An inside look at how Miro builds product: Lessons on outmaneuvering competitors, team structure, product quality, and moving fast | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)

**Varun Parmar** (0:00)
Every single day, every single time, somebody is pushing your code to production and you're releasing a feature or an enhancement, you are making the product better or you're making the product worse, but the products never remain the same. And so with every release that your competitor is making, and every release that you're making, you're either making chess points, moves against them, positive points, or you're going negative. And I think that framework, it actually drives an insane amount of clarity in terms of what you're doing and what the impact is going to be.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:33)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Varun Parmar. Varun is Chief Product Officer at Miro, and prior to Miro, he was Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Box.
As I share with Varun at the start of our chat, I've always been really curious about the product culture at Miro, partly because everyone I've ever met for Miro has been super interesting and super smart, and partly because they've been able to grow as a business and a product in an incredibly competitive market. In our conversation, we get really deep into the product values and principles at Miro, their product development process, how Varun approaches competitive threats, how a bi-monthly company-wide product demo ritual led to saving months of engineering work on a feature, plus insights into how Miro got started, how they grow today, and what their product team has learned about working with a large sales org. Varun is amazing, I learned a lot, and I hope you find it as interesting as I did. With that, I bring you Varun Parmar after a short word from our sponsors.
Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours.
I have a quick request. Head on over to my Miro board at miro.com/lenny, and let me know which guests you'd want me to have on this year. I've already gotten a bunch of great suggestions, which you'll see when you go there, so just keep it coming. And while you're on the Miro board, I encourage you to play around with the tool. It's a great shared space to capture ideas, get feedback and collaborate with your colleagues on anything that you're working on. For example, with Miro, you can plan out next quarter's entire product strategy. You can start by brainstorming using sticky notes, library actions, a voting tool, even an estimation app to scope out your team's sprints. Then, your whole distributed team can come together around wireframes, draw ideas with a pen tool, and then put full mocks right into the Miro board. And with one of Miro's ready-made templates, you can go from discovery and research, to product roadmaps, to customer journey flows, to final mocks, all in Miro. Head on over to miro.com/lenny to leave your suggestions. That's miro.com/lenny.
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Varun, welcome to the podcast.

**Varun Parmar** (4:10)
Thank you Lenny, so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:13)
I'm really excited to have you here.
I've been looking forward to having a chance to dig into Miro's product culture and the way Miro works for a while. We've actually had a few guests, ex-Miro, Mironiers, is that what you call yourselves?