Company goals and key metrics usually take form as a quarterly or annual presentation by upper management. At Miro, things are a little different. Teams use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as a reference point in day-to-day execution, keeping everyone across the company aligned and effective.
How to build a happier, more productive team through better meeting processes
Company goals and key metrics usually take form as a quarterly or annual presentation by upper management. At Miro, things are a little different.
Teams use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as a reference point in day-to-day execution, keeping everyone across the company aligned and effective.
If you aren’t familiar, Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard that is now used by 95% of the Fortune 500. As business has increasingly moved online, especially over the past year, Miro has witnessed massive growth because of its ability to provide a shared ideation space for distributed teams. The company currently stands at more than 500 people located in 7 hubs around the world, with sights set on doubling headcount next year. It’s more important than ever to have an anchor to keep everyone on the same page.
We sat down with Melissa Halim, Enterprise Product Marketing Lead, who broke down the processes that help Miro run across the organization, from product to enterprise to partnerships. With this kind of complex team structure, staying coordinated depends on the entire company’s commitment to its goals.
It’s clear that processes and coordination need to be laid out for everyone to stay on track and aligned. So, how does Miro achieve this outcome to great effect?
"The People team drives that initiative for all the new employees that come on board. This lays down the philosophy and process for our OKR process where we roll it out company-wide then decompose that into team-level initiatives. In some companies this might be a “set it and forget it process” but at Miro it’s the main reference point for guiding our work on an everyday basis. We’re continually refining this process with each quarter that passes"
As in other companies, the OKRs are set annually and quarterly at the management levels, but at Miro, OKRs are then broken down into the team responsibilities for each division and team, and everyone is required to have regular reports on their progress.
Some other interesting points on the process:
On a monthly basis, the product marketing team provides an update for the Go-to-market (GTM) teams regarding the features that were shipped that month, as well as upcoming features in their domain. This is critical since everyone should ultimately know about important product changes that are being shipped.
On top of this, the product marketing team puts together the monthly update all asynchronously, across a wide range of time zones.
To make the presentation effective, Melissa’s team uses the following techniques:
In our discussions of how teams communicate, it became clear that Miro uses similar tools as other distributed organizations (e.g. Slack, Loom), and like others, there may be lots of different channels for communication. Melissa mentioned that it’s important to develop your own personal way of managing communications and creating visibility into work, particularly for leadership and management. Everyone has different preferences.
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