versus it should be simple. And then when you want to do something else, some other job to be done or some other use case, you dive in and it's there and it's obvious, it's intuitive, right? And so that's our tortured artist phase at Miro.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) Have you seen how some of the other softwares have done this? Specifically, GarageBand and Final Cut Pro, these more advanced editing tools—they'll start you in beginner mode, and you can actually switch to advanced mode. Have you guys ever played with that idea?

(Jeff Chow at 00:26:19) Yeah, yeah, we have. I mean, we actually launched modes, interestingly. Yeah, and so these format modes. And then so therefore, a great example would be, we have so many technical diagrammers and cloud practitioners that use our platform. And they're amazing, but they're like, "Man, all of your buttons are all over the place. It's not optimized for us," right? And so we actually have this experience where you can go into a diagramming mode, and all of a sudden it's like, actually, the snap to grid works really well. The quick keys are purpose built. The layers are auto expanded. The shape packs are auto expanded. And now you're literally in a very specific mode just for diagramming, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:03) Oh, nice.

(Jeff Chow at 00:27:04) And so we've been trying to push on that. But then if you exit that mode, you're on the canvas and it feels simple and democratized. You know, if you're a basic user and maybe you weren't doing the cloud stuff, but you're there to review the overall body of work, you're not Homer Simpson-ing into the bushes being like, "Oh my god, this is scary," right? It's like, "Oh, I know what to do. I can drop a sticky," you know, stuff like that. So there's a little bit of, I think we're inventing new ways of UX modalities, but standing on the shoulders of, say, the GarageBand or the Final Cut Pro, where it's like, oh yeah, progressively revealing complexity, absolute strategy. It's a very important one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:49) Earlier you mentioned this innovation lifecycle: discover, define, deliver. Is that something you guys created? Is that something you've learned about or read about from the industry? Tell me about that.

(Jeff Chow at 00:28:00) Yeah, you know, we are the most curious company on other organizations' ways of working, right? And so, literally, I will go to a customer pitch and derail the conversation because I'm asking them questions. It's like, okay, so how do you actually navigate from, what happens when you do this? Because I'm just, we're just curious, right? And so that means we've seen every framework in the world, right? We've seen the double diamonds. We've seen the DevOps loop. We've seen everything. And they just all boil down to there's usually three phases of a project, right, or anything, which is you expand the art of the possible with a lot of people, subject matter experts, data, customer voice of the customer. You need some point in time where you're like, "Okay, that's a lot, but let's propose what we're going to do about it." And then you have to do something about it. And the key around that discover, define, deliver is those twists and turns, right? And I think I would say our industry has tried really hard to accept that there should be less twists and turns. And we're saying, no, those twists and turns are where the magic happens. You know, when you get one customer interview and the most introverted engineer watches that customer interview and has the idea that then turns that project from good to great, right? Or that really opinionated designer sits down with the engineer, and the engineer says, "You know, if I did it exactly your way, that's going to take me eight weeks. But if I did it two steps to the right, that'll take two days." And then the designer's like, "Oh, absolutely. Two days. That's perfect." And frankly, it's probably even better, right? Those are the little moments in every organization that turns things into magic, right? And so our goal is in that process to try to figure out how to actually get teams to feel that flow and not, you know, the classic thing we hear from customers is, "Yeah, that's really great. But what really happens is a designer goes to an engineer and the engineer says, 'Yeah, file a ticket.'" You know? And so it's like, how do you actually unlock the relationships and unlock the vibe for people to push on?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:26) A lot of that's in the company culture too.

(Jeff Chow at 00:30:28) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:30) But if you build tools that are for healthy company cultures, then you get better customers, and that makes your life more enjoyable.

(Jeff Chow at 00:30:37) Absolutely. I mean, it's so meta, right? I mean, we are going through our own journey at Miro around this, and we're using Miro to unlock Miro to develop Miro, right? It's just this kind of very interesting thing. But it really is all about the company culture, psychological safety, deeper inclusive collaboration, and then moments for people to focus, honestly. If I'm a designer, I want to focus on my craft. I don't want to pixel push, right? If I'm an engineer, I want to code and think about the right architecture. I don't want to recreate the wheel 23 times, right? And so there's just ways that we can make sure that this works better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) And, you know, earlier you were talking about a 5x ROI as far as efficiencies and improvements within organizations. But the engineering side of me is like, well, how do you actually measure the real impact of these business outcomes and improved collaboration? So is this something that your customers tell you? They're like, "Hey, we did this and we noticed that this is the case," or is it something that you're measuring? How does that work?

(Jeff Chow at 00:31:44) Yeah, there's a couple ways. It is the number one question, right? It's like, if I can have a number, a single metric, I can print that out and go to the CIO and just say, "Okay."

(Jeff Chow at 00:31:56) This is the way to go. It's not that easy. You know, we've done surveys with our customers and come up with productivity gain metrics. We've looked at certain steps in the process with AI and basically mined the baseline, which is without it, how long does this project take? With it, how long does this project take?

(Jeff Chow at 00:32:22) Right? A great example is our GenAI prototyping tool. Right? It's basically it takes the brainstorm that the team does, a product brief, a brainstorm, and then all you have to do is hit a button, and it turns it into a clickable prototype. And what was interesting and fascinating about that was we thought it would be the 10x productivity saver, and therefore, projects would go faster.

(Jeff Chow at 00:32:53) And a lot of our early pilot customers are saying, you know what? We're using this to do 10 more customer feedback loops. So instead, using that same amount of time, I would have done two customer validation steps. We would love to do 10. Right?

(Jeff Chow at 00:33:11) And so we're actually going to use the time. So it's not a productivity gain. It's actually a definition quality gain, where now when we get to that definition step, we're way more confident, and then we're way more confident that we can put our designer to do the final designs, et cetera. So that makes it a lot more tricky to measure because it's like, oh, yeah. Quality of definition is a metric that we don't know how to measure, honestly, just to be transparent. But it's the, you know, those validation steps—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:42) You feel it and you know it to be true. Yes. You know, honestly, I guess I lean more—my mom was a cheerleader, my dad was an engineer. So I've got this creative engineer. So I really like things to be specific, but I'm totally cool playing in the ambiguous.

(Jeff Chow at 00:33:57) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) But yeah.

(Jeff Chow at 00:33:58) I love it. That's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:00) Yeah. But those gut feels, it's like, you know, you get your team coming to you, and they're like, this is the better way to do it. From me, from an executive standpoint, like, do it that way then. It's not like your tool is very cost effective for the value it brings. It's not like a hard sell.

(Jeff Chow at 00:34:17) That's right. You know? And a lot of this also ties back, which is a challenge, but a lot of this ties back to employee engagement. Right? Employees are the happiest when they're working. Like, they're actually doing the work. They're not going through the Office Space tropes of, you know, writing about the work, packaging work for other people to review, and all this other stuff. And so we find that that is another aspect of focusing on the work itself—is employee engagement spikes. And then you have the, oh, wait. This is the secret sauce for distributed work, not return to office, not whatever. It's like, oh, it's like you can get people activated. And most multinational organizations we work with are distributed no matter what. They have a global footprint. Right? So they're always working distributed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:15) That's actually been a hard conversation for me because I see the pros and cons of both in-person and remote. And I've worked in both, and I've worked—I think hybrid was the worst. I either like it like you're in person.

(Jeff Chow at 00:35:32) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:33) That's it. Maybe you get a flex day or whatever. But or you're fully remote and everybody's fully remote. So I see both sides of it, but your tool works either way.

(Jeff Chow at 00:35:44) Yeah. And people love it in person. Right? Because it's sort of like this—it's a content that we need for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:50) Do you have physical boards?

(Jeff Chow at 00:35:52) We have a partnership with Cisco, Neat, other, you know, monitor interactive monitor devices. So, yeah, it works pretty well. And then a lot of what we're doing now is computer vision as well. Right? So take a picture of your whiteboard, and then it turns them into objects on the canvas. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:13) What? Come on. That's pretty cool.

(Jeff Chow at 00:36:17) But yeah. No, I agree with you. You know, I think I found COVID to be so fascinating because it was a wrong proxy for remote work. Because it's like remote work doesn't mean you should never see each other in person. Right? Which was COVID. Right? Now it's like, no. Like, I've seen organizations and have amazing intentional meetups where you build this great, you know, great trust and you can see the engagement energy spike. And then it starts decaying a little bit over time, and then you're like, oh, let's do another meetup, and then it'll spike again. Right? And then I think there's a real good healthy, healthy balance somewhere in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:03) I'm curious. You mentioned a little bit that you guys are using some prompts, and we've all been seeing the ridiculous record advancements of some of these tools. Like, this past week, I—I know I'm putting you on the spot, but I saw it. Did you see that Bolt thing with Spotify? No. Did you see that post on Twitter or on X or whatever it's called? So this guy, this engineer uses this tool called Bolt, and he's like—he did in a paragraph, he's like, make me a Spotify clone, and he gave it a couple of

(Jeff Chow at 00:37:34) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:34) things. And it fully builds it

(Jeff Chow at 00:37:37) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:37) like, on the computer, tests it, and runs it, and it just pops up, and it's like a Spotify clone.

(Jeff Chow at 00:37:43) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:44) And oh, wait. Josh has it. There it is. Look at that. That's the screenshot. So there's the prompt, and then it builds a fully functional Spotify clone.

(Jeff Chow at 00:37:54) My god.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:55) That's insane, isn't it? Yeah. And so when we see stuff like this, one of the things I like about Miro, if I was an investor, is the fact that because people working together is at the center, that's going to be the last thing to go. Right? Like, even in a hundred years when we have these robots, there's still going to be groups of people orchestrating things to be done. Yep. And so you're in a really good position from a product standpoint to continue to dominate this market.

(Jeff Chow at 00:38:26) Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more. We actually call—our saying is the canvas is the prompt, right, or it's the OG prompt because people, no matter what they're doing, they're inventing something. Right? Like, especially at the discovery phase. They're dropping requirements. They're talking about new ideas. They're talking about how might we exercises. Those are all net new things. Right? The world doesn't have it. Like, the corpus of LLMs don't have it. And so we are making sure that that's what they're doing today. Right? And then you just hit a button, and it does something with it. Right? And so we believe strongly that that's the epicenter of all invention—has to start with people, you know, and we just happen to have a great canvas-based property to do that. So, and, you know, I think there's a lot—you're right. My brain melts literally every day. I have LinkedIn, Twitter overwhelm on the—I can't follow how fast this is going. You know? I have my old man cane. I'm like, when I grew up and I had to do—like, I was just wiring servers into a colo facility with my own bare hands, and now look at you. You know? You wrote a prompt, and it created Spotify. And so, and so—

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:53) People in the nursing homes are looking at you and are like, we punched card programs.

(Jeff Chow at 00:39:57) Without you guys turning the stack, and I tripped, and it's scattered on the floor. You know? So yeah. And so I find it so amazing at this pace it's going. It hurts my brain to say, you know, when we all say simple things like, we should go where the puck is going, and be like, holy crap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) There's 80 pucks.

(Jeff Chow at 00:40:20) And they all know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:21) how to interact with it. Yeah.

(Jeff Chow at 00:40:24) You know, one thing we invented—you know, agents is a big one that's in AI, and so we have this new sidekicks, actually. I'm sure this is one that you're also not using, Joel. But it's basically this ability to think about collaboration as rounded out by agents. Right? And so your real-time multiplayer cursors could be four of you on a team, and the fifth one could be an Agile facilitator. It could be a product leader. It could be a product marketer. It could be a designer. Right? And what they do is you can call on them and they show up as a cursor. Right? Like, they're a partner cursor on the canvas with you. And they can do things like participate in the brainstorm. So they'll add additional stickies. Right? And that solves groupthink. Right? Like, you as a group, you're thinking about this. You probably been working on that problem for so long that you all kind of are starting to think the same way. And all of a sudden, you have this AI cursor that's coming in and be like, what about this? What about that? And it opens up the aperture of discussion. You can have a stakeholder cursor, which comes in and they are basically like, you know, you're talking to inside baseball—you know, simplify this. Right? And so you're like, oh, before I go to the, you know, the CEO to present this, I went through a couple sanity checks. And then you can have the design person that's like, oh, turn this into a prototype. Right? And so we are thinking about this as teammates as well to round up the team, not just, you know, like, sort of like your personal assistant. So it should supercharge the team itself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:00) That's pretty cool. And these are available today?

(Jeff Chow at 00:42:04) Some of this is available today. If you go to miro.com, you'll see there's a wait list to join. We're shipping most of this out in Q4. So it's rolling out private beta. It's all in private beta right now, though. Great feedback so far with our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:19) Oh, nice. You just have a couple of key very involved customers that you roll this stuff out to.

(Jeff Chow at 00:42:23) Yeah. And, you know, a much larger key set of passionate community members who will give us as much critical feedback as we would ask them to. So it's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:36) There's no shortage of that.

(Jeff Chow at 00:42:37) There's no—it's amazing. I love it. Whenever I lose sleep at night because of really tough feedback, I find that we as a team come back the next day with a better idea, and we're better for it. So it's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. So as we start to wrap up, people that want to—can they try this for free? Or is there a base version or no?

(Jeff Chow at 00:42:59) Yeah. There's a free version. I think it's limited by number of boards that you can use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:03) Okay.

(Jeff Chow at 00:43:04) So you can definitely come on and give it a shot. You know, I think we're on an amazing journey to combine amazing canvas, amazing formats, amazing AI, and put that in the slow cooker and see what kind of magic happens from that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:21) Yeah. No. I look. I love the product. It solved this very specific need on my team, and I was very excited about it. And then when I got a message from, you know, Miro that they wanted to do some content together, I was like, yeah. Let's do that for sure.

(Jeff Chow at 00:43:36) That's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:38) Anything else that we didn't get to today that we want to make sure we get out to the world?

(Jeff Chow at 00:43:42) To me, it's all it is is—especially for the CTO audience—it's about my navigating towards more of the solving customer problems, which is every CTO I know is trying to do that in their own specialized way and moving towards a way to do that. And to do that, you need to make sure that you are working alongside your product practitioners, your research practitioners, your design practitioners. So the unlock on cross-functional work, I think, is the next phase of really getting the pace of innovation supercharged.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:18) What's the one hook? Like, one reason a CTO should go try out Miro?

(Jeff Chow at 00:44:25) Yeah. My sense on Miro is that almost all work, if you squint and you look at the work, should be closer in proximity to other teams. Right? And so having people come to your, you know, your Jira castle has diminishing returns. But if you actually have people feel like they're solving problems together is key. So that's not really a hook, but it is the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:57) It's a hook for the people who—the people that know they have talented people, but there's some stuff not exactly working right, and they're not getting the buy-in and the engagement in the project. They might switch to this visual situation. If you want my engagement, I tell people all the time, I'm a very visual person.

(Jeff Chow at 00:45:12) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:13) So, you know, they were trying to put the data into spreadsheets and stuff, and they figured out if they just screenshot it and put it on a Miro board and talked with me about it. Yeah. And then put—like, we can go through each case. They're like, that's the way to work with Joel. So I think for me, it was less—it was more about my team figured out that it was easier to work with me by using it that way. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:34) Yep. And that's paid off so well, though, because then everything works better. Now I work better with the marketing team. We—everyone's super happy. We've got our routine. We use Miro every Monday at nine central.

(Jeff Chow at 00:45:45) I love it. I love it. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the last one I would say for CTOs is, myself included, is that you have a lot of doers in your organization, but you really want to turn them into problem solvers. That's all there is to it. Right? Like, that's the only thing, and that makes them more engaged, more energized, and they want to do and build hard things. And so Miro does that. It makes them focus less on the tactical task at hand and understanding the whys and the whats of a project to execute more flawlessly. So that's—nail it. Then you got an amazing team, and then you're off to the races.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:24) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.