How to grow the product by 300% YoY

Insights from Vicki Kharlamova, Growth Product Manager at Miro

Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard platform for distributed teams. It’s trusted by over 29 million users, including 80% of the Fortune 100 and companies like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Skyscanner, and Salesforce.

Miro grows by 300% year-over-year. The team grows along with the product: five years ago, it consisted of 50 people, now there are over 1000. It launches lots of experiments aimed at product growth and finding solutions to user problems. Besides, it conducts Data Research and rolls out new features that help improve the key product metrics.

Vika Kharlamova, the Growth Product Manager at Miro, told us about the principles that help the team grow, develop, and refine their product.

The principles of the Growth Team

1. Share your knowledge

It’s important to share all knowledge you have — be it about users, competitors, or processes — within the entire company. The Growth team at Miro has a special Slack channel called “Growth Insights”. Among other things, they use it to share the detailed results of all their experiments. They’re structured like this:

Experiment name → Rolled out or not

→ Data Results block (how metrics changed in numerical terms)

→ Learnings (knowledge about user behavior and their reaction to the experiment)

→ Next Steps (should the experiment be continued or not, what are its possible modifications, what new experiments are they going to carry out using the insights from this one)

→ More info (a link to the experiment in Confluence, and links to experiment data dashboards)

Other than the active knowledge sharing in the channel, there are 2 more important steps:

• Reflect on who can benefit the most from your insights, and share information with them directly — tag or dm them.

• Motivate your team to share their knowledge. It will help initiate the process of regular knowledge sharing within the company.

2. Maintain a ratio between the business and user value

Case study 1. A mistake that led to a decrease in long-term virality

Those who use Miro know there’s a sharing popup that enables you to invite your team. It shows the following options:

• Email invitation;

• Invite link to board and team;

• Anyone with the link;

• Team access to the board;

Miro discovered that the “Anyone with the link” option was used more often, though it was the first two options that helped them grow the product and acquire new users. They decided to hide the lower two buttons. In the short term, it helped Miro increase activation and the number of newly registered users.

However, the effect was largely negative in the long term because the users didn’t understand how they could share boards publicly. They just couldn’t find this option. The long-term virality suffered as well: previously, active users had leveraged public links to invite new ones, which contributed to product growth. After this discovery, Miro decided to make all sharing options available again and let users choose a convenient way of sharing their whiteboards.

Case study 2. How the Monetization team launches experiments

Creating the purchase trigger event, the Monetization team always applies usability tests to monitor how it affects a user’s first experience and long-term retention.

When you launch experiments that involve payments, you have to keep track of the long-term retention. If conversion increases but long-term retention falls, you should go with the latter because it’s the retention that indicates whether your product brings value and solves the problems of your users.

3. Stay curious and carry out user research regularly

It’s important to keep asking yourself, “Why do we see these particular numbers?”, “Why do users behave this particular way?” And answer these questions with User Research.

Case study 1.

What happens if they turn off all instructions at the onboarding stage? How does the learning functional during the first and second sessions affect key product metrics? These are the questions Miro asked themselves a couple of years ago.

They launched a test where they turned off all videos, tips, and tutorials in the test variation. The key metrics for this variation decreased. The experiment showed how onboarding impacts activation, retention, and payment conversion. They used these outcomes in all subsequent onboarding experiments.

Case study 2.

About 10-15% of users didn’t get to the board creation stage. After numerous usability tests, a hypothesis was found: Miro assumed that the users didn’t understand what product they were registering with, and didn’t see its value. They thought, what if we add visuals that demonstrate the product right at the registration step?

At first, they got positive feedback on Twitter from Heads of Growth of various top products, but a week later the % of users who created the board got even lower. They've looked through the recordings of user sessions in Inspectlet and realized that the users tried to interact with those visuals thinking it was the real product. Naturally, they couldn’t do it, got distracted, and didn’t reach the board creation stage.

In the end, Miro decided to roll out a final registration flow which led to a growth in conversion - more users got to the board.

4. Plans are nothing, planning is everything

External factors always impact planning, so you should stay flexible and adjust your plans according to your priorities and common sense.

Case study 1.

A year ago, lots of companies around the world shifted to remote work. It strongly impacted Miro’s plans for the second quarter. Teams had well-planned OKRs, but instead of experimenting and developing new features, they all had to work on stabilizing the product to onboard a big volume of new users. There was also a need to improve UX: previously, the product was used mostly by designers and product managers, and the shift to remote work made our TA way more diverse.

Case study 2.

At Miro, the employees use the system of quarterly OKRs. The key metric of the team is activation - that is, the first collaborative session. Recently they've had a new idea: aside from setting predictably achievable roof shots, they should set a moon shot - a very ambitious quarterly goal. Now, there are daily reflections on what experiments Miro's team can launch to achieve this metric. They also have team brainstorming sessions to come up with ideas for new experiments. This approach lets the team think differently, think wider, and reflect on what else they can do to reach their ambitious goals.

5. It’s important to understand that growth is a system

The results of any given team impact the metrics of other teams.

Example 1. The Acquisition team acquires users. The quality of these users will affect the activation, retention, monetization, and other metrics along the entire funnel.

Example 2. The way the Activation team onboards users also affects their activation and monetization.

It’s important to take into account all metrics your own work can impact. This way, you’ll be able to figure out why certain numbers grow or decrease.

6. Build up a knowledge database about users and processes

It’s like a Bible you can refer to anytime. The Miro team has a special Confluence tab where it collects all information about the experiments and the results of all user research and surveys.

It makes their work easier because whatever question they may have, there is almost certainly already an answer for it - in the form of a page with data, numbers, and insights. Besides, new team members can use it to learn the necessary information about users and onboard faster.

7. Build the synergy between teams

Any person and any team can affect their key growth metric.

Example 1. When the Growth team added questions to the signup form, it got easier for the Acquisition team to attract better-qualified leads to their product through ads.

Example 2. The Email marketing team helps the Activation team to improve the key metric. They brainstormed together to onboard users, activate them, and get them back to the product (?)

8. Regularly monitor metrics and competitors

Every month, the Monetization team reviews the metrics and deduces what can be done to increase conversion and ARPA. The Activation team do weekly metric analyses, and on Mondays, check key dashboards. Miro also has the Activation Metrics Journal where they write down hypotheses on why metrics go up or down. Later, they are discussed with analysts, and decisions are made on what to do.

Miro has written up a list of products they like, and a list of direct and indirect competitors. If you analyze their experiments and features on a weekly basis, you can learn a lot and transfer some successful ideas of experiments to your own product.

9. Work fast but don’t forget about fun

What helps Miro work fast:

• Carrying out one experiment a week due to choosing lower-level metrics;

• Understanding that several minor improvements can lead to big results;

• Defining how to assess the experiment depending on different results before launching it;

However, in a fast-growing company, it’s important to not only work fast, but also to reduce stress: to meet each other in person and do something together, discuss news, and have fun.

An example. A team of growth product managers recently had a positive feedback session. It was very easy and fast but gave a lot of positive emotions. Team members spent 15 minutes telling each other what they were good at. Aside from positive emotions, it’s a great opportunity to consider what you can learn from your colleagues.

10. Try to grow faster than the company or product

In a fast-growing company, it’s vital to grow yourself faster than the company or product. What can help you do that:

• Set personal OKRs for different spheres of your life and update professional OKRs every quarter;

• Communicate with product managers from other successful companies or other teams within your company. Learn from the best regularly;

• Have weekly 1-1 meetings with your manager to discuss not only work-related tasks but also your personal goals for a quarter or a year or three. It’s important to ask your manager to give you not applicable solutions, but growth vectors, and find the solutions yourself;

• Ask for regular feedback (say, bi-weekly). Then reflect on it, prioritize your feedback and, most importantly, work on improving your skills;

• Enjoy the challenges (you’ll always find the right solutions), share your experience and never stop learning.