A Comprehensive Guide for Leveraging Miro as a Product Manager
You may be asking the question, “Can I use Miro for product management?” Our answer would be a resounding, YES. This article shares why the tool is great for this kind of work, when to use it, how to use it, and important considerations for implementation.
✍️ Written by our product management craft team -- Brooke Purvis, Chanel Parker, Devin Meares
Introduction
Ever wish you had a magic wand to make managing a project, juggling tasks, and directing team members a smoother process? Meet Miro, your new best friend in product management. Miro is a virtual white-boarding tool where you can brainstorm, plan, and collaborate with your team in real time or asynchronously.
Product Managers know how crucial it is to have tools that not only organize but also ignite creativity and teamwork. In this article, we'll outline extensive practices for using Miro as your secret weapon in tackling short and long term engagements like a pro, making your life easier and your projects more successful.
What is Miro?
At its core, Miro is an infinite whiteboard for virtual collaboration in real time. Your entire distributed team can be in a board together to follow along with a presentation, jam on some work, or attend an interactive workshop. Miro’s toolbox includes sticky notes, shapes, text inputs, stickers, image uploads, and a robust App library that expands your options and creativity tenfold. The tool really shines because of the slew of helpful features like comment threads, voting sessions, timers, music tracks, and emoji reactions that make work sessions highly productive and interactive.
While it beautifully supports synchronous work for meetings or calls, we use it just as often for asynchronous work between team members. It’s flexible for conceptualization, planning, mind mapping, content sharing, and more. The Miro team has succeeded in making the product versatile while maintaining a clean and user-friendly interface.
What aspects of product management work is it best-suited for?
Miro’s use cases are as infinite as the canvas itself. Whether it’s meeting agendas, ice breaker exercises, collaborative workshops, or backlog management, Miro can support your work with their limitless toolbox and customization options.
Here are some of the types of work we utilize Miro for, along with templates from the Miroverse to get you inspired:
- Meetings
- Planning
- Problem solving
Crema is an official partner of Miro, which means that we have a handful of tried and true templates available for download in the Miroverse. Not to mention they’re totally free. You can find them on our Miro Experts page.
PM-friendly frameworks and workflows
Miro is an excellent tool for product management, offering versatile functionalities that cater to various frameworks and workflows. Not to mention a vast array of templates to use. Here's how you can leverage Miro for some of the most essential product management frameworks:
- Design Sprints
- With Miro, teams are able to have real-time collaboration within a design sprint both virtually and in person. Miro allows teams to brainstorm, sketch, and iterate on solutions regardless of location. Using Miro’s sticky notes, drawing tools, and frameworks allows teams to visualize ideas and feedback quickly. Miro also integrates with other tools like Slack and Jira, enhancing workflow efficiency and communication.
- User Journey Mapping
- User journey mapping in Miro allows for a more dynamic and interactive session enabling the team to make easy adjustments and annotations as user insights evolve. Teams can even integrate personas directly into the journey map to maintain a user-centered focus while also using charts and diagrams to represent data points and user feedback, thus enhancing the map’s depth and clarity.
- User Personas
- Teams are able to leverage Miro’s persona templates to quickly create and customize personas. They can even incorporate images, videos, and other rich media to create vivid and realistic personas. With collaboration, teams are able to collectively gather data and evolve their personas, and then connect them to journey maps, wireframes, and other assets within Miro for a more cohesive workflow.
- Architecture Mapping / ERDs (Entity-Relationship Diagrams)
- Miro offers templates for various architectural diagrams and ERDs, making it easy to start. Teams can use Miro’s customizable shapes and connectors to accurately represent system components and data relationships and make annotations and suggestions directly to the diagrams. Diagrams can be easily exported in various formats for integration into reports or presentations so teams can share them more broadly with the organization.
Managing tasks and timelines in Miro
**Traditional product management tools** like Jira are still indispensable, but Miro can be leveraged for many, if not all, functions that a traditional PdM tool would provide. If you are looking to use Miro as your primary product management tool, here are some tips and tricks for creating tickets inside Miro or integrating tasks from an existing tool.
Miro tasks:
Miro cards look and feel just like a user story, task, or ticket in your standard PdM tool. To get started, add your task’s title then expand the card to add a description, status, assignee, due date, or tags. The Miro cards you’ve created are perfect for sorting into a prioritized backlog, a Kanban board and roadmap.
💡We recommend enabling your preferred Miro notifications to ensure you and your team members are aware of future board updates. My favorite is the Slack integration.
Integrating tasks from existing tools:
Integrating Jira allows you to work with and update cards directly in Miro. Just like Miro cards, this integration can support your backlog prioritization, sprint planning or roadmapping efforts.
💡To ensure your board is not overloaded with Jira cards, we recommend authorizing access to a single Jira project and selectively adding Jira cards as needed. You may add specific Jira tickets by selecting the desired issues in the integration setup or by copy and pasting ticket URLs directly from Jira into Miro. Miro will automatically convert those URLs into Jira cards!
Don’t go Miro crazy!
Although Miro is a tool that all product managers should have in their back pocket, there are times when it can do more harm than good. It’s important to remember that Miro is a hammer, but not everything is a nail. Here are a few reasons you should keep Miro on the sideline.
Miro is robust, but can be complicated and clunky to use.
Miro's got so many bells and whistles that it's easy to get tangled up in all the options, especially if you're running a small project or team. You might find yourself spending more time customizing than actually getting stuff done!
The user learning curve hump is real.
Miro is pretty user-friendly, but there's still a learning curve. If your team's already attached to another similar tool, switching to Miro could feel like trying to teach an old dog new tricks. It's gonna take some time and patience to get everyone up to speed.
Miro integrates with nearly everything, but it might do more harm than good.
When you've got your favorite task tracker, chat app, and file-sharing tool already in play, integrating Miro with all of them might feel like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It could end up causing more confusion than collaboration.
Task management isn’t Miro’s forte.
Miro's great for brainstorming and visualizing ideas, but when it comes to hardcore task management, it's a bit like bringing a butter knife to a sword fight. If your team needs robust task tracking, resource juggling, or fancy Gantt charts, you might find Miro coming up short.
Security is not Miro’s first priority.
Miro says it's got your back when it comes to security, but some organizations need more than just the basic service. If you're dealing with super-sensitive info or swimming in a sea of regulations, Miro might not be able to meet all your security demands.
Money talks, and Miro has a lot to say.
Depending on how big your team is and what you need, Miro's pricing could leave you with sticker shock. Paying top dollar for premium features might not be worth it if you're watching every penny.
