Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Using the right tools in your tech stack is critical for collaboration and innovation. Teams today use up to 200 tools in their app portfolio and that number is constantly growing. With so many different tools, context gets lost and work gets complicated, with constant tool switching and effort spent managing multiple tools and databases. Fortunately, you can align your tools to better fit your workflows and boost productivity in many different areas.

A retrospective might feel like something that’s exclusive to product teams. But in reality, a retrospective is a valuable meeting for any type of team or project. During a retrospective, a team comes together to discuss their work and identify ways to better their processes, communication, relationships, and output as they move forward. It’s a chance for them to reflect, connect, and ultimately improve.

A refrain that I hear often these days is that the pandemic forever changed the way we work. And yet, just three years later, it’s not uncommon to see companies requiring their workforces to be in-person full time, in large part because it’s easier for business leaders to revert to the circumstances with which they’re most comfortable and familiar.

First, before we dive into all things new at Miro, a quick reminder — our next What’s New webinar is right around the corner and there’s still time to claim your spot. What’s in it for you? An in-depth view of how to use our new features to supercharge your workflow, plus some other key announcements. We can’t wait to see you there! Now, onto the (other) good stuff.

The recent pandemic has changed the way we work and has forced millions of people to work from home. This shift has brought an unprecedented need for businesses to collaborate virtually. Miro, an online workspace for innovation, was on the front line of this change and quickly grew from 5 million users in May 2020 to 10 million in November 2020. Thanks to AWS, Miro has been able to handle this hyper-growth and serve over 50 million users today.

Creativity and speed are crucial ingredients for innovation; teams must balance high quality work with velocity. However, even with the best intentions and planning, people sometimes experience mental blocks and struggle to execute — resulting in frustration and stalled innovation.

Creating a new board from scratch can be time-consuming and results in a divergence of inconsistencies from the look and feel to methodology across projects. Custom templates help solve these challenges by providing a standardized starting point for your team’s work in Miro.

Whether you call it program increment (PI) planning, quarterly planning for product teams, or even big room planning, the reality is the same: These sessions are complex undertakings, even more so in our current hybrid reality. Every 8-12 weeks, dozens, hundreds, or — in some cases — thousands of product team members meet to to align on a shared vision, pinpoint cross-team dependencies, discuss features, and, ultimately, plan their product roadmap.

Creativity can be scary. Team members worry about being judged for an idea that is too out there, or they might be nervous about trying and failing. This temptation to stick with tried-and-true approaches is kryptonite for creative thinking — and it’s not just in your head. In fact, 85% of CEOs believe fear stands in the way of their company’s ability to innovate. But why?

This year, organizations will spend trillions of dollars to bring innovative products to market. However, most leaders are dissatisfied with current ways of working and their company’s ability to support such innovation. Adopting tools that help teams align against strategy, deliver on customer needs, and engage workers will be critical to competing in the modern market.