Miro

Nailing Jell-O to a wall. Playing telephone…

You’ve probably heard these sayings before. But if you’ve ever been tasked with leading stakeholder management for a project, you know those phrases are more than just funny idioms — in most cases, they adequately describe the headache-inducing process of managing your stakeholders.

What exactly is stakeholder management?

Before you can grasp what stakeholder management is, you first need to understand the meaning of “stakeholder.” It’s a buzzword that gets thrown a lot and likely inspires visions of stuffy boardrooms and high-stress corporate environments. In reality, a stakeholder is simply anyone who has an investment, share, or interest in your project. In other words, they “hold” a “stake” in what you’re working on.

That could mean someone who’s actively involved in working on the project as well as anyone who could be impacted by the outcome of the project. Your stakeholders can be employees, leaders, investors, customers, board members, vendors… you get the idea.

So, your stakeholders are all of the people who have a vested interest or involvement in your work. That means stakeholder management is the process of identifying those people, keeping them adequately informed, and maintaining solid, trusting relationships with them.

High stakes of stakeholder management: Why it’s important

Needless to say, it’s easier said than done — particularly when stakeholder management is only one of your responsibilities (there’s still the actual project work itself, after all). Yet, prioritizing effective stakeholder management offers several compelling benefits:

• COLLABORATE MORE EFFECTIVELY: While a stakeholder might sound passive, they’re not always on the sidelines. Many times, you’ll need their active involvement or contribution — whether you need resources from another department head or insight from a company adviser. It’s far easier to get that when people already feel informed and engaged.
• BUILD STRONGER RELATIONSHIPS: Project success doesn’t hinge on processes and protocols — it depends on people. When you focus on establishing and maintaining strong bonds with the people who are closely tied to your work, you forge connections that benefit not only this specific project but also your future career.
• MITIGATE CONFLICTS: Projects usually involve a lot of different personalities and communication styles, which means they’re no stranger to conflict and finger pointing. Unsurprisingly, poor communication is the number one cause of conflict. So, the more successful you are at keeping your stakeholders in the loop, the less rocky the road will be.
• BENEFIT FROM MORE BRAIN POWER: Your stakeholders aren’t a burden — they’re a resource. They all have their own unique experiences and strengths that can be an asset to your project, provided you’re able to leverage them. When you effectively involve, engage, and manage your stakeholders, you’re in a better position to get their most helpful advice and guidance as they’re already up-to-date on your project.

Solid relationships, smoother collaboration, less conflict, and diverse perspectives are all wrapped up in the biggest advantage of successful stakeholder management: improved performance.

With the right stakeholder management strategy, you can spend less energy acting as a go-between or a mediator and more energy on what matters most: the actual project.

3-step framework for effective stakeholder management

Stakeholder management is important, but it’s also…well, hard. It often means juggling different priorities, perceptions, communication styles, preferences, levels of involvement, and even timezones — it’s enough to make any project manager break into a sweat.

We won’t sugarcoat it: stakeholder management is complicated. But this three-step framework helps simplify the process in a way that feels more doable.

1. Identify your stakeholders

Should I include this person on this email? I’ll copy them just in case. I’ll invite everybody to this meeting and see who shows up. I’ll just let this person know once the project is done.

Sound familiar? It’s easy to take a slapdash or best-guess approach to stakeholder management, particularly if you skip the crucial yet often overlooked first step: identifying your stakeholders.

Sure, this likely begins with a list of names — you need to determine all of the people who should be kept informed about your project progress. But simply creating a roster isn’t enough. One person on that list might be elbow-deep in the project and have to attend every meeting while another might only need a monthly update.

That’s why you need to dig deeper when identifying your stakeholders to not only understand who they are but where they fit in. There are several helpful stakeholder mapping tools you can use to do this:

• STAKEHOLDER MAP TEMPLATE: Identify all of your stakeholders and then categorize them based on who’s part of the core team, who’s involved, and who needs to be kept informed.
• STAKEHOLDER RACI MAP TEMPLATE: Similarly to the above, this map sorts your stakeholders — but this one uses their level of responsibility as opposed to their level of involvement. You’ll sort them into separate rings to figure out who’s responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed.

In short, it’s not enough to know the names of your stakeholders — you also need to understand their roles in your project.

2. Prioritize your stakeholders

Stakeholders are all different. That’s ultimately what makes them beneficial, but also challenging to manage.

Some might be your biggest advocates and cheerleaders. They’re ready and raring to champion your project. Others might be skeptical or even aggravated by your need for their involvement. And then there are plenty in between those two extremes.

Once you know who your stakeholders are and how they fit into your project team, it’s time to do something that feels maybe a little counterintuitive: determine who deserves most of your attention.

This might feel like playing favorites, but any sort of solid strategy is one that recognizes you can’t do everything at once. Prioritizing your stakeholders means you’re able to analyze which ones have the most influence and potentially the highest impact on your project. Those are the ones that warrant the majority of your focus.

This stakeholder management template is a helpful tool for doing this sort of stakeholder analysis in a logical and orderly way. With this matrix, you sort your stakeholders into the following quadrants:

• LOW INFLUENCE, CHAMPION: Excited about your project but don’t have a lot of influence
• HIGH INFLUENCE, CHAMPION: Excited about your project and have a lot of influence
• LOW INFLUENCE, DETRACTOR: Skeptical about your project but don’t have a lot of influence
• HIGH INFLUENCE, DETRACTOR: Skeptical about your project and have a lot of influence

When you have them sorted, you’re better equipped to take action in a strategic way. Generally, here’s how your prioritization shakes out:

• LOW INFLUENCE, CHAMPION: Medium priority
• HIGH INFLUENCE, CHAMPION: Highest priority
• LOW INFLUENCE, DETRACTOR: Lowest priority
• HIGH INFLUENCE, DETRACTOR: High priority

Particularly when you feel spread thin, having a resource that helps you understand where your stakeholders “rank” will help you focus your efforts on the people that are the most meaningful to your project’s success.

Try this Stakeholder Management template

3. Create a stakeholder strategy

Now it’s time to actually get into the management of your stakeholders — most of which hinges on your stakeholder communications plan. This is your blueprint for how you’ll actually keep your stakeholders informed and in the loop.

How you choose to approach this is up to you. You could create a plan for each of the “categories” you identified in the previous step. For example, establish a communications strategy for “high influence, champion” stakeholders that’s separate from the one you use for detractors.

Regardless of how you choose to break this up, your communications plan should detail things like:

• FREQUENCY: How often will you communicate with these stakeholders?
• METHODS: What communication channels will you use to communicate with these stakeholders?
• OWNER: Who is responsible for communicating with these stakeholders?

Some of these things can shift as you learn more about your stakeholders and their unique preferences. For example, some stakeholders might prefer email over Zoom meetings or another might let you know that they don’t need the weekly recaps and a monthly update would suffice.

While accommodating those individual requests is helpful for keeping stakeholders happy, be mindful that you don’t agree to so many specialized demands that communicating with stakeholders becomes unmanageable. You don’t want every single conversation to have to be highly-individualized.

Similarly, as you iron out your stakeholder communications plan, it can also be helpful to establish some communication rituals that you’ll stick with. These are recurring, predictable practices you’ll use to keep stakeholders informed, such as:

• Daily team meetings
• Weekly recap emails
• Monthly summaries

Not every stakeholder will need to be involved in every ritual. But establishing some of these communication conventions can be a great way to reliably communicate with a lot of stakeholders — without needing to have dozens of individualized conversations.

3 (more) practical stakeholder management tips

The above framework will help you tackle stakeholder management in a less daunting way, but here are three more tips to manage your stakeholders with more strategy and less stress.

1. Align your goals

Stakeholders don’t only have lofty ambitions — they often have competing ones. You’ve likely experienced it before. For example, one person wants it done perfectly and another wants it done fast.

It’s tough to keep your project moving forward if everybody’s running in eight different directions, which is why it’s so important to ensure everybody is aligned on the project’s goal and success metrics.

You can use objectives and key results (OKRs) to ensure all of your stakeholders are on the same page about where the project is headed (and how you’ll know when you get there).

Try the OKR template in Miro

2. Create a single source of truth

Silos are another cause of rifts among stakeholders and project team members. It’s hard for them to see the forest when their faces are smashed against a tree. And sometimes they might be dealing with outdated or even inaccurate information.

That’s why it’s little surprise that research shows transparency is a crucial part of stakeholder management. One of the best ways to give your stakeholders a high level of visibility is to create a single, centralized source of truth for your project.

This could be something as simple as a weekly update email, a shared Google Doc, or a Miro board where you track progress and provide updates. It ensures everybody is getting the same overview and also gives stakeholders a stronger sense of ownership and involvement in the project.

3. Focus on trust

One of the best ways to maintain strong stakeholder relationships actually applies to any type of relationship: do what you say you’re going to do.

That might sound deceptively simple, but trust is crucial for stakeholder relationships and business performance. And your stakeholders can’t trust you if you’re repeatedly shirking responsibility and bailing on agreed-upon expectations.

Trust also breeds a high degree of psychological safety on your team and amongst your stakeholders, which means people will be more comfortable bringing information to you. Whether they’ve spotted a potential project risk or experienced someone trying to deviate from the project plan, trust means that all of your stakeholders will feel empowered to openly communicate with you.

Make no mistake(holder)

When it comes to planning and overseeing projects, stakeholder management often doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Many make the mistake of assuming it’s something that will just naturally happen as the work progresses — everybody will figure it out.

But it’s never too long before you have a mess on your hands and confusion, competing interests, and conflicts abound.

Much like your project itself, your approach to stakeholder management deserves some careful thought, strategy, and planning. Put the above framework and tips to work and you’ll handle stakeholder management in a way that hopefully feels a little less like herding cats and a little more like leading ducks.

Stakeholder management checklist

Stakeholder management isn’t a one-and-done activity — it’s a priority that extends through your entire project (and even after your project crosses the finish line).

Feeling overwhelmed? This quick checklist breaks down what to do with your stakeholders at each stage of your project.

PLANNING THE PROJECT:

• Identify your stakeholders
• Use a stakeholder map to understand your stakeholders’ roles
• Prioritize your stakeholders
• Create your stakeholder communications plan
• Establish your communication rituals

EXECUTING THE PROJECT:

• Create a single source of truth for your stakeholders
• Align stakeholders on your project goal and communication rituals
• Fulfill your promises to maintain trust with stakeholders
• Carry out your communications plan
• Check in frequently, particularly with high-impact stakeholders

WRAPPING UP THE PROJECT:

• Share final deliverables with stakeholders
• Communicate results and metrics to stakeholders
• Ask stakeholders for feedback
• Identify improvements for the next time you manage stakeholders

COLLABORATE AND INNOVATE WITH MIRO’S ONLINE WORKSPACE — LEARN MORE!

In July we released a host of updates to help you and your teams innovate from one visual workspace. This includes new product development features, dashboard user interface improvements, and a new way to connect Miro across your Google Workspace.

We’ve also made a number of enhancements to accessibility such as the ability to add alt text to images and color contrast enhancements for improved visibility.

Keep reading to get all the details!

Product development workflows for faster time-to-market

Enjoy greater flexibility and control in your PI planning

Now, product development teams can take advantage of increased flexibility and control with alternative fields as columns on a Program board. This includes status, fix version, component, and priority. In addition, we’ve updated the Dependencies app so you can visualize dependencies linked to a specific Jira card, reducing the mess created by overlapping dependencies.

Apps & integrations to unite your work

Boost collaboration with Miro smart chip for Google Docs    

Add Miro to your Google Docs. With smart chips, you can grab a Miro link and embed the board right into your doc, making it easy to collaborate in Miro without leaving your document. This means you can view details, request access, and save time when working across Miro and Google Workspace tools. Add Miro to Google Workspace today.

Reimagine video in Miro with all-in-one Video Clipper app

Imagine that after weeks of recording video you have an app that can upload, transcribe, and instantly create clips of the videos in one place — with just a few clicks. Say goodbye to hours wasted editing videos or searching for the moments you’re looking for. A must-have for user interviews, recorded meetings, and video-inclusive brainstorming, now you can gain insights from videos without leaving Miro, with the Video Clipper app. 

Ready-made templates help support innovation 

In the past month, our talented Miro users created over 100 new Miroverse templates to help you move toward a more connected, productive, and collaborative way of working. Explore the proven workflows, projects, and frameworks of the Miro community, or be inspired to share your own!

• Use the 20-10-10 Exercise from maad labs to take inventory of what you’re motivated by and have an easier time saying “No.”
• The Meeting Culture ReDesign template from Voltage Control helps you take an intentional look at your meeting culture and how you might redesign it.
• With 3 Effective Speech Structures from Gregory Balon at BEsmart, you can leverage three different frameworks to help you find the right structure for your next public speaking engagement. 

Showcase your accomplishments with Miro Academy badges in Miroverse

Let your accomplishments take center stage on your Miroverse profile. From creative collaboration techniques to advanced mapping and diagramming, you’ll now earn a Miro Verified badge for select Miro Academy courses. This way, others in the Miroverse can recognize your skills, expertise, and dedication to continuous learning. 

Accessibility updates support inclusivity 

Enjoy an enhanced screen reader experience in Miro

• Toolbars and objects: Thanks to our recent keyboard navigation update, toolbars and board objects — frames, sticky notes, text, emojis, tables, images, lines and curves, stickers, and documents — are more perceivable and operable for users of assistive technology such as screen readers. Plus, we’re continuously working on integrating more objects.
• Alt text for images: We’ve also made it possible to add alt text, unlocking image descriptions for screen readers and enabling users with limited sight to collaborate with images on a board.

Color design improvements for better visibility 

• Color pickers with text description: Color pickers now provide a text description of the chosen color, conveying color information to color-blind users and those with low or no vision. Miro standard colors include their color labels while custom colors include the hex color values.
• Improved color and sticky note palettes: Both the color and sticky note palette borders have improved color contrast, making it easier for all users to distinguish colors and elements on a Miro board.
• Custom board background colors: Based on popular demand, we’ve made it possible to change the background color of your Miro boards! Tailor your boards to your preferences, or design a dark board to reduce eye strain and enhance readability.

User interface enhancements to your dashboard 

Easily discover your recent boards 

Now you can quickly revisit the Miro boards you’re working on. Simply open the Search bar at the top of your dashboard and you’ll see up to 25 of your recently opened Miro boards. 

Find your Trash bin more easily

Get quick and direct access to your discarded boards. You can now find the trash menu in the top-left menu, alongside Recent and Starred, allowing you to effortlessly restore or permanently delete your boards as desired.

And there’s more…

These updates are just a fraction of what we’ve been working on to help make Miro the best tool for building great things. Be sure to check out our other updates if you missed them, or share your ideas on the Wish List if you have an idea to make Miro even better!

Joel Bancroft-Connors has always had a vested interest in the technology and tools organizations use to effectively collaborate. He’s a certified scrum trainer, team coach, and consultant also known as The Gorilla Coach — a nickname born from his blog featuring his expertise in Agile.

“I’m really focused on helping organizations to generate more sustainable business,” Bancroft-Connors said. “Business sustainability comes in three, what I call the ‘three p’s of business sustainability:’ people, process, profits.”

Given recent, major shifts in the ways we work, we asked Bancroft-Connors to share his insights on the biggest changes he’s seen in how teams collaborate, his best advice for large-scale collaborations, and just how he earned his memorable moniker. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us more about the “3 p’s” and the significance behind your name, “The Gorilla Coach.”

“People” means: Are we practicing sustainable practices around people? Are we creating an environment where they want to be successful? The “process” has to be repeatable as well. If you’ve got to make these exceptions and figure it out on the fly — that’s not sustainable. And “profitability” — if you are not making a profit, eventually you are not sustainable because you run out of the money.

I was actually an anti-Agilist in 2009, before I got laid off from a very cushy project management job. I realized that I had made a lot of mistakes that I didn’t want others to make. So I started blogging and I needed a device — and came up with the invisible gorilla in the room.

The gorilla is part-elephant in the room — that problem no one wants to talk about — and part 800-pound gorilla that can do whatever it wants and leave your organization wondering what just hit it. If you don’t talk about it, it’s going to result in big problems for your organization. I’ve long had a reputation of being willing to literally say, “The emperor has no clothes.” The “Gorilla in the Room” is a generic term to describe these kinds of problems.

A lot has changed about the ways we work. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in how teams collaborate with the rise of distributed work?

The good: It’s giving us more flexibility. More people have the opportunity and ability to work with more companies. It’s also helped to equalize adult education. If you wanted a scrum master certification in the past, you had to go in person. Now somebody can literally learn about it from any place in the world.

The bad: Taking it too far. People think, “Oh, well we can be remote, so our team can be completely distributed.” They went hog wild. Yes, you can really be remote — but if you don’t have certain things, you’re not going to be successful.

Communication is still the core principle in Agile. Several years ago, I wrote an article about the ideal agile team space. When the pandemic hit, I wrote a “recipe substitution.” The things to ask if you can’t have an in-person agile team space are: What do you need to do to create a successful remote team space? Do you have the right tools to be able to replicate that stuff?

What are the most successful enterprises doing to collaborate at scale today?

We’ve experienced great growth in the ability to be more flexible in how we do work, but I think it comes back to profitability, process, and people. A lot of companies can do one, some companies can do two. I don’t know very many that have been able to do all three, long term, and that’s something we’ve got to figure out. We are in a whole new paradigm.

I’ve been quoting Start with Why and Drive a lot lately. We’re in this wonderful digital revolution to be able to work in so many different ways (and we haven’t even touched on AI — let’s not). It’s enabling whole new things. But if we lose “why,” then we are no better than the machines, because we have lost our purpose. And without purpose, what are we even doing?

So the way I teach my scrum master classes now, I actually start with “why.” I explain the underlying theory of why scrum works. And then I teach how to do daily scrum. I then connect it back to that underlying theory of empiricism — this concept of transparency, inspection, adaptation, and feedback loops.

What’s your best advice for maximizing output during something like a big room planning session in a virtual setting?

In order to collaborate at scale, the first thing you’ve got to figure out is where you are today. Before you can drive to New York, you’ve got to know if you’re leaving from Austin or Seattle — that’s very much going to change the roads you’re gonna take to get there.

It’s this idea of doing the discovery phase if you want to get to large-scale collaboration. That happens before you ever get to the big room planning. And I think a place that people really miss is the retrospective.

Surveys don’t work — you don’t get good feedback on them, and it is incredibly hard to write good surveys. With a large-scale retrospective, you’re going out and you’re actually asking the individuals. The question I always use when I’m doing these large-scale retrospectives to help an organization understand what their challenges are: I ask everybody what’s impacting your ability to get your work done — positive or negative. It’s a very open-ended question that gets a huge amount of information.

There’s the need to be on camera when you are actively collaborating with people — so much of our communication is visual. There’s also this concept of “co-time zones.” My professional opinion is that two hours is about the maximum distance you can separate people on a team; even if it’s not face-to-face, they’ve at least all got to be awake and able to talk together.

The ability to move data between technologies with automation is so important because we are moving in different tech stacks. We need that recognition that we are going to use multiple tools, so how do we get them talking well together? We’ve got to stop being these walled gardens and synchronize these platforms both ways.

I also used to give this argument of why you needed in-person collaboration — it’s what I call “the power of the Post-it.” Nothing beats the absolute physical tactile ability of pulling a Post-it off, putting it on the wall, writing on it, and moving it around. That open collaboration concept is just so critical.

When March of 2020 came along, I went out and evaluated over 20 pieces of software that could capture the power of the Post-it, and it came down to Miro. I really liked the open canvas, and it had some great collaboration functions, like the voting option.

It’s the closest thing to creating the power of the Post-it in an electronic form, and in some respects, it can be better because you can dive in or zoom out. It’s very accessible and you can get people up to speed really quickly on it. I basically use Miro as my go-to remote tool for almost everything.

Thanks for sharing your insights on collaboration at scale, Joel!

YOU CAN LEARN MORE ABOUT JOEL HERE, AND READ MORE OF HIS INSIGHTS AT THE GORILLA COACH AND AGILE CONNECTION.

As more enterprise organizations embrace remote and hybrid work and bring together employees and external partners spread around the globe, they are faced with new challenges to ensure their sensitive data stays safe.

This includes data from Miro, a visual workspace for innovation that enables distributed teams of any size to build the next big thing. But with 40% of full-time employees working from home at least part of the time, there is greater risk. That means IT and security teams must find a way to ensure all of their users’ data and content stays safe. They need visibility into the activities happening within apps such as Miro: user behavior, access attempts, and any other data where anomalies could signal a threat.

At Miro, we’re committed to ensuring that enterprise admins have all the tools they need to monitor Miro user activity and quickly identify any actions that seem suspicious. That’s why we’ve partnered with Microsoft on a new integration — Defender for Cloud Apps.

“We’ve collaborated with Miro on end-user integrations that have empowered teams worldwide, and today, we take our partnership to new heights by focusing on security integrations.”

MAAYAN BAR-NIV, General Manager, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Maayan continues: “Together, by leveraging the power of Miro’s collaborative platform and integrating it seamlessly with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, we can help organizations to strengthen their security posture while maximizing productivity.”

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps is a holistic SaaS Security solution that helps organizations to safeguard their data, mitigate risks, and reinforce their overall SaaS Security posture. Defender for Cloud Apps is part of Microsoft 365 Defender, which means enterprise admins can use the same interface to gain insights into their Miro users’ activities and correlate signals across apps, identities, endpoints, email, and collaboration.

With a vision to build the leading enterprise ecosystem, we at Miro are continuing to expand our enterprise capabilities by partnering with top security and compliance vendors. While our core features delight users and enable teams to innovate across hybrid, distributed, and remote teams, we continue to design and build Miro Enterprise with IT, security, compliance, and legal teams in mind.

With this partnership, Miro has extended its integrations with leading Identity, SIEM, and XDR vendors. Whether you prefer Microsoft 365 Defender or one of our other security integrations for tools you already use, your Miro data stays safe.

Try the Defender for Cloud Apps integration today! Contact us to learn more.

Diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams. And when we say “diverse” we mean teams with different characteristics or traits, such as professional experience, life experience, identities, roles, etc.

These individual differences create diversity of thought. That might feel like an overstatement or a broad generalization, but there’s plenty of research that backs it up. Diverse groups are better at:

With such clear benefits, thought diversity offers a boost to any type of team. But on Agile teams in particular, diversity of thought isn’t just a competitive advantage — it’s non-negotiable. Here’s why.

1. Thought diversity is woven into the fabric of Agile

If you’re familiar with the Agile methodology, then you also likely know the Agile Manifesto — the document that outlines the core values and guiding principles of Agile teams. Within the manifesto, you don’t have to look far to find an emphasis on thought diversity.

In fact, the first of the four values states, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” Agile teams focus on collaboration, but they also value the individual — and doing so means valuing that individual’s unique experiences, perspectives, and ideas. That level of respect facilitates openness, new perspectives and points of view, constructive debates, and ultimately thought diversity.

You’ll find thought diversity embedded in a variety of Agile frameworks as well. Scrum, as one example, is built on five values:

• Commitment
• Courage
• Focus
• Openness
• Respect

Teams that embody and prioritize openness, respect, and courage provide welcoming, inclusive spaces that cultivate diverse opinions and ideas from all team members.

2. Thought diversity facilitates better, more considerate and informed decisions

The Agile methodology is all about flexibility and shorter iterations. You’ll find those characteristics peppered throughout the Agile Manifesto too:

• “Early and continuous delivery”
• “Welcome changing requirements”
• “Deliver working software frequently”
• “A preference to the shorter timescale”

You get the point. Agile teams need to work, learn, and act nimbly. And when they have solid diversity of thought, teams benefit from more perspectives and more ideas — and that breadth of knowledge makes it easier to make informed decisions and innovate rapidly.

3. Thought diversity benefits your customers

There’s another thing the Agile methodology emphasizes: the customer. Satisfying the customer is the core focus of any Agile team, and the first principle behind the Agile Manifesto: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

Agile teams are intensely focused on meeting customer needs. In order to do so, they first need to understand what those needs are. Customers themselves have varied experiences and perspectives. So, a diverse Agile team can more accurately comprehend and even relate to those backgrounds and viewpoints.

4 tips to cultivate thought diversity on your Agile team

Diversity of thought matters, but it also doesn’t just happen. It requires conscious effort to support and cultivate.Leaders need to foster psychological safety, strike a balance between introverts and extroverts, and combat cognitive biases like groupthink to ensure they’re truly benefitting from the diversity on their teams. Here are some tips to make that happen.

1. Try silent writing

Agile events like daily standups, retrospectives, and sprint planning sessions likely inspire visions of lots of back-and-forth and spirited conversations. But trying something different may help you better support thought diversity.

Try practicing silent writing or (or creating silence in a meeting) when you’re brainstorming and/or collecting data as a team. It gives space for all ideas to be heard — rather than the loudest voices only.

Plus, research shows that brainwriting (brainstorming ideas in writing as a group) generates more innovative ideas than the traditional approach. You can use a Miro board to do brainwriting with your team — whether remote, hybrid, or in-person — without any friction or frustration.

2. Use voting to capture opinions and democratize decision making

Some people on the team might not feel comfortable openly voicing their opinions. Collecting votes (it’s easy to do in Miro) is efficient, and it also gives more reserved team members an opportunity to share their perspectives without the pressure of feeling like they need to build a case. And it ensures you can democratize decision making by allowing everyone to cast their vote.

Be aware that Agile’s emphasis on quick decision-making often defaults to the majority — which means less-heard voices can still be forgotten or overshadowed.

Try using votes as your starting point and facilitate an open discussion about the results from there. You’ll get the benefit of taking a pulse of the team, while also providing an opening for the less-popular options to surface, receive acknowledgement, and spark a conversation.

3. Provide a little safety

Teams with a high degree of psychological safety might not feel like they need. But even so, a little bit of privacy and protection can still give people a confidence boost to share their biggest and boldest ideas during retrospectives, sprint planning sessions, or other Agile meetings.

Private mode in Miro offers a sweet spot between total namelessness and the potential stress of contributing in real-time. With private mode, nobody can see what you’re writing on the board as you’re doing it, though they can see you participating (so everyone feels involved). But as soon as private mode is turned off, everybody’s ideas become visible.

This feature ensures all team members feel comfortable jotting down their thoughts in the moment and can also help to reduce group bias since people are brainstorming without reading each others thoughts

4. Practice amplifying ideas

When there’s so much to discuss during meetings and group conversations, ideas — yes, even good ones — can be easily dismissed, overlooked, or forgotten.

Research shows there’s a helpful way around this: amplifying ideas. Team members should practice calling attention to other people’s contributions, while also providing credit.

All ideas get adequate attention and consideration—which is important for facilitating thought diveristy. Plus, both group members — the original contributor of the idea as well as the person amplifying it — benefit from boosted status within the group.

Fuel innovation and creativity with thought diversity

When it comes to decision-making and innovation, the data doesn’t lie: diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones.

And on Agile teams — where collaboration and the ability to learn and work quickly reign supreme — thought diversity isn’t just nice, it’s necessary. It’s ingrained in the Agile methodology.

However, diversity of thought doesn’t just happen by putting people with different backgrounds and experiences in the same room or on the same team. It’s up to leaders to provide the right environment where everybody feels comfortable chiming in. That’s when the real magic happens.

Learn more about Miro, the ultimate online workspace for Agile teams.

I’ve built my 20-plus-year career through continuous learning. I’m intensely curious about people and technology, and the way people experience technology and the world around them. This curiosity has fueled a learner’s mindset that urges me to always want to know what’s next.

So, needless to say, I was fascinated to discover data from Miro’s new Soft Skills Report showing that an overwhelming 97% of knowledge workers today agree that learning a new skill can help them “recession-proof” their jobs, with 89% planning to learn a new skill this year. Reskilling and upskilling is also a popular topic among the enterprise leaders with whom I engage on a daily basis.

The truth is that this period of economic uncertainty isn’t the only reason that skill development is top-of-mind for employers and employees alike. Paired with the pandemic, today’s macroeconomic environment simply amplified a workplace trend that has long been building: The super specialized, technical skills we’ve focused on developing in recent decades won’t continue to serve us nor our organizations well going forward. Rather, cultivating human skills — including relationship building, empathy, creativity, and adaptability — will be essential for keeping up with the already rapid pace of change that new technologies continue to accelerate.

And yet, as important as it is to understand what skills we need to learn, how we learn these skills is the differentiator between passive understanding and active application that drives productivity and business growth. In order to create an adaptable, future-ready workforce, organizations must approach learning and development (L&D) in new ways. Let’s dive deeper into four steps leaders can take to evolve their L&D strategy and ensure the right skills for their people in the future.

1. Recognize L&D as a strategic priority

One of the primary reasons for organizations’ lack of investment in L&D is that it gets lost among HR’s ever-growing list of responsibilities. Not only do these priorities compete for resources (money and time) — some also have conflicting goals. For example, policies focused on regulatory compliance and risk mitigation are often at odds with programs designed to foster employee well-being.

One potential solution is to elevate your L&D leadership into C-suite conversations — treating L&D as a key component of your organization’s talent strategy and differentiating it from HR functions. Slalom does this by creating strong business alignment to key value streams. This year, Slalom prioritized L&D as a top initiative for our people, embedding it into our customer engagement, consulting delivery, and technology strategies.

L&D remains under the HR umbrella with Miro, but leaders have likewise threaded it throughout the company’s culture in the form of one of its core values: “learn, grow, and drive change.” During the hiring process for any role, the values interview is key to not only identifying people who can adapt to and iterate within today’s ever-evolving world of work, but also to growing a workforce that is bought into the company’s learning environment from the outset.

Whether you lead a consulting firm, a SaaS startup, or any other organization, your people are your most valuable asset, and investing in their development is a strategic imperative.

2. Facilitate opportunities for collaborative learning

Buying into L&D as a strategic priority means much more than growing the library of self-serve trainings that you require your employees to complete throughout the year. These rote readings and videos are designed for self-learners, neglecting those who learn best by doing or working alongside others. To foster a more effective and inclusive learning environment, introduce programs and tools that forge connections between colleagues and facilitate on-the-job training.

For example, at Slalom we offer opportunities for junior-level employees to shadow senior leaders, with whom they meet regularly to discuss their growth goals. Leaders enable their “shadow” to sit in on client engagements and spend time debriefing on learnings from those conversations. There’s no requirement to participate, so it tends to be self-directed and attracts people who are dedicated to their own development, of course, but also to helping others progress. The dynamic in these pairings goes beyond that of a typical “mentor” and “mentee” — the insights flow in both directions, fostering a collaborative learning environment that encourages co-creation and growth.

“The majority of learning happens while trying, experimenting, succeeding and failing, and learning from experts. The more we can learn on the job from others, the better and faster our people grow and develop.”

KEITH HILDESHEIM, Sr. Director, People Experience & Talent Management at Slalom

The program’s fluid structure also facilitates ongoing learning — the pairs can continue to collaborate, whether or not they’re consistently in the same office. Such flexible learning is possible, in large part, to tools that encourage transparency and collaboration. In fact, my co-author, Bram, and I discussed how being a co-creator on or simply included in a Miro board facilitates our on-the-job learning. We see ideas grow in the form of our collaborators’ sticky notes, Talktrack recordings, and other contributions and, in the process, gain insight into how they frame problems, tackle challenges, celebrate wins, and more. We can then adopt, adapt, and apply these learnings to the ways that we approach our own projects.

In this way, L&D has progressed from a largely solo, rather static experience into a collaborative exercise. Seeing people work and grow together in online workspaces motivates others to participate, creating a positive feedback loop that, in turn, pulls in additional contributors eager to learn and share their learnings.

3. Create a continuous learning environment

Evolving the continuous learning loops described above into a full-fledged continuous learning environment requires leaders to realize the importance of and invest in their own learning and development. This often isn’t as simple and straightforward as it sounds, given that many leaders rise to such high levels based on what they know. That said, there are a few steps that you can take to recast yourself as a learner and leader.

First, organizations can create structures that facilitate dialogue among leaders about trends shaping their teams, businesses, and industries. To this end, Slalom strives to break down geographic silos by bringing together leaders who do similar types of work across the firm to share what’s working and what’s not in their specific markets. Leaders and practitioners meet virtually or in-person monthly to share stories, successes and best practices, as well as problem solve together. Miro, meanwhile, coordinates community groups — including Miro Consultants and Miro Enterprise Advocates — to foster connections between leaders across companies and industries.

While leaders are often already well trained on the hard skills and technologies specific to their business areas, everyone can benefit from formal leadership training on how to grow themselves and their teams. Organizations may offer access to peer / professional coaching and group workshops to help managers keep these soft skills fresh, or they may opt to provide leaders with resources to seek out such trainings themselves.

By embracing a learning mindset, you open yourself up to new possibilities that allow you to think beyond the world of work as it is today and envision what it, and your company, could become. Investing in your own development, alongside that of your workforce, is akin to investing in your company’s ability to adapt to and innovate in the ever-changing, fast-moving future of work.

4. Adopt an AI-powered approach to L&D

The recent ubiquity of generative AI technology has made many leaders feel like the future is now. And, when it comes to learning and development, it is.

Though AI cannot wholly replace the human capabilities on which modern workplaces run, there are several ways that AI can streamline skill development:

• By processing data from performance reviews on delivery quality and volume, for example, AI can identify high-performers and where they sit within an organization — in addition to uncovering skills gaps.
• It can also generate a snapshot of the organization’s current L&D landscape, tracking trends in how people are currently learning and uncovering opportunities for new types of trainings.
• AI can match coaches and mentees based on shared experiences and interests, as well as connect learners with relevant educational material in real-time.

You can then turn these AI outputs, which are valuable in their own right, into truly transformative outcomes for your organization by leveraging them to devise a scalable strategy for re- and up-skilling your existing workforce. At Slalom, we take a fiercely human approach with our learning ecosystem — leveraging emerging technologies to develop lifelong learning behaviors, critical thinking, and mental agility.

Far from being the shortcut it’s often perceived as, AI is a solution that leaders can leverage to scale L&D across their organizations. And, on an individual level, the ideas it generates can enrich and strengthen people’s critical thinking by requiring users to determine the accuracy and relevancy of its output. In these ways, AI serves as a multi-purpose teacher and tool.

READ MORE: TALENT STRATEGY IN THE AGE OF AI

Investing in L&D now can yield dividends in the future

There’s no doubt that learning and development is a pivotal pillar of a company’s talent strategy — investing in the re- and up-skilling of your workforce makes for more creative, productive, and satisfied employees. In fact, LinkedIn’s new Global Talent Trends report shows that companies whose employees learn skills on the job see a 7% higher retention rate at the three-year mark.

What’s more, L&D is increasingly critical to a successful business strategy. Investing in the upskilling of our early career consultants and continuous learning of all our consultants through in-house L&D programs, hands-on learning experiences, and external certifications and coursework enables Slalom to (typically) double our impact in sales and client delivery.

Supercharge your own organization’s ability to adapt, grow, and pivot as new technologies emerge and the workforce evolves with L&D.

FROM HOW WE LEARN, TO WHAT WE LEARN — READ MIRO’S SOFT SKILLS REPORT.

Hybrid PI planning presents interesting challenges both in terms of facilitation techniques and the tools we use to collaborate. As an Agile Coach and Release Train Engineer (RTE), I have facilitated remote and hybrid PI planning events over the last 3+ years. Let’s get into it!

What is hybrid PI planning?

PI planning is a two-day, cadenced-based planning event (typically held every ten weeks) for an ART (Agile Release Train) to align on objectives and create a collective plan for the upcoming Planning Interval. Although the terminology can vary, there are essentially four types or contexts for PI planning.

• IN-PERSON PI PLANNING: This is simply when everyone is at the same, single location (collocated). PI planning is done face-to-face in “a big room” using physical tools. This was the most common format for PI planning before COVID-19.
• PARTIALLY DISTRIBUTED PI PLANNING: This is when teams are collocated together but are distributed from other teams on the ART (Agile Release Train). This scenario occurs when teams are based in different countries or states, and it is impractical for them to travel for the event. In partially distributed events the ART is spread across a few shared office locations, usually with a facilitator at each.
• FULLY REMOTE/VIRTUAL PI PLANNING: All participants join remotely from their individual locations. Remote tools are used exclusively. This became a necessary format for most organizations during COVID-19.
• HYBRID PI PLANNING: Some participants work from a single, primary, shared location, while others join virtually from their individual locations. Unlike partially distributed planning, teams may consist of a mix of in-person and virtual participants, and attendees may be joining from 100+ locations rather than several. The event needs to be mindfully facilitated to accommodate both types of participants.

The challenges and considerations of a hybrid PI planning event

Hybrid PI planning is a challenge for several reasons. Firstly, it requires large-scale facilitation to reveal the diverse viewpoints and collective wisdom of the group. Additionally, there are two types of participants: (1) in-person participants, and (2) remote participants, that you need to design the event for.

Therefore, when planning your hybrid event you need to consider how to facilitate large-group dialogue, and how to create a shared experience that does not privilege one group (in-person or remote) over the other. In my experience, most hybrid meetings tend to be optimized for in-person attendees by default.

Benefits of running PI planning in a hybrid setting

Fundamentally, large-scale hybrid events are simply part of a broader shift to hybrid working arrangements, which offer employees increased flexibility and autonomy, reduce travel time and cost, and allow recruitment from a larger geographical area.

The benefit of running PI planning events in the hybrid setting is it creates a recurring opportunity (typically every 10 weeks) for members of your ART to meet face-to-face if they so choose. Feedback from our in-person attendees has been that they enjoy the social aspect and team-bonding opportunities that this creates, particularly for out-of-town employees who might not regularly see their teammates otherwise.

In addition to helping build a strong social network and offering employees autonomy, at its heart, the PI planning event is about engaging the teams fully in the planning process. The hybrid format should support this by giving everyone on the ART an equal voice regardless of their physical location.

Logistics: How to prepare for hybrid PI planning

Scaled Agile identifies three areas major areas of preparation for successful PI planning.

• ORGANIZATIONAL READINESS is predominantly about the business aligning priorities and ensuring that the critical ART roles are filled.
• CONTENT READINESS is concerned with providing the vision and context as inputs to PI planning.
• LOGISTIC READINESS refers to locations, technology and tooling, and communication channels.

Hybrid events require you to reconsider logistic readiness

You need to totally rethink…

• Location
• Equipment
• Communication channels
• Collaboration tools

Location

Your first consideration needs to be the location or venue. In-person PI planning events typically take place in a single ‘big room’ (hence the popular term “Big Room Planning”).

Hybrid PI planning events require (1) a big room for the sessions that involve the entire ART, and (2) individual breakout rooms for the groups to use during their team planning sessions. It is not practical for multiple hybrid teams to share a big room, as it is not possible to isolate the sound from other teams or share screens effectively. You also should ensure that your location has a high-quality internet connection in all of the rooms.

AV equipment

AV equipment includes devices that provide sound and audio, such as projectors or large screens, microphones, speakers, etc. In the big room, you need a large screen that all the in-person participants can clearly see.

You need an audio setup that ensures that your remote participants can hear everything that is said in the room (not just the facilitator). Your in-person participants also need to be able to hear your virtual participants, so you will need some speakers to make sure they are audible.

In your breakout rooms, you will require video conferencing equipment so that your teams are able to collaborate on their plans with remote counterparts.

Communication channels

It is likely that you already have some kind of communication platform for video calls, messaging, etc. I recommend using this to create a channel for the PI planning event with all of the attendees. You can use this to manage the invites and share any important information before, during, and after the event.

Collaboration tools

PI planning events typically utilize physical or digital whiteboards, depending on the setting. For hybrid events, you should use digital tools that everyone has read and write access to. If people are new to the tools you should schedule a training or tutorial session before the event.

For hybrid PI planning, I prefer primarily using a digital workspace over workflow management tools, as you can customize a digital board however you see fit, and there are no limitations to what you can include or exclude.

• We use Miro as our main collaboration tool during PI planning. Team members already have access to it and are familiar with the functionality, as they use it in their own team meetings.
• We use Azure Cards to integrate with Azure DevOps, and the two-way sync reduces the need for switching between tools and the risk of errors.
• Whole-team estimation is essential to PI planning, so our teams use the Estimation and Voting apps to facilitate collaborative conversations and gain group consensus.

It is important that PI planning is fully transparent across the organization and not just for the Technology and Product departments. Our stakeholders have found Miro to be intuitive, and we are able to set appropriate board permissions. Most importantly Miro has proved to be consistently reliable and easy to use. I have collaborated with Miro to create a custom Miroverse template specifically for hybrid PI Planning events that you can use. 

Try my Hybrid PI Planning Board template in Miro

There is certainly a lot to consider regarding hybrid logistics, but in my experience, the three most important logistical elements of collaborative hybrid events are:

• A CONSISTENT INTERNET CONNECTION – If this is choppy people will miss important information and find the event frustrating.
• HIGH-QUALITY, BI-DIRECTIONAL AUDIO – Video and screen sharing are very important but the audio is absolutely critical to hosting an inclusive hybrid event.
• COLLABORATIVE TOOLS – If you want your whole team to collaborate you need to provide tools that everyone can use. It’s never a truly collaborative experience if somebody else needs to edit a board or item for you.

How to facilitate hybrid PI planning

Facilitating in a large-group setting with an entire ART can be challenging. It is important to find multiple ways for your participants to be heard, as most people are not naturally comfortable speaking in very large groups. Additionally, time is a factor, as it is simply not possible to hear from 125+ people individually, so you need to be creative.

5 tips for successfully facilitating hybrid PI planning

1. Consider the experience you are not having

If you are the main facilitator (RTE) for hybrid PI planning it is most likely that you are attending in person. If this is the case try to frequently consider what the event is like from the perspective of the online participants.

2. Gather feedback and iteratively improve

It is particularly important during your first hybrid PI planning events that you gather feedback. I recommend that you do this throughout the event, not just at the end. Requesting feedback can be as quick and simple as asking questions like “Can everyone online see this okay?” or “Were you all able to hear that question?”

3. Expect the unexpected

During these events, unexpected things can and do happen (equipment failures, unplanned absences, etc.). While it is prudent to have some contingency plans, know that sometimes things will occur which are beyond your control and it’s important to simply do your best to prevent disruption.

4. Support your teams

PI planning is all about the teams, so make sure you support them. Communicate clearly about what to expect, and help them to prepare as best they can. During the event make sure that they know where to go for help if needed.

I recommend introducing any facilitators and tech/logistics support at the start of the event. The PI planning Coach Sync, which occurs at regular intervals throughout the planning event, is another great opportunity to offer support for your Scrum Masters/Team Coaches and Product Owners.

5. Enjoy yourselves

Although PI planning is undoubtedly hard work, for me one of the best things about it is the sense of community and coming together collectively as a team of teams. Try to build in some time for social activities, even if it is as simple as providing lunch or scheduling coffee breaks. If possible look at ways to make these activities inclusive, this could mean arranging food deliveries or hosting social breakout sessions online.

Learn more about Miro for Hybrid Work

Suggestions for facilitating inclusivity

TIP #1: Have a working agreement that outlines how you will facilitate the event and what you collectively expect from each other. A working agreement is essentially a guideline defining how a group wants to work together. Therefore, try to write and review this agreement collaboratively.

Example agreements:

• We will value in-person and online participants equally
• We will acknowledge every comment in the chat
• If you raise your hand you will get an opportunity to speak next
• Cameras on is invitational but encouraged
• We will stick to our timeboxes

TIP #2: Use group polls, word clouds, surveys with free-text fields, silent writing exercises, etc, to get input from the entire group.

TIP #3: Leave extra long pauses after asking if anyone has any questions or feedback. There is often some hesitation to speak in a large-group setting (shyness and/or a reluctance to risk talking over others), so it is important to give people a real opportunity to speak.

TIP #4: Consider what both groups (in-person and remote) can see. Ideally, they should both be able to see (1) the screen share, (2) the meeting chat, and (3) the video of the other participants. This is absolutely vital in bringing the two sub-groups together.

TIP #5: If you are facilitating in person, consider having a remote co-facilitator (or vice versa). They will help ensure the remote experience is smooth and you can troubleshoot tech issues.

TIP #6: Facilitating the team breakout sessions is comparatively more straightforward. This is typically done by Scrum Masters/Team Coaches.

Things to remember…

• Use digital tools.
• Use timers and set frequent breaks. PI Planning can be an intense and tiring experience, don’t burn yourself and your team out. Try to encourage screen breaks and healthy snacking, it makes a big difference!
• Have a working agreement for the team. This is a good idea for any long-lived team, not just for PI Planning or hybrid events.
• Remind the in-person group to involve their remote teammates if the conversation is becoming one-sided (or if the reverse is happening).

What to do if something goes wrong

The most common question that I am asked about hybrid PI Planning is “What would I do if I had a tech failure? Or something doesn’t work as expected?” There is no single answer to this as there is a wide range of scenarios, from instances you cannot immediately recover from (a complete loss of internet) to more trivial annoyances.

My advice is…

• Test your equipment and have a backup plan.
• Don’t expect perfection and make incremental improvements as you go.
• Rely on the understanding of your colleagues and team. In my experience, everyone has been very supportive and understanding when we have encountered difficulties.
• Switch the event from hybrid to fully remote if that resolves your issues. It may not be ideal, but at least the event can continue with everyone.

Get started with a PI Planning template

I hope that you have found this article useful as you consider running your next hybrid PI Planning event. As discussed in the logistics section, I strongly recommend using a digital workspace as your primary collaboration tool.

I have built a Miroverse template designed for hybrid PI Planning. Some of the key benefits of using the Miro template are:

• EQUALITY: Trying to create an experience that values both in-person and remote participants.
• TRANSPARENCY: All vital information about PI Planning and the ART is available in one easy-to-access place.
• LIVING ARTEFACT: The ART Planning Board should be used throughout the Planning Interval and not just the PI Planning event.
• COMMUNICATION: Providing multiple ways to be heard by leveraging Miro’s tools such as voting, sticky notes, and commenting.

Please feel free to edit the template to best meet your organization’s needs and good luck running your next PI Planning event!

Try the PI Planning Template now!

For the past few years, especially as hybrid and remote work has become normalized, enterprise organizations have become reliant on an increasing number of applications and cloud-based platforms to streamline collaboration and improve productivity among teams and individuals. Companies are incentivized to ensure their tools are accessible to everyone and that work remains frictionless, all while ensuring their data stays safe.

According to the latest Businesses at Work white paper from Okta, large companies (2000+ employees), on average, relied on over 200 apps in 2022. This means IT and security teams must manage not only more licenses but also alleviate increased organizational security and compliance risks — they must find a way to configure secure collaboration in and outside their network.

However, many SaaS applications don’t work natively together by default and point-to-point integrations can be burdensome. In addition, application security data is highly variable and lacks standardization, which increases security risk. And finally, admin productivity can be compromised when they must manage security tasks across all their apps separately.

That’s why enterprise organizations must harmonize their security monitoring across all of these tools. Otherwise, it can take several incidents and weeks to even identify a leak or breach.

Now, thanks to a new partnership with Amazon Web Services, Miro is one of the first apps to integrate with AWS AppFabric, which can solve these challenges. AWS AppFabric connects multiple SaaS applications with no coding required. This means that organizations not only have better app security, but they can also give their end users the confidence that the tools they use will keep their content and ideas safe.

With AppFabric, Miro enterprise admins can now elevate their security posture by normalizing application data and connecting Miro to leading security solutions, making it easy to set global policies and standardize security alerts.

AWS AppFabric is available for your enterprise organization today.

With a vision to build the leading enterprise ecosystem, Miro continues to expand our enterprise capabilities by partnering with top security and compliance vendors. While our core features delight users and enable teams to innovate across hybrid, distributed, and remote teams, we continue to design and build Miro Enterprise with IT, security, compliance, and legal teams in mind.

Learn more about Miro for Enterprise

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.

One of the best strategies for getting “unstuck” is tapping into the creativity of your community, whether they be your immediate teammates and manager or a network of collaborators from other businesses and industries who share your expertise or interests.

This is certainly true of the Miro Community, composed of 1,000-plus Creators who connect over messaging apps, on social channels, in the Miroverse, and face-to-face at events like the recent Into the Miroverse. Read on to learn how some of the Community’s most active members empower each other to make new things; maximize their efficacy and efficiency; and infuse fun, inspiration, and happiness into their work.

Jumping into Miroverse has been an immersive experience — I’m surrounded by innovative creators from around the world.”

Indra Kusuma, Business Mentor and Educator at Apple Developer Academy

Make new things while having fun

Said Saddouk, ”Faciltainer” and Miro Community Group Leader, had an idea to up-level — and have a bit of fun with — his favorite Miro feature. He wanted to infuse the otherwise straightforward, square sticky note with a bit of personality.

Said came across the artistic Miro templates of Lucie Agolini, Visual Experience Designer at WRKSHP CNVS, and shared his idea with her. Together, Lucie and Said transformed his early prototype into a usable template, adding arms, legs, and faces to bring sticky notes to life. They dubbed their creation “enotejis.”

The enotejis template is a testament to the power of collaboration and community in turning an idea into reality.”

Said Saddouk, Facilitainer

Unsurprisingly, Said infused a lot of fun into his Into the Miroverse session, “Miro Games 101: Practice Your Creativity.”

Jonathan White Hiro Studio and fellow Miro Community Group Leader Rachel Davis share Said’s “passion for facilitation, having fun in workshops, and, of course, Miro,” so Jon and Rachel launched a monthly recurring event for Miro Board Improv during which they apply comedic improv techniques and solicit audience input to build activities, icebreakers, and other never-before-seen creations in Miro.

Of Miro Board Improv, Jonathan said, “It’s a constant source of inspiration.” Jonathan and his Hiro Studio teammate Hilary Jenkins continued to inspire play and template-building in their Into the Miroverse session, “Level Up Your Miro Game Using Visual Storytelling.”

Maximize efficacy and efficiency

Creativity isn’t limited to making something new; people also express their creativity when they solve problems — like finding ways to operate more effectively in today’s always-on, fast-paced workplaces.

For example, Marie Louise de Beyssac draws inspiration from Miroverse to kick off her consultations with small- and medium-sized businesses. She said:

When starting a custom project, I always bring in best practices and trending methodologies and frameworks from the inspiring knowledge base in the Miroverse to create a welcoming experience for users and attendees, whether it’s an agile ceremony, sales meeting, or workshop.”

 Marie Louise de Beyssac, consultant at InfinitoArco.com

In “AI as a Tool for Creativity in Miro” — her Into the Miroverse session with Martin Gleitsmann, business strategist and innovation enthusiast at not yet normal — de Beyssac highlighted another way to jump start solution development: AI.

Likewise, Nina Pozderec, who pulls triple duty at Switch to Eleven studio, said: “In my line of work — I’m a psychologist, and I’m a self-management expert, and an agile expert — I have to be very quick. That means that I don’t always have an hour or two to design my own board.”

So, Nina leans on Miroverse templates to operate more efficiently, whether she’s building a strategy, leading a retrospective, or meeting with a client. She leverages the creativity of her fellow Miro community members to ensure that she can focus fully on facilitating her consultancy’s workshops and growing her business without wasting time on logistics.

Work happy

When she has a moment to spare, Nina and her business partner at Switch to Eleven, Jaka Kladnik, also design their own templates — several of which focus on optimizing team dynamics, including “Self-management Team Workshop” “Team Psychological Safety,” and “Team Alignment Circle” (below). At Into the Miroverse, Nina teamed up with Indra to expand on this theme in a session titled: “Thriving Teams Through Templates.”

Read more: Why psychological safety is key to fostering creativity in teams

How to best connect and collaborate is a topic that’s top-of-mind for many of today’s workers even as — or, perhaps, especially because — teams today are increasingly distributed across different work environments. As Miro’s “The Ways We Work” survey showed, strong workplace relationships can be powerful drivers of engagement and happiness at work. In fact, among the 800+ respondents who said that they’re unlikely to leave their current company in the next year, their top reason for staying is feeling connected to their team. One remote respondent added, “The people I work with are the key to making a good place to work.”

Those who work for themselves or are part of a small company can derive these same benefits of tight-knit teams by tapping into communities of people with shared interests and unique perspectives:

I’m connected with a lot of facilitators through Miroverse and through the Miro Community, and I just think it’s amazing how I find inspiration from other people.”

Nina Pozderec, Switch to Eleven

On May 31st, over 1,000 Community members joined Hilary and Jonathan, Indra and Nina, Marie and Martin, Said, and 11 other Miroverse Creators and Miro team members to source creative inspiration, supercharge their problem solving, and forge new connections at Into the Miroverse. Thank you for joining us!

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Into the Miroverse is an annual event featuring Miroverse Creators and the Miro team in fun-filled discussions and interactive workshops, exploring ways to innovate through creativity, collaboration, and joy.

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 align on a shared vision, pinpoint cross-team dependencies, discuss features, and, ultimately, plan their product roadmap.

PI or big room planning is designed to capitalize on the product teams’ collective brainpower and enthusiasm. But here’s the thing: In the modern working world, this planning is no longer happening in…well, one big room. Many organizations have had to adapt this formerly face-to-face ritual to accommodate distributed teams.

3 major pitfalls of distributed PI or big room planning

When product teams adapted these planning sessions for distributed ways of working at the outset of the pandemic, they became more accessible, convenient, and cost-effective. But the remote format introduced a few new hurdles, too.

1. Too much wasted time on duplicate, manual work

Ensuring that a quarterly planning session is as effective as possible requires a great deal of preparation, as well as organization post-meeting.

Beforehand, facilitators need to gather key information to understand each team’s capacity and estimate the story size, for example. In most cases, this requires tracking down product managers, product owners, and developers to get important details.

And even once they have all the necessary information in hand, there’s a lot of manual and tedious work involved in importing roadmaps from multiple sources and cleaning them up so that everybody’s working from a single source of truth for the product vision.

And the hard work isn’t over after the planning session either. Facilitators are then left to manually replicate the session’s decisions in their systems of record, like Jira or Azure DevOps. “We wasted 100 hours on manually checking [that] columns [and] rows were accurately reflected in Jira after the session,” explains Marc Luett, Director of Business Agility at Werner Enterprises, whom we interviewed.

All of this back-and-forth clicking, copying, and pasting not only wastes time and energy but also makes teams far more prone to human error.

2. Dependencies are harder to visualize

Projects are like rows of dominoes, and it’s crucial for teams to understand the relationships between all of the different epics, stories, features, tasks, and more. That’s why dependency mapping is one of the most crucial pieces of PI or big room planning — it uncovers those relationships and encourages teams to break down the silos between them.

And yet, it’s “time-consuming and frustrating for users to identify the dependency or use it to discuss with other teams,” Luett continues. Virtual connectors have replaced in-room strings, but dependency mapping has remained as messy in today’s distributed sessions as it was offline.

3. Lack of energy leads to a lack of engagement

PI or big room planning sessions are known for their big energy, but product teams are quickly learning that it’s difficult to capture that same collaborative and dynamic spirit in a virtual session.

“I miss the energy and fun of being in the same room,” Isaac, an Agile Coach told us in an interview. While he used to be an active participant in in-person planning, he prefers to observe and participate only when required now that these sessions are hybrid or fully remote.

The value of PI or big room planning comes from the energy and focus that its participants invest in it. You can’t risk having people back out because the sessions feel more like an obligation than an opportunity.

3 tips for putting the passion and productivity back in PI or big room planning

Anybody who’s ever attended a virtual happy hour will readily admit that it’s tough to replicate the same enthusiasm you feel when you’re together in the same room with other people. But remote work isn’t going anywhere. In fact, Miro’s “The Ways We Work” survey found that 32% of knowledge workers say their ideal work environment is remote and 56% say they prefer a hybrid environment; just 12% want to be fully in-office.

The truth is that distributed product planning sessions won’t be exactly the same as the in-person ones you used to host, but here are three tips for ensuring they’re just as effective.

1. Sync experiences across your tech stack

When it comes to virtual PI or big room planning, it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of using the right tools. The right technology significantly reduces manual work, improves visibility and transparency, and enables more efficient communication and collaboration.

For example, with Miro’s Program Board, you can easily (seriously, it’s only two steps) import all of the epics, stories, and tasks you need from Jira. No more painful copying and pasting.

And rather than having to do a bunch of grunt work after the session, it is synced to your system of record and hence, updates it live. Edits made in Miro are synced immediately to Jira and any edits made in Jira are visible right away in Miro. No more duplicate records, missed entries, and crossed wires.

Teams can spend less time pulling in data and more time on what matters most: strategizing.

2. Clearly visualize connections between tasks

Identifying dependencies doesn’t need to result in a complex maze of arrows and lines. With Miro’s Dependencies app, you can map dependencies between Jira cards either directly on your Program board or anywhere on a Miro board during your real-time planning session. Those dependencies are instantly synced in Jira, so you don’t run the risk of forgetting to transfer them.

Don’t want to see those lines on your board? They only show up when the Dependencies app is open, so you don’t need to see those visual cues if you don’t need them.

Not only do these dependency lines boost cross-functional visibility — they also amp up teams’ productivity and supercharge time to market by ensuring stakeholders understand who is blocked by (or blocking) a build.

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3. Boost the fun and collaboration

Using a virtual format for these sessions shouldn’t come at the expense of a little fun. Miro offers several features to ensure that your distributed planning is just as energetic as your in-person sessions.

Participants can use reactions to express how they feel using one of six emojis. For even more creativity and broader expressions, they can also use a huge assortment of stickers and emojis directly on the board.

Keep in mind that people might need some quiet time for reflection, too. Use private mode during brainstorming or confidence voting to ensure participants have adequate time and space to think. While private mode is on, any thoughts and edits written on a sticky note are hidden and are revealed to the entire team only once private mode has ended.

The magic of big room planning (without the big room)

Quarterly product planning requires a great deal of collaboration and coordination, particularly if you have to adapt your previously in-person sessions.

Distributed planning sessions don’t have to mean more work and less enthusiasm, though. Put the above tips to work and you’ll benefit from product teams’ collective brainpower — even if you all aren’t in one big room.

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