🤝 Takeoff #49: Miro's PLG
Welcome to Takeoff, your weekly dose of product deep dives and new learning opportunities. Today, we're diving into the Miro story. Lessgo!
📔 PLG Playbook of Miro
The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the way we work, accelerating the adoption of collaboration tools. In 2020, the usage of these tools skyrocketed from 5% to 33%, with Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard, leading the charge. As the global market for collaboration tools is projected to reach a staggering $309 billion by 2025, Miro, with its impressive 300% growth between March and November 2020 and a user base of over 25 million, including 95% of Fortune 100 enterprises, is setting the pace. 🚀
Let's delve into the heart of this newsletter to uncover how Miro, under the strategic guidance of its CEO, masterfully executed a Product-Led Growth strategy.
Decoding Miro’s PLG Engine
User-Centricity and Ease of Access 🔓
Andrey Khusid (CEO of Miro) shares that Miro's product-led growth (PLG) strategy is rooted in a user and customer-centric approach. They strive to remove friction in the user journey, providing free sign-ups, self-service purchases, and enabling unlimited users and external collaborations.
Dual-Team Approach 🤝
Khusid reveals that Miro operates with two teams working in harmony. The first, driven by the roadmap, is dedicated to delivering significant value and addressing user needs. The second team, fueled by experimentation, optimizes the funnel, investigating how customers can activate additional value, drive engagement, monetize, and generate new user referrals.
Collaborative Independence 💫
Despite their distinct focuses, he emphasizes that the two teams collaborate closely, understanding the value created at each user journey stage and pinpointing potential friction points. Yet, they are resourced separately, enabling each to operate their own playbooks.
How to scale PLG? 🎢
Andrey Khusid emphasizes that the foundation of a robust, long-lasting business is its focus on the customer. By incorporating marketing and sales layers into Miro's product-led growth (PLG) strategy, they've significantly increased their investment in customers. This shift from a transactional, self-service business model has not only deepened their relationships with existing customers but also broadened the range of customers they can serve. This strategic move has also positively impacted Miro's reputation in the market.
Khusid also highlights the importance of asking key questions to drive business efficiency: "How can you build an efficient business with these different motions? What needs to be driven through PLG and self-service? Where should the most expensive sales reps be allocated?" He advocates for continuous experimentation to find these answers. According to him, Miro is at the beginning of this experimentation journey, actively seeking the most efficient ways to integrate these different business motions.
Growth Pods at Miro 🧪
Miro employs a unique approach called "Growth Pod," where cross-functional teams align around the company's value streams to solve complex problems. For instance, one pod, comprising marketing, customer education, product, engineering, and customer success, focused on driving usage. They brainstormed ideas, established communication methods, and ran experiments, scaling successful approaches.
Another pod, centered around "Miroverse," a user-generated content platform, aimed to democratize innovation best practices. This team, including product marketing, product growth, growth engineering, and community marketing, worked to increase engaged community members. Since its inception in April 2020, Miroverse has seen significant growth, evolving into a self-sustaining community engine.
Closing Thoughts
Miro stands out with its user-centric and innovative growth approach. It serves as a crucial tool for product managers, enriching collaborative efforts and idea visualization. As they navigate the current tough market, watching their strategic execution and growth will be truly interesting.
🎙️ Building products for India vs. Bharath
In Episode 5 part 2 of 🎙️The Airtribe Podcast, Malay and Navneet, sit down together and discuss whether PMs really need a tech background, whether an MBA is compulsory, and building products for India and Bharath.
You can watch it here
💁♂️ Product Jargon of the Week
Feature creep
Feature creep, also known as scope creep, refers to the tendency to constantly add new features 🛠️ or capabilities to a product beyond its original scope. While it often starts with good intentions, such as wanting to meet customer requests 👥 or outdo competitors 🏁, feature creep can lead to a product becoming overly complex and difficult to use. It can also delay product delivery ⏰ and increase costs 💰. The key to managing feature creep is to have a clear product vision and roadmap 🗺️, and to carefully evaluate the impact of each new feature on the product's usability, timeline, and budget.
✅ Fintech product management
Wondering how product management works in fintech?
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That’s all for today, folks! We hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter. 🤗
Until next week, keep learning and growing! 👋