Miro

From powerful planning tools to interactive meeting and a visual refresh that makes everything feel just a little smoother, this month we’ve been busy bringing you updates designed to help your team move faster and collaborate more intuitively.

Last month, at Behind the Canvas, we shared our vision for helping teams move from ideas to execution with greater speed, fewer barriers, and tighter alignment across every stage of work. The future of innovation in Miro is here — and it’s built for real impact.

Let’s dive into everything new this month.

Tables and Timeline 

Tables and Timeline are available for you to use in your daily workflows, and they’re here to bring structure and consistency. Whether you’re roadmapping, goal setting, or managing a project, Tables help you get organized without giving up the freedom of a visual canvas.

Think of Tables as your new favorite organizer: sortable columns, grouping, filtering, and even the ability to seamlessly switch to Timeline view. You can track progress at a glance and keep everyone moving in the same direction.

And the best part is that you can come back to Tables again and again. Tables support teams as a system of record that you can continuously come back to, helping you to update and track progress over time.

Slides, Diagrams, Formats & Focus mode

Slides (Beta)

Slides are everything you love about a traditional slide deck, with all the added benefits that Miro brings to your workflow. This format combines the structure of presentation slides with the flexibility of an interactive canvas, making Slides the ideal choice for meetings, workshops, and client sessions. 
Work on your slides in Focus mode to keep all the tools you need on hand. You can easily drag-and-drop slide reordering, work on presenter notes, and add smooth content imports without the distractions of the rest of your working board.

Formats & Focus mode (Beta)

Need to focus? Focus mode cuts out the clutter so you can zero in on what matters. Set any format — like Docs, Tables, Timelines, Slides, or Diagrams — as the board’s default view to keep your team aligned and turn scattered ideas into clear, organized outcomes

Embed diagrams directly into Docs (Beta)

Use diagrams frequently in your workflow? You can easily drag a Diagram widget into a doc, creating a Synced copy of the original diagram that’s automatically embedded. This means any updates made to the original diagram will instantly reflect in the doc, ensuring consistency across your work. This is a simple way to keep everything aligned and up to date without the hassle of manual updates.

Synced copies

And that brings us to Synced copies. Create a live embed of key formats like Docs, Tables, Timelines, Diagrams, and Slides — along with all their nested content — and use them across multiple boards. No more manual updates or version control headaches; any changes made to the original will automatically sync everywhere, keeping your work consistent and up to date.

Blueprints (Beta)

Announced in our Behind the Canvas event, Blueprints are available in the Miro template library. These pre-made, multi-step templates are automatically set up with all the boards, formats, and resources you need for each step of your process. Whether you’re following best practices or replicating existing workflows, Blueprints help you hit the ground running and keep everyone aligned from start to finish.

Blueprints bring entire end-to-end workflows (like roadmap planning, OKRs and AI initiative planning) into a single source of truth, and help you get work done faster amongst the chaos of daily tasks. 

Sketch to Diagram (Beta) with Miro AI

Miro AI keeps on getting better and better! You can transform screenshots or sketches of diagrams into readily editable diagrams in Miro, allowing your teams to move directly to editing and collaboration. With Sketch to Diagram (Beta), simply upload an image of your sketch and convert it to a fully editable diagram with just a few clicks. This feature is accessible through the context menu when selecting any image.

Planner updates 

Here are the Planner updates that will give you the flexibility to easily filter and organize your Planner. 

• Filter by active sprint: Users can see all tickets by default. To focus on the current sprint, turn on the active sprint filter via the filter icon in the top-right menu after selecting Sprint. 
• Add unassigned to Planner: Users can filter or organize unassigned tickets into a column or swimlane for better visibility and workflow management.

Collaboration updates with Flip cards (Beta) & mobile apps 

Flip cards (Beta)

Want to improve engagement and collaboration in your virtual workshops or meetings? Flip cards make it easy to create engaging, interactive moments with your team. With this Intelligent Widget, you can add a question or prompt to the front, and reveal the answer or explanation on the back. Great for icebreakers, quizzes, brainstorming, or teaching sessions, Flip cards bring a touch of surprise that keeps everyone involved and curious.

Collaboration apps in the Miro mobile app

Collaborate anywhere with your team with two collaboration apps that are available in the Miro mobile app.

With the Timer app, you can effortlessly track time for the workshops, both as a moderator and a participant. And here’s a helpful hint: you can manage the timer in the Miro mobile app while focusing on the workshop or presentation on your laptop.

With Reactions, you can express your feelings and provide feedback quickly and visually right in the Miro mobile app.

A refreshed look with Miro Aura

For a more consistent, clear, and aligned look, we’ve updated our product design language with Miro Aura. This round of updates includes:

• Refined color palettes: more shades for better contrast and easier color pairing.
• Updated typography: a new font that supports more languages and improves readability.
• Consistent icons & visuals: more uniform and recognizable elements for a cohesive experience.
• Refreshed sticky notes: adjusted shadows for easier alignment and updated colors for added vibrancy and contrast.

These design language refresh give Miro a more polished, modern look while keeping the intuitive feel you know and love.

We partnered with three experts in our Creator Community who crafted Blueprints to demonstrate the power of Spaces. Those frameworks are available for all paid plans:

Have your own ideas? Publish templates to Miroverse and share your expertise with 90M+ users.

Stay tuned for May!

And that’s all of our updates this month! We’ve been busy, and we’re sure you will be too with these new features and tools. 

While you’re here, why not download our Coda ebook where you can learn how to amplify your Agile events and other innovation rituals with Coda and Miro. And don’t forget to watch the recording of our Behind the Canvas event, where you can hear from our very own Mironeers about some of the biggest updates that will help you turn your work into fast-moving success stories. 

As clocks sprung forward and days grew longer, March brought with it a spirit of fresh starts and bright ideas. And wow — did our community deliver! This month, Miroverse blossomed with 119 new templates, each one reflecting your creativity, curiosity, and passion for better collaboration. 

If you have a Miro board that could help others, now’s the perfect time to publish your template.

Curious about publishing your first template? Submit today! 

Visit the Creator Toolbox to learn more.

Audrey L | Most Copied Miroverse Template 🚀

Sometimes, less is more. Audrey L.’s Simple Retrospective proves just that. Copied 165 times in March alone, this clean and efficient retro format makes it super easy for distributed teams to reflect and align — thanks in part to a smart use of sticky stacks.

Audrey, thank you for showing us that simplicity, when paired with smart Miro features, makes a big impact. The community clearly loved it!

Damien H | Most Viewed and Liked Miroverse Template 🚀

AI hype, meet actionable process! Damien H., AI Product Strategist at Half Machine, published an Agent Design Sprints template to help teams surface high-value AI Agent use cases by examining workflows, processes, and data. In March, it was viewed 1.6K+ times and saved by 22 community members!

Thank you, Damien, for creating practical, clear, and community-ready AI enablement.

Create.Access | Social Impact 🚀

Accessibility Personas (UX Starter Kit) is a game-changer. Create.Access, a design agency dedicated to accessibility, built this UX starter kit to help product teams build inclusive experiences. The personas align with major accessibility standards (like ISO 9241-210, W3C, and GOV.UK) — and fill a big gap in the UX space.

We’re inspired by this contribution. Thank you, Create.Access team, for creating a tool that empowers teams to design with every user in mind.

Shayne Smart | Staff Picks 🚀

Pitching doesn’t have to be painful — and Shayne Smart’s Pitch Ideas | The Cycles ₊✦⁺ AI Native makes sure of that with this beautifully designed, clearly structured template. It combines collaborative workflows, MiroAI, and embedded prompts to guide teams from idea to presentation. 

Shayne, congrats on the spotlight! Every month, our submission review team highlights one outstanding template and this time your template definitely stood out! 

__________

At Behind the Canvas, we introduced Blueprints — ready-to-use templates using Spaces to organize multiple boards in a single hub, so it’s easier to keep track of work. And some of the first to launch came straight from the community:

Just Mad | Professional Spotlight 🚀

Years of research expertise wrapped into one intelligent, AI-powered workspace – Just Mad’s Research Planner. Perfect for interviews, surveys, and stakeholder alignment.

Daiana Kaplan | Professional Spotlight 🚀

This plug-and-play Epic Feature Planning template by Daiana Kaplan walks teams through the full product lifecycle — from idea to post-launch review. A must-have for PMs!

Ryan Brooks | Professional Spotlight 🚀

AI Enablement Sprint by Ryan Brooks is designed to help teams explore and integrate AI into their current workflows — and test those ideas fast. Innovation starts here.

While we work on adding Blueprints to Miroverse, we’re collaborating with a handful of Creators to build Blueprints for Miro’s in-product template library. If you’re interested in working with us, reach out to miroverse@miro.com.

Explore thousands of templates created by and for the Miro community in Miroverse. Discover a new template you loved? Share what you’ve found in the thread below. 👇

If you can’t find the template you’re looking for, submit it in Template Requests.

Feeling inspired? Join our community of Creators and share your ideas with the world.

We know that traditional ways of innovating are inefficient, fragmented, and slow. That’s why, according to McKinsey, only 6% of CEOs are satisfied with the way they do it. They don’t need an evolution. They need an intervention. 

That means putting innovation to work by making sure it drives measurable outcomes for critical projects. So Miro is changing to meet the moment. We recently announced a number of new updates and feature launches to create a turbocharged system for faster collaboration with superpowers like composable workflows, flexible formats, and data-driven insights, all supported by AI baked into everything.

While we think everyone will benefit from a speed boost, we’re particularly excited to unleash the potential of Product teams so engineers, designers, and product managers can accelerate key use cases. And because they can’t do it alone, it also means improving collaboration and unlocking better ways of working across the business – especially with IT.

Product planning and roadmapping

Let’s unpack product planning and roadmapping to see how these new capabilities add up to a new way of working.

Traditional planning tools tend to run into a number of issues:

• Roadmaps quickly become overwhelming and hard to follow
• They end up as static artefacts that aren’t connected to specific tasks
• Without alignment there’s no shared responsibility

This is hardly surprising – planning is complex and cross-functional. It needs a deep synthesis of inputs including customer insights, market dynamics, technical constraints, and strategic priorities. All of which need to be weighed and translated into a clear direction.

Teams must align on objectives, define requirements, assess feasibility, and prioritize initiatives. They need to adapt as conditions evolve so that the roadmap becomes a living framework that continuously guides execution, iteration, and decision-making.

Miro enables organizations to navigate this complexity with speed and precision. Starting with a centralized Space, teams can work from a single source of truth. Everything that they need will be here – from a RACI to supporting documents to lessons learned in previous projects – so strategic decisions will always be grounded in the right context.

Even better, AI-powered tools can take all of this information and use it as a prompt to surface key insights, identify gaps, and suggest prioritization strategies informed by historical data. All of this means teams can get to the heart of the work faster, as AI takes a bunch of typically time-consuming tasks off their hands.

So then it’s time to do the work. Rather than starting from scratch on a blank board, product teams can now jump straight into a Blueprint for Roadmap Planning. 

It provides a structured approach for teams to align on company-wide strategy, ensuring that all planning efforts are connected to overarching business objectives. It organizes key artifacts, facilitates team-level planning, and consolidates initiatives into a shared roadmap.

By gathering strategic inputs, defining team- specific goals, and structuring a clear execution plan, this blueprint enhances collaboration, prioritization, and visibility across departments. With real-time syncing, visual timelines, and stakeholder-ready presentations, it serves as a dynamic and adaptable framework for effective roadmap planning.

Not only are these boards customizable (think your brainstorm needs a SWOAR instead of a SWOT? Go right ahead and change it), they all have AI tools – and everything else – baked right in. Let’s say you’re using the product vision template. You’ve got dozens of sticky notes with suggestions and feedback. So you use the AI assistant to do the hard work of turning it into a structured doc. If it needs more work, just switch to Focus Mode, going full screen on the document to drown out any other distractions until it’s edited to perfection.

And because execution is just as critical as planning, Miro integrates seamlessly with Jira, Microsoft 365, and other core platforms, transforming the roadmap from a conceptual framework into a dynamic, action-driven plan. By creating a shared space where product strategy and execution coalesce, Miro enables organizations to move from vision to impact – faster and with greater confidence.

AI transformation

We’ve seen how Miro supports Product teams through better organization and customizable blueprints. Now let’s take a look at how we can help IT teams with a process that’s going to get a lot of attention from the C-suite this year: AI transformation.

Yeah, okay, #rollseyes and all that. But according to McKinsey, 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investment in the next three years. That means IT teams need to have an answer. But they can’t do it alone. Miro breaks down the walls between IT and the rest of the business so they can work together to define the opportunity, build a winning strategy, and manage their organization through the transition.

Miro is already the place where a lot of this work happens. That means it’s the perfect place to get stakeholders in sync: Running workshops on everything from strategic overviews to on-the-ground implementation, so every team can get on board – then get to work. 

To make the process even faster, we’ve created two AI Transformation Blueprints. These customizable templates help teams run an AI capability assessment, map out human/AI touchpoints, plan the implementation, and track performance. 

Not to get too meta, but teams can even use AI to crack the AI transformation code. For instance, by creating an Action Shortcut to auto-generate a list of AI use cases for consideration. They can also use Canvas Layouts to customize their Miro board for technical diagramming – taking advantage of all the tools and features you’re used to (multiplayer collaboration, super smooth UI, a full-screen Diagramming Format) with an added AI shape pack. So it’s easy to drag and drop AI agent icons, define human touchpoints, and set automation triggers.

As AI adoption accelerates, the companies that can design, implement, and scale AI workflows the fastest will have a major competitive advantage. With Miro, this transformation isn’t just an idea – it’s a structured, executable plan that puts strategy, workflow design and implementation tracking all in one place. And it actually uses AI to make AI delivery even faster.

How do we know it works? Because we’re doing it ourselves. “As a company that sits at the intersection of technology and innovation, it’s important that Miro is constantly embracing new and faster ways of working,” says Tomás Dostal-Freire, Miro’s CIO and Head of Business Transformation. “Using AI to define how our team members should partner with AI for their daily activities, give time back to employees to work on higher value-add initiatives, and ultimately improve our productivity and quality of output is a huge part of that. And of course we’ve mapped all of these workflows on Miro.”

In fact, Miro’s AI Transformation Blueprints are actually based on the processes Tomás and his team developed. “We were able to nail this workflow really fast,” he explains. “For one thing, we already have our entire business strategy and org structure already defined in Miro. And like most IT teams, we have a lot of experience running transformation projects. When you put those two things together, it’s pretty powerful. So even though ‘AI Transformation’ sounds like this incredibly difficult thing, what you find is that you already have a lot of the tools and expertise you need. Miro just supercharges the pace.” 

“Even though ‘AI Transformation’ sounds incredibly difficult, you already have a lot of the tools and expertise you need. Miro just supercharges the pace.”

Of course, that expertise doesn’t only exist inside IT. For all that AI Transformation usually starts within the CIO organization, it’s relevant to all parts of the business. One of Miro’s greatest strengths is bringing together leaders from every department into a single workspace so they can define the vision and direction of their AI strategy together.

Traditional ways of innovating are inefficient, fragmented, and slow. That’s why, according to McKinsey, only 6% of CEOs are satisfied with the way they do it. They don’t need evolution. They need an intervention. 

That means putting innovation to work by making sure it drives measurable outcomes for critical projects. So Miro is changing to meet the moment; providing a turbocharged system for faster collaboration with superpowers like composable workflows, flexible formats, and customizable layouts – all supported by AI baked into everything.

[embedded content]

Forget about jumping between tools, apps, and browser windows. Forget about endless meetings, multiple updates, and version control meltdowns. Forget about work feeling like wading through treacle.

Instead, picture everything you need in a single place, with ready-made templates so you never need to start from scratch, customizing your workflows so they work perfectly for you. Imagine moving between docs, diagrams, tables, and timelines with zero friction, so all your notes, ideas, plans and goals sit in the same place where you actually bring them to life. 

“This isn’t just an upgrade on your existing tools; it’s an accelerant for innovation. No wasted time. No lost context. Just faster progress from strategy to execution.”

Now picture modern fonts, streamlined navigation, and vibrant colors, where every design choice has been carefully crafted to make collaboration feel more effortless, inspiring and productive than ever.

This isn’t just an upgrade on your existing tools; it’s an accelerant for innovation. It means discovery, definition, and delivery happen on the same canvas. No wasted time. No lost context. Just faster progress from strategy to execution.

While we think everyone will benefit from a speed boost, we’re particularly excited to unleash the potential of Product teams so engineers, designers, and product managers can get from idea to outcome faster. And because they can’t do it alone, it also means improving collaboration and unlocking better ways of working across the business.

Let’s start by looking at how we’re upping the pace for Planning and Roadmapping. 

A faster path from idea to impact

Product teams are the engine room of innovation, influencing the breakthrough products that actually get built. But traditional planning tools tend to result in roadmaps that are hard to follow and aren’t connected to specific tasks.

They also miss a critical step because behind every great product is a great insight. And figuring out what customers want is a whole other challenge. Let’s say you’re looking for data to inspire the discovery phase for your next feature. You check out Salesforce or some other CRM tool. Trawl through Jira or Notion. Dip into Zendesk, Gong or Intercom. None of these sources speak to each other, so is it any surprise teams struggle to align on their most important priorities?

With Miro, you can already move from feedback to features faster by bringing all your people and data together in one place, transforming insights synthesis from a solo effort into a team sport. Now we’re excited to launch Miro Insights (formerly Cardinal) to help teams make even smarter decisions about what to build next.

Miro Insights doesn’t just bring your data sources together – it brings them to life, using AI to spotlight backlog recommendations, map feedback to product strategy, and even forecast the revenue value of future features. You can sign up for early access now.

Once you know what you want to build, it’s time to make a plan. While the canvas naturally turns planning into a collaborative experience, the downside is that you can end up with a ton of content – sticky notes, diagrams, comments – that’s pretty hard for newcomers to navigate.

That’s why we’ve already released Spaces. With Spaces, all the boards, documents and data you could possibly need are grouped together in one place. Entire projects are accessible in a couple of clicks, including every comment and conversation that informed the final decision. So teams can jump straight into real work – no friction, no frustration.

But then we thought, ‘Why not go a step further?’ If we really want to help teams put innovation to work, then a blank canvas might not always be the best option. Especially for something like product planning and roadmapping. What if we could make it a simple, repeatable process instead?

Today we’re introducing Blueprints to take the guesswork out of projects and help streamline key use cases like planning and roadmapping.

Blueprints are ready-made Spaces that contain all the boards you need to get the job done. Think of them as a way to strike a balance between productivity and agility. Nobody needs the chaos that comes with completely undefined ways of working. On the other hand, too many restrictions and you get the sort of bureaucracy that grinds employee engagement into dust.

Because Blueprints are customizable, they can flex to accommodate whatever way of working suits your teams best. Like building blocks that you can re-arrange or build on top of until you’ve created the perfect workflow for you. 

How does it work in practice? Well, our Blueprint for roadmap planning features 11 boards split into three sections to guide you through your vision and objectives, with worksheets for individual teams to define their strategies, initiatives, and trade-offs, and finally a consolidated planning section to put all your team inputs into a company-wide roadmap, timeline, and stakeholder presentation.

Not only are these boards customizable (think your brainstorm needs a SWOAR instead of a SWOT? Go right ahead and change it), they all have AI tools – and everything else – baked right in. Let’s say you’re using the product vision template. You’ve got dozens of sticky notes with suggestions and feedback. So you use the AI assistant to do the hard work of turning it into a structured doc. If it needs more work, just switch to Focus Mode, going full screen on the document to drown out any other distractions until it’s edited to perfection.

With the discovery and definition phase complete, your team starts to think about delivery. They need a way to share early concepts with stakeholders without bouncing back and forth between different tools like Figma. So they turn to a new format: Slides.

Now they can simply select the relevant work on the canvas and turn it into a presentation at the touch of a button. It’s easy to re-order and add content, convert it into brand colors, or import a PDF from Google Slides or PowerPoint. That means they can take advantage of interactive experiences like dot voting, counters, and T-shirt sizing. So just like the rest of the product planning process, it isn’t only faster, it has collaboration at the core.

Keep pace with AI transformation

We’ve seen how Miro supports Product teams through better organization and customizable blueprints. Now let’s take a look at how we can help IT teams with a process that’s going to get a lot of attention from the C-suite this year: AI transformation.

Yeah, okay, #rollseyes and all that. But according to McKinsey, 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investment in the next three years. That means IT teams need to have an answer. But they can’t do it alone. Miro breaks down the walls between IT and the rest of the business so they can work together to define the opportunity, build a winning strategy, and manage their organization through the transition.

Miro is already the place where a lot of this work happens. That means it’s the perfect place to get stakeholders in sync: Running workshops on everything from strategic overviews to on-the-ground implementation, so every team can get on board – then get to work. 

To make the process even faster, we’ve created two AI Transformation Blueprints. These customizable templates help teams run an AI capability assessment, map out human/AI touchpoints, plan the implementation, and track performance. 

Not to get too meta, but teams can even use AI to crack the AI transformation code. For instance, by creating an Action Shortcut to auto-generate a list of AI use cases for consideration. They can also customize their Miro board for technical diagramming – taking advantage of all the tools and features you’re used to (multiplayer collaboration, super smooth UI, a full-screen Diagramming Format) with an added AI shape pack. So it’s easy to drag and drop AI agent icons, define human touchpoints, and set automation triggers.

As AI adoption accelerates, the companies that can design, implement, and scale AI workflows the fastest will have a major competitive advantage. With Miro, this transformation isn’t just an idea – it’s a structured, executable plan that puts strategy, workflow design and implementation tracking all in one place. And it actually uses AI to make AI delivery even faster.

How do we know it works? Because we’re doing it ourselves. “As a company that sits at the intersection of technology and innovation, it’s important that Miro is constantly embracing new and faster ways of working,” says Tomás Dostal-Freire, Miro’s CIO and Head of Business Transformation. “Using AI to define how our team members should partner with AI for their daily activities, give time back to employees to work on higher value-add initiatives, and ultimately improve our productivity and quality of output is a huge part of that. And of course we’ve mapped all of these workflows on Miro.”

In fact, Miro’s AI Transformation Blueprints are actually based on the processes Tomás and his team developed. “We were able to nail this workflow really fast,” he explains. “For one thing, we already have our entire business strategy and org structure already defined in Miro. And like most IT teams, we have a lot of experience running transformation projects. When you put those two things together, it’s pretty powerful. So even though ‘AI Transformation’ sounds like this incredibly difficult thing, what you find is that you already have a lot of the tools and expertise you need. Miro just supercharges the pace.” 

“Even though ‘AI Transformation’ sounds incredibly difficult, you already have a lot of the tools and expertise you need. Miro just supercharges the pace.”

Of course, that expertise doesn’t only exist inside IT. For all that AI Transformation usually starts within the CIO organization, it’s relevant to all parts of the business. One of Miro’s greatest strengths is bringing together leaders from every department into a single workspace so they can define the vision and direction of their AI strategy together.

We think that by combining the collaborative power of the canvas with customizable Blueprints, flexible formats, and AI, organizations will truly be able to unlock the full potential of their innovation projects. And it doesn’t stop with insights synthesis, product planning and roadmapping, or AI transformation.

New Blueprints are available right now for critical jobs like goal setting, customer journey mapping, process design, and organizational planning – with more to follow. And it’s not just us – the Miro community has been hard at work building its own Blueprints,  including an AI Enablement Sprint, Research Alignment Workshop, and Epic Feature Planning.

Not sure where to start? Miro Solution Partners can provide tailored workshops, training, and implementation support to help you turn snail-paced innovation projects into fast-moving success stories. They can also help with broader AI, agile, or cloud transformation initiatives – including customizing new features to align with your specific business needs – so you see immediate value from your Miro investment. 

February, the shortest month of the year, was packed with creativity in Miroverse! Our incredible Creators shared 127 new templates, ranging from playful boards to celebrate International Women’s Day to structured frameworks for strategic planning. 

If you have a Miro board that could help others, now’s the perfect time to publish your template.

Curious about publishing your first template? Submit today! 

You can also visit the Creator Toolbox to learn more.

Phillip Nalesny | Most Published Miroverse Creator 🚀

Phillip Nalesny, a Learning & Agility Enthusiast with a deep focus on psychological safety in teams, published five templates in February! His Games templates and (Pre) PI Planning Board help teams collaborate effectively and stay engaged.

Thank you, Phillip, for your generosity in sharing your knowledge with the Miroverse community. We can’t wait to see what you create next! 

The Foundation Sprint Workshop by Design Sprint Academy was copied 170 times last month — proof that tried-and-tested methods never go out of style. This framework helps teams define the right problem, pinpoint their unique differentiators, and craft a testable hypothesis.

Huge congratulations to the Design Sprint Academy team! We look forward to your next contributions.

Kaospilot | Most Viewed Miroverse Creator 🚀

Kaospilot’s 5E Experience Design Model was viewed 841 times in February! As a school for creative leadership & meaningful entrepreneurship, Kaospilot builds powerful frameworks to help teams design impactful experiences, from events to learning journeys.

Your insights are helping thousands of creators elevate their work — thank you for sharing! We’re excited to see what you create next.

JCG | Most Liked Miroverse Creator 🚀

February is a great time to reset and refine team communication, and 20 community members liked & saved JCG’s 1:1 Doc. (for Managers/Line-Report) [V4]. This template encourages open, structured discussions, helping managers provide better support.

JCG, thank you for creating tools that empower teams. Keep the great ideas coming!

Every month, our submission review team highlights one outstanding template, and in February, John Sexton’s Business Value Framework stood out for its exceptional design and use of advanced Miro features.

John, congratulations on this well-earned recognition! Your work is setting a high standard in Miroverse. 

Explore thousands of templates created by and for the Miro community in Miroverse. Discover a new template you loved? Share what you’ve found in the thread below. 👇

If you can’t find the template you’re looking for, submit it in Template Requests.

From excitement over the latest tools to speculation about job security and debates over potential benefits and risks, we hear a lot about AI from leaders. But despite AI’s omnipresence in the news and at work, we haven’t heard much about what it means for today’s knowledge workers. What have their experiences with AI been like so far, what challenges have they encountered, and how has AI shaped their hopes, worries, and goals for the future? 

To find out, we surveyed over 8,000 knowledge workers across seven global markets. Our survey finds that their views of AI often diverge from assumptions and headlines, and offer important insights for leaders as they navigate an increasingly AI world. Let’s dive in.

AI usage lags, with 35% of workers citing “nonexistent” skills

Given all the excitement about AI in the workplace, it’s easy to assume that knowledge workers have fully embraced these tools. However, our survey uncovers surprising gaps in usage: 35% of workers describe their AI skills as “nonexistent.” This trend is consistent across each market surveyed, with 34% of U.S. workers saying the same. 

Furthermore, we find that over half (54%) of global workers say they do not have the time or resources needed to learn how to maximize AI’s potential for their role. One-third of global knowledge workers say they don’t use AI at all, with some differences across markets: only 31% in the U.K. and 35% in the U.S. agree, compared to 41% in France and 44% in Japan. 

As employees struggle to find their footing, AI imposter syndrome is taking hold: Workers are 75% more likely to rate their own skills as “nonexistent” than to say the same about their teammates. Indeed, across all markets we find that workers believe their AI skill level is lower than that of their team, manager, colleagues on other teams, and company leaders. 

We find that AI etiquette is a moving target in this time of ongoing change. Twenty-five percent of global workers admit to exaggerating their AI abilities, while 30% downplay how much they use AI at work. And one in five workers can’t shake the feeling that it feels like “cheating” to use AI, although there is some regional variation: while 25% of Australians agreed with this, the number drops to 21% in the U.S. and only 13% in Japan.

Half of workers are still unsure of when to use AI

Although workers are optimistic about AI’s potential, they are still sorting out what this means for their roles — and even for their organization overall. Seventy-six percent of global knowledge workers believe that AI could benefit their role, yet 54% struggle to know when to use it. Once again, we find these trends to be consistent across markets. 

Adding to the confusion, workers are getting mixed signals from their organizations. Thirty-nine percent report that their company often abandons AI efforts, and 46% agree that there is more talk than action when it comes to AI at their organization. 

That being said, there are steps companies can take now to ease the AI transition. Here are the top three things workers report that leaders can do to help them feel more confident about adopting AI:

1. Offer formal trainings (45%)
2. Clarify the company’s strategy for AI adoption (37%)
3. Communicate the business benefits of AI (35%)

Workers say AI can boost wellbeing, collaboration, creativity

It’s time to move past the idea that workers are scared of AI — if anything, they’re enthusiastic about its potential. While 33% of workers report feeling anxious or stressed out about AI, 61% say that it makes them feel excited and energized. So what do they think AI can do for them?

For all the talk about AI’s ability to offload repetitive tasks and boost efficiency, many workers are just as excited about the emotional impact. A majority of workers agree that AI can improve wellbeing (61%) and job satisfaction (62%) — which, in turn, can bolster productivity and innovation. 

Here are the biggest benefits of AI so far, according to global workers:

1. Improved productivity (44%)
2. Enhanced creativity (34%)
3. Better communication (29%)

Moving forward, workers predict that AI can help support collaboration (32%), as well as reduce stress and burnout (29%). 

42% of workers plan to use their AI skills to get a new job

Forget the idea that AI is coming for jobs: Today’s knowledge workers see it as a potential career catapult. Fifty-six percent say they are already better off today than one year ago due to their new AI abilities, and 69% plan to upskill on AI in 2025. To workers, the need for AI will only rise: globally, 73% predict that they will use AI more this year, particularly workers in the U.K. (79%), the Netherlands (75%), and U.S. (74%).

But make no mistake: These workers are also looking out for themselves. In today’s tight job market, workers are eager to stand out — and 66% believe their AI skills will make them more competitive. Four in 10 say they will reconsider their career plans because of AI this year, and 44% intend to leverage their AI skills to find a new job. 

Gen Z remains skeptical, while Millennials embrace AI

Despite being digital natives, Gen Z emerges as the most hesitant generation with AI. Globally, 46% of Gen Z knowledge workers don’t use it at all, compared to only 33% of Millennials. Similarly, 43% Gen Z workers describe their AI skills as “nonexistent” — more than any other age group. They are also the most likely to disagree that AI can benefit their role: 30% agree with this, compared to 21% of Millennials. 

In fact, across a variety of measures we find that Gen Z is more negative than their Millennial colleagues: They are less likely to say AI has made them better off professionally, improved the quality and speed of their work, or to agree that their company provides adequate training in AI. 

This pattern applies to the effective impact of AI. While 56% of Gen Z says AI makes them feel excited and can boost wellbeing, the numbers jump to 65% among Millennials. Overall, Gen Z reports weaker gains from AI, from improved productivity to creativity, communication, collaboration and focus. 

Is the youngest generation of workers waiting for AI to prove its mettle or do they need companies to take action? It’s too early to tell, but leaders should be mindful of this emerging generational divide.

Workers are poised for AI, but leaders need to guide the way

Our survey leaves no doubt that global knowledge workers are ready and willing to embrace AI, but they can’t do it alone. 

Even though it seems like AI is everywhere, usage lags among a significant minority of workers — and many aren’t touching AI at all. This isn’t a case of luddite holdouts, however. We find that the majority of workers believe they are better off because of AI and are excited to continue building their skills in 2025. Indeed, they are bullish about AI’s ability to boost everything from productivity, creativity, and collaboration to wellbeing and job satisfaction. And, significantly, many have caught onto the fact that AI skills will make them even more competitive in today’s job market.

Interestingly, we find clear evidence of a generational divide between Gen Z and Millennials. While Gen Z is less positive about AI on multiple measures, Millennials are embracing it head-on. As the year continues, this is a division to watch.

We believe that this survey offers key learnings for leaders as they navigate the next stage of AI adoption. Workers are excited by what they’ve seen, but want to be part of what comes next. This means moving from ad hoc AI adoption to formal opportunities for training, deeper insights into organizational plans for AI, and a closer look at the potential business benefits. 

And when knowledge workers and leaders come to embrace these new AI tools, anything is possible.

Methodology: In January-February 2025, Miro surveyed 8,094 full-time employed knowledge workers across diverse industries and company sizes, and from seven global markets (N=1,000 for Australia, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and N=2,000 for United States).

Successful Agile projects rely on clarity and collaboration between team members — so to facilitate planning, execution, and retrospectives, product teams assign roles and responsibilities and use structured Scrum events. Teams also practice Agile visual management, a principle that uses visual tools to further improve Agile workflow efficiencies and alignment.

Below, we’ll explore the concept of Agile visual management, and the tools behind it.

The basics of Agile visual management 

To boost cross-team transparency, communication, and collaboration, Agile teams turn to visual Agile management. This means using visual tools—like Kanban and Scrum boards, burndown charts, and digital whiteboards—to make workflows, tasks, and project statuses immediately visible to all stakeholders, ensuring better progress tracking and adaptability.

For example, a software team working in Sprints begins backlog planning with a digital whiteboard to define key goals and priority tasks. They then use a Kanban board to track backlog items through each development stage. As work progresses, team members update statuses in real time, helping the team balance and adjust priorities and keeping stakeholders aligned on the big picture.

Key benefits of Agile visual management include: 

• A clear, shared understanding of work in progress
• The ability to catch bottlenecks and inefficiencies in real-time 
• Increased collaboration and accountability among team members
• The data to make smarter decisions faster 

Core principles of visual management in Agile 

Effective Agile visual management is rooted in five core principles to keep teams working efficiently and collaboratively. 

1. Transparency through a shared view of work

Transparency in Agile means making work visible, accessible, and easy to understand for all. This ensures that team members, stakeholders, and decision-makers have a clear, real-time view of project progress, priorities, and roadblocks.

Visual tools like Kanban boards, Scrum boards, and dashboards help teams see what’s in progress, what’s blocked, and what’s completed, eliminating guesswork and improving alignment. With full visibility into workflows, teams can identify issues early, make informed decisions, and stay focused on delivering value.

2. Simplicity through easy-to-understand visualizations  

Agile visual management tools should be easy to interpret at a glance, and easy to work with throughout the Sprint cycle. 

Overloading boards with too much detail can lead to confusion rather than clarity. To simplify visual project documents, Agile teams can use color coding, task icons, and clear labels to minimize cognitive load.

3. Real-time updates to keep teams in sync

Agile thrives on adaptability. Real-time updates ensure that teams can respond quickly to changes as they occur, and not get bogged down with back-and-forth questions and realignment. 

Agile visualization tools like digital whiteboards, flowcharts, and Kanban boards allow for live updates on task progress and backlog changes, ensuring that everyone is working with the latest information.

4. Collaboration as the driver of project success

Visual management provides a centralized space for collaboration, helping cross-functional teams stay aligned. Shared boards, virtual sticky notes, and workflow diagrams foster teamwork, enabling faster decision-making and problem-solving. 

Of course, visualization tools are just one part of effective collaboration. The Agile team themselves should also take steps to ensure close collaboration and communication throughout the process, ideally by holding regular team meetings, Scrum planning and retrospectives, and using remote collaboration tools like Slack or MS Teams. Great visualization tools enable great collaboration, but they don’t guarantee it. 

5. Adaptability that enables continuous improvement

Lastly, Agile teams must remain, well, Agile. They need to be able to adapt task priorities and workflows quickly as the project progresses and requirements evolve. 

Visual management tools must also be adaptable, allowing teams to quickly adjust backlogs, capture new requirements, and assign adjusted tasks without having to halt the product process. 

While we mentioned a few tools above that facilitate Agile visual management, here’s a deeper dive into specific tools that can improve efficiency, communication, and adaptability within Agile teams, and across the organization.

Here are four main categories of visual Agile management tools that can come into play. 

1. Visual boards (like Kanban and Scrum boards)

Visual boards, such as Kanban and Scrum boards, provide a structured way to track tasks from start to completion. These boards break work into columns—Backlog, In Progress, Done—to give teams real-time visibility into progress, and to enable individual contributors to track and update tasks as they are worked on and completed. 

Did you know? Miro offers digital Kanban and Agile boards that teams can customize to fit their needs.

2. Digital productivity and collaboration tools

Many remote and hybrid Agile teams rely on digital collaboration tools like virtual whiteboards, task managers, and workflow trackers to stay aligned. 

These tools enable real-time updates, async communication, and remote brainstorming. Combined with digital collaboration platforms like Google Meet or MS Teams, they keep teams aligned before, during, and after Agile work cycles. 

Did you know? Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard with features like sticky notes, task trackers, and workflow mapping. This whiteboard can be used to brainstorm product features, prioritize tasks, and manage end-to-end Sprint cycles remotely. 

3. Purpose-built visual templates

Agile teams may also use pre-built templates for daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives to streamline meetings and improve communication.

Miro, for example, offers hundreds of Agile-specific templates, including: 

These templates, combined with the collaboration and digital productivity tools found in a digital whiteboard, give teams purpose-built tools that boost alignment and adaptability at all stages of Agile production. 

5 Agile visual management challenges (and how to solve them)

Even with the best tools, Agile visual management can present challenges that hinder productivity and collaboration. Here are five common challenges, and how to overcome them.

1. Resistance to change. Individuals or teams may hesitate to adopt new visual management methods or tools, leading to poor engagement and a failure to realize efficiency potential. It’s essential to manage this change proactively. Involve the team in selecting tools, provide hands-on training, and emphasize efficiency improvements from these new tools to encourage adoption. 
2. Lack of visibility and understanding. Boards that are overly complex, hard to find, or simply unclear can create confusion and misalignment. Use real-time Agile boards that offer simple and clear visualizations. 
3. Information overload. Using too many different visualization tools, or trying to cram too much information into a single tool, makes it difficult to extract meaningful insights. This stalls productivity and collaboration. To solve this, focus on key performance and tasks, use color coding, and simplify board layouts to improve clarity. Only visualize what needs to be visualized. 
4. Be consistent. Without regular upkeep, visual management boards can become outdated. Schedule weekly reviews to refine workflows, remove outdated tasks, and keep boards relevant. The more consistent you are with updating and using your visualization tools, the more impactful they will be. 
5. Bridge collaboration gaps. Distributed or hybrid teams may struggle with communication and alignment. That makes true collaboration difficult. Use visual Agile tools that also enable remote collaboration—both live and async. This ensures that all members can use and update these tools, regardless of physical location or time zone. 

By proactively addressing these challenges, Agile teams can optimize efficiency, enhance collaboration, and keep workflows running smoothly.

Stay aligned and efficient with visual Agile management

No tool guarantees success. Even the most feature-rich platform or template is only as good as the user behind it. That’s why it’s so important to pair great visual Agile management tools with the foundational principles and best practices outlined in this article. When you do, Agile teams become more aligned, more efficient, and ultimately create better products for their customers and companies.

Agile transformation is the process of adopting Agile methodologies and principles across an organization to enable stronger adaptability, collaboration, and more efficient work processes.  

Organizations go through this process to deliver better products faster, and create more value for the company and their customers. Unfortunately, while the benefits seem clear, according to the 17th Annual State of Agile Report, an alarming 47% of Agile transformations fail. The question is, why?

Below, we’ll explore common hurdles to Agile success and what you can do to overcome them.

Common reasons that Agile transformation fail 

There are many factors that can lead to failed change projects, including

1. Insufficient strategic planning

One of the most cited reasons for Agile failure is inadequate planning and unclear goals at the outset of the change initiative. Agile’s iterative nature is often misunderstood as a lack of need for planning, but without clear objectives and a structured roadmap, teams can become directionless. 

The 17th State of Agile Report highlights that many organizations dive into Agile transformations without a defined strategy, leading to fragmented efforts and missed opportunities for alignment​.

2. Poor leadership

Leadership plays a critical role in Agile success. When leadership is strong, Agile transformations are successful. When it’s not, they falter. In fact, 41% of Agile transformations fail, according to the 17th Annual State of Agile Report, due to a lack of leadership involvement, and 38% fail due to insufficient management support. 

Successful Agile transformations require leaders who champion Agile values, allocate necessary resources, and foster a culture of collaboration and empowerment​.

3. Resistance to change

Resistance to change remains a significant barrier to Agile transformations, with 47% of respondents in the 17th State of Agile Report identifying it as the primary reason for failures. 

Employees accustomed to traditional workflows may fear loss of control or job security, leading to reluctance in embracing Agile practices. Overcoming this resistance requires effective change management, transparent communication, and strong leadership support​.

4. Organizational silos

Agile thrives on cross-functional collaboration, but many organizations suffer from a silo mentality. Separate departments often have conflicting priorities and communication gaps, stifling Agile’s potential.

When organizations try to apply Agile methodologies within isolated teams without addressing broader structural barriers, the likelihood of failure increases. For example, rigid hierarchical structures that slow down decision-making and fixed budgeting processes that can limit flexibility and cross-departmental collaboration both can be a roadblock to true Agile transformation, and ultimately lead to failure. 

5. Lack of training 

Insufficient training can also derail Agile adoption by leaving teams unprepared for new methodologies and roles.

According to the 17th Annual State of Agile Report, 27% of respondents cited inadequate training as a significant challenge, leading to misapplication of Agile principles and poor execution​.

Proper change management, internal communications strategies, and continuous learning programs are essential to equipping teams with the necessary knowledge and skills needed to successfully implement Agile workflows. 

6. Misalignment between goals and metrics

Agile success relies on measuring the right success metrics. Those metrics relate to specific Agile work cycles, but must also ramp directly to broader business goals and outcomes to ensure that teams are consistently working on the most impactful tasks and projects. 

Here are some examples of Agile metrics to track: 

• Velocity. Measures the amount of work completed in a sprint.
• Value delivered. Assesses the actual business impact of Agile initiatives.
• Predictability. Evaluated through the planned-to-done ratio to ensure consistent delivery cycles.
• Sprint burndown charts. Tracks work completion against sprint goals.
• Flow metrics. Highlights the flow of value and where flow is constrained.

Misalignment between business objectives and Agile performance indicators can lead to misguided efforts and unmet expectations. 

To be successful, teams should regularly review these metrics through Sprint retrospectives, allowing them to adapt quickly, fostering continuous improvement. 

7. Overemphasis on tools over people

While tools like Jira and Miro can facilitate Agile processes, overreliance on them without fostering Agile values can lead to superficial adoption. 

The tools you use should serve the individuals and interactions on the team from a neutral perspective, and not enforce a single workflow or way-of-working that runs counter to the collaboration style of the team. 

Many organizations adopt tools without cultivating a mindset of collaboration and continuous improvement, resulting in failed transformations​. Agile’s core lies in people, interactions, and adaptability over rigid processes. Any transformation initiative, therefore, must focus first on the people behind the processes. 

Tip: Miro actually fits this role very nicely. It’s a flexible tool that lets teams do Agile in their own way, without having to fit into a prescribed workflow or collaboration style. Teams can choose the amount of collaboration they want and need, and whether to manage that collaboration in a structured or unstructured way. 

9 tips to preventing Agile transformation failures

Preventing Agile failures requires both an understanding of the common causes of that failure and a proactive approach to mitigating these risks. 

Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Establish clear, measurable goals that align with the organization’s vision to provide direction and purpose.
• Encourage continuous feedback loops through regular check-ins and retrospectives for ongoing improvement.
• Ensure leadership participation, with leaders actively embodying Agile principles and supporting teams.
• Provide ongoing training and mentorship to equip teams with essential skills and confidence.
• Customize Agile frameworks to suit the organization’s unique needs rather than enforcing rigid methodologies.
• Evaluate company culture against Agile values to ensure alignment with Agile principles and readiness for change​.
• Mitigate external pressures from stakeholders by setting realistic expectations and ensuring their support for the Agile journey​.
• Promote open communication and collaboration across all departments to break down silos and foster shared ownership of the Agile transformation​.
• Invest in hiring and retaining Agile talent with the right mindset, personality, and values, not just technical skills​.

With these strategies in place, organizations can build a strong foundation for Agile success and avoid common transformation pitfalls. 

Become an Agile transformation success story

Almost 50% of Agile transformations ultimately fail. That’s a sobering stat for anyone starting to embark on this journey. But while the figure is high, the reasons for that failure are clear and, most importantly, preventable. 

If you’re just starting out, we encourage you to pinpoint potential weaknesses before they may cause your transformation to falter — and take a proactive approach to mitigating your risks.. Be open, collaborative, and provide strong leadership to your team throughout the process. Use the right tools and put your people first. 

Give it time, and soon your organization will become an Agile success story that defies the statistics and drives incredible results for your organization and customers. 

The rise of AI in the workplace presents both an opportunity and a challenge. While AI has the potential to drive efficiency and unlock new capabilities, integrating it requires more than just technical know-how — it demands cultural and operational shifts. For Culture Amp, an employee experience platform that specializes in helping organizations build high-performing teams, this transformation is about more than technology; it’s about people.

At Culture Amp, AI has the power to alter how companies deliver value. From determining where AI is most useful to navigating data complexities and upskilling employees, the company’s approach reflects a deep commitment to thoughtful, human-centered AI adoption. 

In a recent webinar, Rhiannon Gaskell, Culture Amp’s Director of Delivery Systems & Capability, shared how her team is using Miro to enable faster decision-making, facilitate AI experimentation, and scale AI expertise across the organization.

In this interview, Rhiannon takes us behind the scenes of the company’s AI transformation, covering strategies, challenges, and lessons learned from their journey, with valuable insights for any organization looking to embrace the power of AI.

Rhiannon thanks for your time! And what a great webinar. We just had to get more time with you! What are the biggest challenges around balancing alignment and autonomy when it comes to adopting AI?

The biggest challenge was changing the culture. Teams had been able to operate autonomously forever, so they rightly wanted to understand the “why.” We spent a lot of time explaining what challenges we thought we were going to see — delivery challenges as we acquired more customers. We also had teams who were already experiencing some of that dependency complexity talk about the pain they were feeling to help build broader empathy for why we needed to standardize where it made sense and bring more structure to our planning. Starting with the “why” to build empathy really helped us make that culture shift.

You mentioned that shifting Culture Amp’s culture around AI adoption was a challenge. One way you tackled that was with HackAIathon — giving employees a hands-on way to experiment with AI in their workflows. What were the biggest takeaways from that event?

The biggest takeaway was just how smart our people are. When you give them the space, safety, and opportunity to experiment, great things happen.

Now the question is, how do we bring this into our day-to-day? We do have committed roadmaps we need to deliver, so we can’t disrupt everything, but we do want to create pathways for innovation to thrive. That’s why we’re looking at a process where we can spin up small, focused teams to move fast on new ideas. There’s a lot of appetite for that model after seeing the creativity and energy at the final HackAIathon showcase.

And this was over 350 employees, right? That’s a huge undertaking! How did you approach upskilling such a large group to make sure everyone was set up for success?

HackAIathon was a really fast way for us to upskill everyone together. One thing that worked really well was the enablement tracks we created leading into the event, so that everyone came in with a baseline understanding of AI prompting. If they were technical, there was a technical track they could take as well.

If you think about the three Es of development — education, experience, and exposure — HackAIathon gave us something we wouldn’t have gotten in our normal day-to-day: real experience and exposure to working with AI. The feedback we got was overwhelmingly positive. People knew about AI, and some had experimented with it a bit, but they left the event with a much deeper understanding and far more confidence in how to apply it to their work. That was really powerful.

That’s great to hear! It sounds like HackAIathon helped build confidence, but of course, not every problem needs an AI-driven solution. How do you decide when AI is actually the right tool for the job?

If we can solve the problem without AI, then that’s probably where we start. AI has to add value. Our leaders help guide teams through the discovery process, and we have a framework that all teams are asked to use very early on in the discovery workflow. It’s really about risk — considering data, legal, security, and ethical AI as part of the assessment.

In the webinar, you mentioned having to use synthetic data for the HackAIathon, even though synthetic data isn’t always representative of real customer data. What’s Culture Amp’s answer to this problem longer term?

For the ideas we’re taking forward from the HackAIathon, the next step is using real data to validate them. We do that using our own data — we are a customer of our own product, with a thousand employees. Since we’re not allowed to use customer data, we start by validating with our own data first. Once we feel confident, we put it into the platform behind a beta flag so customers can choose to turn the feature on or off, allowing us to go broader and learn more.

You talked about using your own internal data to validate AI ideas before rolling them out. That deep contextual understanding must be a key advantage. How do you make sure Culture Amp’s AI remains competitive against general-purpose models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude? What do you say to prospects who assume those tools can deliver similar insights?

Look, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are great models — we use them too. But what we tell our customers is that we have much richer contextual insights that allow us to provide better solutions than they ever could.

We understand a company through employee surveys, performance feedback, one-on-one conversations, and recognition data. We’ve built a profile of an organization’s unique challenges. Plus, we have our own wealth of people science research and insights — we know what actions lead to effective behavioral change. Combining those two things allows us to provide real, actionable insights that drive change.

It sounds like your ability to leverage contextual insights is a big differentiator. So as you scale AI capabilities, how do you balance maintaining existing systems while continuing to innovate and roll out new features?

This is really the change in our operating model this year. Last year, we had a small pilot team that was responsible for both building new AI features and maintaining the AI features we had already built. That was a lot for a small team.

The shift we’re making this year is to establish a dedicated AI capability team — one out of about 35 teams — that will focus on ongoing model evaluation and managing the data pipelines that enable the rest of our product teams.

At the same time, we’re moving to a decentralized AI model. Now, teams that are working on customer-facing parts of the product are empowered to solve problems in their own domains using AI. And hopefully, after HackAIathon and our enablement efforts, they now have the skills to do that where it makes sense.

You’ve mentioned that AI itself isn’t a differentiator anymore — it’s how you apply it that really matters. How do you communicate that value effectively to customers?

We actually just hired someone specifically focused on this. Before, we had a team of product marketers, but now we have a dedicated role within this team focusing on AI positioning.

The key for us is leading with our people science expertise. The AI itself isn’t what makes us different — it’s how we apply it in ways that create real impact for organizations. We understand companies deeply through the data we collect — things like survey results, performance feedback, and recognition. That means we can use AI to provide insights tailored to the unique challenges of each organization.

So our messaging is shifting to focus on how AI enhances the value of what we already do best: helping companies build high-performing teams.

With so many moving pieces — scaling AI, empowering teams, and refining messaging — collaboration must be key. How has Miro helped Culture Amp drive innovation and keep everyone aligned?

I love all the new features in Miro, but for us, the real value it provides — and has always provided — is enabling faster decision-making. With offices around the world in different time zones, staying aligned asynchronously is really important for us at Culture Amp. Otherwise, decision-making would be super slow.

For example, when we came out of HackAIathon, people got on planes and flew back to their offices, and did their reflection and retros independently. Then we were able to bring all of that together in Miro, synthesize it quickly, and share talk tracks to make sure people understood our plans and direction. Leadership provides guidance, and we can iterate and make decisions quickly. That’s the key value prop for us.

That makes a lot of sense. AI on its own isn’t the differentiator, but how you apply it to drive real impact is. It’s clear from everything you’ve shared today that Culture Amp’s approach to AI is deeply rooted in enabling people, not just deploying technology. From HackAIathon to decentralized AI teams, you’re striking a balance between innovation and structure in a way that keeps both speed and strategy in focus.

Rhiannon, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through your team’s journey. It’s been great hearing how you’re scaling AI in a way that aligns with Culture Amp’s mission!

After working with a rare, high-performing product team, Dave Baines and Sam Quayle were inspired to bottle that experience and build the product development consultancy, Hyperact. Dave had been tackling misalignment between cross-functional teams — a common challenge for growing organizations — for over 15 years before founding Hyperact, and knew that while many consultancies over-index on either engineering-driven solutions or design-heavy approaches, his company would instead focus on eliminating silos and helping teams work more effectively together. 

Today, Hyperact embeds directly within client teams and uses powerful Miro templates to refine product strategies, team structure, and development processes — all essential to achieving cross-functional alignment. 

Cross-team alignment is challenging in scaling agile teams 

Misalignment is one of the biggest barriers to speed and efficiency when organizations are scaling — and, when organizations are slow to innovate, they risk falling behind market trends, customer needs, and their competition.

Misalignment is even more likely when multiple teams — often working asynchronously — must collaborate across different functions and priorities. Dave explains, “In small teams, alignment happens naturally through direct conversations, but this begins to break down at scale.”

Three key challenges contribute to this misalignment:

Too many priorities

As organizations grow, so do the number of concurrent initiatives they’re engaged with. Work starts overlapping, dependencies increase, and teams struggle to agree on what truly matters. Without clear coordination, each team risks duplicating its efforts or working at cross-purposes with other stakeholders. 

Centralized decision-making

As headcount grows, organizations can run into two issues: leadership may continue to make decisions without being fully in tune with the day-to-day processes or they may continue to require approval for every decision, which creates bottlenecks and inertia for teams. The key is to set the teams up for success by providing strategic context and supporting them to make as many of the decisions as possible.

Poor organizational design

As organizations scale, lines of communication increase, ways of working become less standardized, and it can become much harder to ensure that teams have everything they need to make progress. 

Simply working harder won’t overcome these alignment challenges. To drive forward and achieve success, scaling organizations need structured collaboration tools that reinforce alignment without adding friction. Below are four templates to help. 

4 templates to unlock cross-team alignment 

Dave and Hyperact adopted Miro in March 2020 as the first Covid lockdowns set in, and remote work became a necessity. He found that Miro instantly opened up a greater scale of collaboration.

“I remember seeing the amazement on some participants’ faces as they saw dozens of cursors whipping up diagrams in seconds,” Dave says. 

Miro eliminates the need for lengthy write-ups and serves as a shared knowledge base. Combined with strong facilitation and tools like dot voting, Miro enabled Hyperact and its client teams to diverge and explore ideas and then quickly converge on what matters most. 

To help their clients achieve cross-team collaboration as they scale, Hyperact developed four Miro templates. Check them out below. 

Product Team Canvas 

The Product Team Canvas distills everything a team needs to stay aligned — priorities, user insights, and ways of working — into a single, accessible artifact that passively builds cross-team alignment.

“I’ve used this in every team I’ve worked with over the last five to ten years,” says Dave. 

Beyond helping teams stay focused, it also helps new hires quickly get up to speed. “It’s rare for anyone to receive that level of business context so early on,” Dave says. 

Assumption Map 

The Assumption Map is essential for kicking off complex initiatives so teams can align on risks, concerns, and priorities from the start.

“It’s my go-to for when many stakeholders are involved,” says Dave. “It’s an open, accessible way for everyone to get everything out of their heads and align on language assumptions, risks, and critically, the way forward.” 

By framing uncertainties as assumptions, teams can collectively prioritize what needs validation, and create a shared backlog that multiple teams can rally around. “It’s the best tool we have for driving alignment across teams from day one,” Dave says.

Story Mapping 

The Story Mapping template builds on the popular concepts discussed in User Story Mapping, by Jeff Patton. “We wanted to make story mapping as simple and accessible as possible,” says Dave. 

Hyperact’s approach helps teams build a shared understanding of the product, clarify what’s essential, and break work into manageable slices. It makes prioritization intuitive — focusing on what meets user needs, surfacing dependencies, and shaping how teams collaborate — without unnecessary complexity.

Service Blueprint 

As a broader, systems-thinking approach, the Service Blueprint template focuses closely on how users interact with a product. The framework maps the entire end-to-end process, including each behind-the-scenes step that impacts delivery.

“Some of the biggest opportunities aren’t at the usual customer touchpoints but in the hidden operational layers where the real challenges and wins lie,” says Dave. 

Dave used this approach when working with car retailer Cinch to align many teams around a single blueprint in Miro. By doing so, they created a shared reference point for the whole organization, be it product engineering, operations, or customer support. Dave adds, “We even held regular sessions where product managers walked through their areas. Just that ceremony alone was transformational.” 

Cross-team collaboration thrives when everyone understands the bigger picture and has what they need to move forward. “A team can have the best direction in the world, but if they don’t have the right tools or the ability to make decisions quickly, progress will stall,” says Dave. One way to reinforce strategic clarity is by using a Decision Stack — a light framework that helps teams understand where they’re heading, why it matters, and how to make aligned decisions.

“You don’t need a perfect strategy — just a simple, structured way for teams to connect their work to the bigger picture.”

Using cross-functional collaboration as a foundational pillar for successful innovation is a value that Hyperact and Miro share. High-performing teams don’t wait for perfect conditions; they align, iterate, and push forward together. When collaboration is effortless, innovation becomes inevitable. 

This month, we’re introducing powerful new integrations and updates designed to make your workflows smoother, your collaboration sharper, and your creativity limitless. From AI-powered mood boards to upgraded templates and doc enhancements, these updates help you work smarter, not harder.

Want to take your Miro expertise even further? Join us at Powering Innovation in Miro to get practical strategies, hear from the teams shaping Miro’s future, and be the first to see new features that will transform how you manage projects—from start to finish.

Let’s dive in!

Integrations

Amazon Bedrock integration

Transform your mood and story board creation process with Miro’s new Amazon Bedrock integration. Generate custom images directly within Miro boards using simple text prompts, eliminating the need to search for and import images manually. 

Want to iterate quickly? Break down your prompts into multiple sticky notes and easily modify specific elements to refine your images. Whether you’re in game development, cloud architecture, or industrial design, this powerful AI integration helps you create and refine images faster than ever.

Adobe Express integration (Beta)

Transform your creative process with the Adobe Express integration for Miro. Access Adobe Express’s powerful design tools directly within your Miro boards, enabling your entire team to collaborate on creative assets in context. 

Convert images into editable Adobe Express projects, leverage Adobe Express templates and design elements to maintain brand consistency, and provide feedback – all without leaving Miro. The integration empowers designers to set up templates and guide the creative process, while allowing all team members to contribute ideas and iterate quickly. With Adobe Express in Miro, you can keep your creative projects organized and accelerate the journey from concept to completion.

New template library and Intelligent Templates

We’ve reworked all templates in our library with a new design language, making it easier to use and fit in your workflow. We’re also introducing a set of new widgets to all of them, including Dot Voting and the People Widget, so you can collaborate with your team and streamline your workflow.

This update also brings a new batch of Intelligent Templates, including a full SAFe methodology pack and daily sync templates. These templates are designed to streamline your workflows and boost engagement with Miro AI, Sidekicks, interactive tools, new Widget SDK items, and integrated video calls.

Spaces, Docs and Stickies updates

Team picker improvements for Spaces

Spaces is your reimagined dashboard and sidebar for seamless, contextual and hierarchical content management across multiple boards. For a smoother team management experience, we’ve updated the team picker to a drop down selection. Now, you can pin teams and drag-and-drop them to define a custom order. Organizing your Spaces has never been easier.

Docs updates

Here are some small updates that make a big difference to your experience using Docs:

• Support for multiple widgets: Users can now drag and drop Grids, Synced Copies and Code block in a doc.
• User mentions: Users can now mention other users within docs, similar to the board mentions.

Sticky stacks update

Sticky stacks make collaborating and brainstorming smooth and easy for your team. You can now make your sticky notes wider and choose from small, medium, or large sizes for your Sticky Stack.

Performance update

Quill update

The text editing library has been upgraded to a modern version of Quill, improving performance, fixing bugs, and enhancing support for Korean and Japanese text entry. Formatting no longer carries over to new lines automatically, improving the text editing performance.

The biggest performance boost large boards have ever seen

Big boards, big ideas—but navigating them shouldn’t feel like a workout. That’s why we’ve optimized how we process board updates, making panning and zooming up to 2x faster on large boards.

By streamlining how Miro renders and refreshes visuals, we’ve eliminated unnecessary processing, ensuring every movement feels smoother and more responsive. And the bigger the board, the bigger the improvement—so whether you’re building a complex product roadmap, analyzing a detailed research synthesis, or orchestrating a company-wide planning session, you’ll experience less lag, faster interactions, and a more seamless workflow, even on the most intricate projects.

Move freely, think big, and let your ideas flow!

Stay tuned for March!

And that’s a wrap on this month’s updates! With new integrations, smarter templates, and enhanced collaboration features, Miro keeps evolving to support the way you work.Looking for even more ways to level up your workflows? Register for Powering Innovation in Miro to gain expert insights, see what’s coming next, and get your questions answered live. We can’t wait to see you there!

Agility is critical in Agile product management. It’s right there in the name. Teams need to be able to align on plans and priorities, execute at speed and scale, and then be able to adapt in-flight as situations and priorities evolve. To make that possible, Agile teams need visual product roadmaps.

By combining visual clarity with real-time updates, these dynamic tools keep your product strategy flexible and engaging, and help your teams adjust to shifting priorities while collaborating seamlessly across departments.

Below, we’ll explore what visual product roadmaps are, and why they’re critical to Agile teams’ success. 

What are visual product roadmaps? 

A visual product roadmap is an important tool in the Agile methodology that offers a dynamic, graphical representation of a product’s development plan. It outlines key milestones, features, and development timelines. 

By using timelines, milestones, icons, and color coding, visual product roadmaps help to simplify complex information, promote collaboration, and allow teams to quickly understand and adjust to new priorities. This makes it easier for Agile teams to align on goals, prioritize tasks, and communicate effectively with stakeholders. 

For example, Agile teams might use a feature roadmap to outline upcoming product features, a release roadmap to coordinate launch timelines, or a strategic roadmap to align initiatives with long-term goals. Each type provides clarity while supporting the flexibility needed for iterative development.

The collaborative and dynamic nature of visual product roadmaps means that teams can easily update and adapt them as priorities and timelines change. This is a distinct feature from traditional, text-based roadmaps, which tend to be more static and less accommodating to changes. 

The diagram below illustrates the similarities and differences between visual and text-based product roadmaps. 

Visual vs. text-based product roadmaps
Visual roadmaps	Commonalities	Text-based roadmaps
Format: Dynamic, graphical representation (e.g., Gantt charts, timelines, boards) Key elements: Color-coded milestones, visual task dependencies, themes Strengths: Easy to understand at a glance, promotes team alignment Weaknesses: Can be oversimplified without proper detail management	Both aim to communicate product strategy and milestones Require regular updates to stay effective Provide a shared reference for development teams and stakeholders	Format: Static, document-style (e.g., spreadsheets or bullet lists) Key elements: Text-heavy descriptions of tasks, timelines, and milestones Strengths: Detailed and comprehensive, ideal for documentation Weaknesses: Hard to digest quickly, prone to misalignment without regular updates

How to visualize product roadmaps: key components

Clarity and alignment are the two main priorities for visual product roadmaps. To achieve both, project leads should focus on selecting the format and visual components that will most effectively communicate scope, priorities, progress, and dependencies. 

Regardless of the type of visual roadmap you’re using, here are some important components to consider: 

• Timelines. Establish clear timeframes for milestones, releases, and initiatives. Use tools like Kanban tool or project timeline views to show progress and keep teams on track.
• Themes. Organize tasks under broad goals, such as “Improve User Experience” or “Expand Market Reach,” to align efforts with strategic priorities and simplify decision-making.
• Milestones. Highlight major achievements or deadlines, such as product launches or feature updates, using distinct icons or markers to make them easily identifiable.
• Initiatives and epics. Group related features or tasks under larger efforts to visualize scope and dependencies. Swimlane diagrams or labeled sections can help define these areas.
• Dependencies. Use arrows or lines to demonstrate how tasks and teams are interconnected. This helps identify bottlenecks and streamline project handoffs.
• Color coding and icons. Apply colors to differentiate priorities, task status, or ownership. Icons add visual cues that guide stakeholders through the roadmap easily.

By using the right foundational template  and incorporating these visual elements, your visual product roadmap will become a powerful tool that not only displays progress, but also enhances collaboration, keeps stakeholders aligned, and ensures smooth execution of your product strategy. 

Effective visual product roadmaps start with selecting the right templates and visual elements to enable clarity, collaboration, and adaptability. Different formats work better for different teams and project sizes, so it’s important to evaluate your needs and workflow before committing to a specific tool or template.

Here are some tips to guide you: 

• Determine the roadmap’s purpose. For example, determine if your roadmap should focus on high-level strategic planning for executives, or detailed task-level tracking for development teams. Strategic overviews benefit from timeline-based visuals, while Agile teams may prefer swimlane formats or Kanban boards.
• Consider the features you’ll need. For example, if you’re tracking milestones, deadlines, or dependencies, opt for timelines. For cross-functional collaboration, look for templates that highlight task ownership and team dependencies.
• Evaluate ease of use. Choose a visualization tool or template with an intuitive interface and customizable elements, such as drag-and-drop functionality, to minimize setup time and learning curves.
• Assess cost and scalability. Ensure the tool or template can scale as your organization grows, and can adapt to evolving product development needs without loss of functionality or becoming cost-prohibitive. 
• Prioritize integration capabilities. Look for tools that can integrate seamlessly with the tools you already use to manage your product development projects and communicate with stakeholders in your company. 
• Test and gather feedback. Involve your team in testing different options to find the tool and template that supports collaboration and keeps everyone on the same page.

By selecting a scalable, user-friendly visualization tool, your product roadmap will effectively guide teams, maintain alignment, and adapt as your organization evolves.

Try these Miro tools to create an engaging visual product roadmap

Miro offers a variety of templates and native features to help you create visual product roadmaps and boost collaboration. 

Some examples include: 

• Product development roadmap template. Align cross-functional teams around key milestones and deliverables.
• Roadmap planning template. Quickly create timelines and visualize dependencies with drag-and-drop elements.
• Agile product roadmap template. Use this for iterative development and dynamic updates in Agile workflows.
• Integrations with project management tools. Connect with Jira, Azure DevOps, and other tools for real-time updates and streamlined collaboration.
• Meeting and collaboration features that allow teams to work on and with product roadmap documents live or async.  

5 pitfalls (and best practices to avoid them)

Even the most well-design visual product roadmaps sometimes don’t quite hit the mark. They might be misaligned with the team’s work style, missing key pieces of information, or lack the needed specificity to keep everyone on the same page throughout a project. 

To ensure you create impactful roadmaps, it’s important to understand these potential pitfalls, and apply some best practices to avoid them.

Here are five to keep in mind. 

1. Overloading with details. Including too much information in a product roadmap can overwhelm your audience and obscure the roadmap’s core message. Instead, only include important milestones and high-priority tasks. Use concise labelling and clear, simple descriptions to make the roadmap accessible to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. 
2. Ambiguous timelines. Roadmaps need to be precise and clear. Creating vague or inconsistent timelines hinders this requirement, causing confusion and slowing down progress. To keep timelines clear, be sure to use exact dates and timeframes for each major project phase. Visual tools like Kanban boards or timelines views help teams easily understand work periods, and where they are within a specific time period. 
3. Choosing the wrong visualization tool. Not all tools fit all needs. Using the wrong tool, template, or features that don’t align with your team’s needs and workflows can lead to inefficiencies. It’s important to select a roadmap tool that aligns with your team’s workflows, offer intuitive and user friendly designs and interfaces, and integrates with mission critical tools that you use to plan, execute, and track tasks. 
4. Neglecting regular updates. Roadmaps are rarely set in stone. They adapt and evolve as the project progresses. Failing to update your roadmap as these changes happen means they will quickly become outdated and unreliable for the project team. To mitigate against this risk, schedule regular roadmap review meetings to reflect on new priorities and track ongoing progress. Adapt the roadmap as changes occur and tasks are completed. 
5. Limited stakeholder input. Roadmaps should never be created in isolation—especially if that isolation excludes important product stakeholders. This causes teams to miss critical insights and needs for the product, and may ultimately cause them to work on the wrong tasks. Involve stakeholders early and often. Collect feedback from product, development, marketing, and leadership teams to ensure the roadmap reflects shared goals and stays relevant.

By staying aware of these pitfalls and following these best practices, you’ll create a clear, engaging visual product roadmap that supports better decision-making and keeps teams aligned—no matter how quickly priorities shift.

Stay agile with visual product roadmaps 

Visual product roadmaps keep your team aligned, adaptable, and ready to respond to change. By embracing clarity, collaboration, and flexibility — facilitated through dynamic visualization tools — you can create a roadmap that evolves with your product and helps you overcome any curveball that might come your way during an Agile project.

Sprints get all the attention in Agile project management, and with good reason. That’s when all the work gets done. Ideas become features, and features converge into products. But there’s a step before the Sprint that makes this all possible: the backlog refinement meeting.

Below, we’ll explore the unsung hero that is the backlog refinement meeting, and offer some insights into how to make yours successful. 

The basics of backlog refinement 

Backlog refinement — aka backlog grooming — is a part of Agile product management cycles where teams collaborate to ensure that the product backlog for the upcoming Sprint cycle is clear, prioritized, and actionable. 

This process involves close collaboration among all Scrum team members, as they come together to analyze user stories, estimate effort, gain a shared understanding of the work to be done, shortlist and re-order key tasks, and align on project goals. 

By doing this before each Sprint cycle, teams can expedite and improve their task planning process, reduce scope creep, and ensure that high-value tasks are ready for development in a timely manner. 

What is a product backlog? 
A product backlog is a prioritized list of tasks, features, and requirements that serves as the single source of truth for Agile teams. It guides development efforts toward project goals.

Key components of an effective backlog refinement meeting

Backlog refinement meetings are Scrum events that ensure the product backlog is organized, actionable, and align with project goals. 

To accomplish this, they need to include the following key components: 

• A clear agenda that outlines meeting objectives and prioritizes high-value backlog items to keep discussions focused and efficient​​.
• Scrum team participation, including the product owner, Scrum master, developers, and stakeholders.
• Collaborative task prioritization based on business value, risks, and dependencies to align with project objectives​​.
• Task estimation exercises to collaboratively assess effort and complexity.
  • Popular techniques include planning poker — an interactive, consensus-driven method where team members estimate effort by “playing” numbered cards as a way of measuring the overall effort, risk, and complexity required to complete a task​​.
• A Definition of Ready (DoR) that dictates which backlog items are ready to be included in the upcoming Sprint​.
• Collaboration tools like digital boards or templates to organize and track updates in real time​​.

Like all Scrum events, backlog refinement meetings are all about collaboration, alignment, and open communication. The meeting structure, team engagement techniques, and collaboration tools should all help teams accomplish this goal.

What to include in the agenda for a backlog refinement meeting 

Nobody likes a meeting without an agenda. That’s especially true for backlog refinement meetings. These are events that require tight scheduling and structured collaboration so that the team can come to a clear consensus on the next Sprint cycle. A well-structured agenda ensures a productive backlog refinement meeting by keeping discussions focused, and outcomes clear and actionable.

Here’s what to include in your agenda, along with recommended timelines. 

1. Opening (5 minutes): Begin with a quick overview of the agenda and set expectations for the meeting’s outcomes. Clearly state the purpose of the session.
2. Backlog review (15 minutes): Review existing backlog items to ensure they’re relevant, clear, and detailed. Update descriptions, refine user stories, and remove any outdated or unnecessary tasks.
3. Prioritization (20 minutes): Reorder backlog items based on value, dependencies, risks, and alignment with project goals. Focus on identifying the highest-impact tasks for the team to address.
4. Estimation (20 minutes): Collaboratively assign effort estimates to backlog items using techniques like planning poker or story points. 
5. Discussion of new items (15 minutes): Introduce new backlog items or user stories, define their scope, and evaluate their importance. Determine their potential inclusion in the upcoming Sprint.
6. Action items and closing (5 minutes): Summarize the key decisions made during the meeting, review any remaining questions, and confirm next steps. Outline preparation tasks for the next backlog refinement session to ensure continuous progress.

If all goes well, the Scrum team will have a clear and actionable list of tasks to complete in the upcoming Sprint. 

How long should a backlog refinement meeting be? 
Backlog refinement meetings should typically last one to two hours — and be held once per Sprint — to ensure enough time for meaningful discussions without causing fatigue​​. 
If meetings regularly go longer, you may want to consider reducing the number of tasks you assess, and splitting them out into multiple Sprint cycles. 

5 pitfalls to avoid during backlog refinement 

Even with a backlog refinement meeting agenda in place, things can go awry. It’s easy to lose focus in meetings, or fail to establish consensus on what comes next.

Here are five common pitfalls that can lead to backlog meeting failure: 

• Lack of preparation. Team members may attend without reviewing the backlog or understanding priorities, both of which can lead to unproductive discussions​.
• Overloading the agenda. Trying to tackle too many items in one session results in rushed decisions and lower-quality refinement​​.
• Unclear objectives. Without clear goals for the meeting, discussions can become unfocused, leading to misalignment and wasted time​.
• Excluding key stakeholders. Not involving the product owner, Scrum master, or development team limits the scope of the conversation, and doesn’t allow for the diverse input needed to make business-informed decisions. 
• Ignoring time limits. Allowing meetings to run too long reduces team engagement and creates fatigue, undermining productivity​​.

While there are quite a few hurdles here, the good news is that there are meeting management tools and techniques available to help make sure things don’t go wrong. 

Best practices for facilitating backlog refinement meetings

An effective backlog refinement meeting requires two key things: preparation and active engagement. 

Here’s how to achieve both: 

• Think ahead. Make sure you, and all participants, are well-prepared before the meeting starts. Share the agenda, prioritized backlog items, and supporting materials with participants before the meeting to maximize readiness and focus​​. Let them know what to expect and what their roles are. 
• Set time limits for key parts of the discussion. Stick to the timelines outlined in the agenda, and use timers or alarms to ensure that you don’t go over time. Designate a meeting facilitator — usually the Scrum Master — to keep the conversation on track. 
• Encourage and actively facilitate participation. The Scrum Master’s job is to create an open environment where all team members feel comfortable contributing ideas and raising questions. 
• Break down complex tasks. Guide the team in splitting large and complex tasks into smaller and more actionable jobs to be done. This improves clarity, helps to establish responsibility, and makes the product backlog more manageable. 

These best practices, used in combination with the right tools, will help to foster collaboration, efficient decision-making, and alignment during backlog refinement sessions. 

Manage your backlog refinement meetings with Miro

If backlog refinement meetings are the unsung heroes in Agile product management, then tooling is the unsung hero in backlog refinement meetings. Tools, like Miro, enable the collaboration and efficiency that teams need to effectively audit, refine, and scope their upcoming Sprint cycles. 

Miro, for example, helps to facilitate backlog refinement meetings by providing collaborative tools like digital boards, estimation templates, meeting management tools, and visuals aids. 

Try Miro’s product backlog template

Scrum Masters can use Miro to plan and facilitate backlog refinement meetings, capture ideas and feedback during the live session, and turn outcomes into actionable tasks. Plus, an integration with Jira ensures that teams can push to-dos from Miro into the project management tools that power their day-to-day production cycle. 

So while Sprints get all the glory in Agile product management, none of the amazing outcomes from these work cycles would be possible without a backlog refinement meeting, and the tools and processes that power them.

After first connecting at an Agile training course in Malta, we made a deal to form a learning organization for two to drive our personal development. To push through the discomfort of trying something new, we started with a small, but meaningful, experiment to post on Linkedin once per week for a year.

We managed to stick to it, publishing more than 52 posts in that first year. The positive response we received to our experiment led us to discover the power of visuals and, ultimately, unlock our mission: creating The Visual Agile Coach.

We started speaking at conferences and on podcasts, collaborating on projects with Linkedin thought leaders, hosting workshops, and eventually, we secured a book deal, leading to the Visual Agile Coach Playbook.

This Playbook captures key learnings from our ongoing Visual Agile Coaching journey about how visuals can truly spark engagement and make the workplace a fun and productive place to be. Such insights are particularly useful in today’s workplace, where teams are distributed around the world, often working asynchronously across time zones.

In this article, we’ll highlight specific tools (templates) from the book that leaders, teams, and individuals can use to reduce the “distance” between colleagues, stay engaged, get involved, and reach their goals. Our goal with each template is to help maximize your time — by, for example, ensuring that each meeting is as worthwhile and useful for each person as possible (and that each meeting, indeed, needs to be a meeting!). It’s also to help individual workers discover their own strengths and skills, so that they can bring their best selves to work every day, ensuring that the team environment empowers them to do their best work. 

The Visual Agile Coach Playbook features over 25 tools that comprise the Toolkit, which is designed to promote engagement in the modern workplace. The “tools” are much more than just fill-in-the-blank templates — they offer a range of resources from quick tips to case studies, explainers, and visuals to help you make the most of them.

Below, we’ll dive into 15 tools from the Toolkit that we’ve recreated in Miro because of how they help inspire teams to work better together and enable individuals to figure out how they can bring their best selves to work, too. 

For individual information workers

1. The Personal Growth Rocket

Inspired by the Learning Zone Model, the Personal Growth Rocket follows the trajectory of comfort, fear, learning, and growth, helping you focus on your strengths and not your weaknesses. By encouraging you to identify your passions, interests, skills, and hobbies, it’ll help you boost your positivity, break out of your comfort zone, and achieve your ambitions.

What makes it different from many personal development plans is that it focuses on what you are good at, not what you’re inexperienced or disinterested in. What’s more, it can work for self-coaching for an individual or at the team level. 

2. The 4 Dimensions of Me

This is a bright but simple tool for a complicated subject: ourselves! Inspired by the Wheel of Life and the Johari Window, The 4 Dimensions of Me tool helps individuals and teams navigate the tricky topic of figuring out what they want to share about themselves with teammates. 

In fact, being told to bring your full self to work can create pressure — even if it’s meant to be a positive thing. Maybe there are things people aren’t ready to share. Our tool encourages authenticity and psychological safety, as users can create a wheel with items in the open (choose what to share), closed (choose what not to share), obvious, and “I’ll tell them when I’m ready” sections. 

3. The Personal Development Canvas

We love canvases, so we wanted to create one that was unique, simple, useful, and inspiring. Use our Personal Development Canvas to logically set out all the components of your personal development, piecing them together into a comprehensive big picture

While some canvases have a fixed layout, this one can be tailored to your needs. You can use it at any time, whether you’re starting a new job, learning a new skill, or just want to reprioritize your current responsibilities. Across the top is a timeline or roadmap; the middle is your “why” or mission; the left is your plan; and the right is how you’re going to get there. It’s truly up to you to shape and adapt how you wish. 

4. Traffic Jam Backlog

This tool was inspired by the phrase “go slower to move faster” and the 8 Different Ways to Organise Your Backlog template from Anthony Murphy, product coach and Founder at Product Pathways.

It’s human nature to try to do too much, too soon, and all at once. In doing so, work can slowly grind to a halt like a motorway in rush hour. To ensure work flows smoothly, sometimes the best thing to do is less (all at once and at the same time). The Traffic Jam Backlog enables individuals to visualize the volume of their work and determine which tasks to prioritize or park for now.

5. The Piste Map for Growth

At the heart of the Visual Agile Coach Toolkit is the Agile Growth Mindset, a quest for continual learning and development. The Piste Map for Growth, just like a real piste map, provides structure for progression, from green run novice to off-piste mastery — in whatever field you choose (not just downhill skiing).

We don’t advise throwing yourself headlong down a black run. Instead, use the Piste Map for Growth to plot your development journey with progressive step-ups, requiring new skills, new experiences, and ever greater proficiency.

For high-performing teams

6. The Team High Performance Builder

Teamwork is at the center of Visual Agile Coaching and this tool was designed to help teams shoot for the stars, together. An aspirational roadmap, it helps teams define what high performance means to them — and then how to get there. 

Together, you’ll: agree on your high performance mission; break it down into its component parts; figure out your gap to high performance; visualize your current and future states; allocate owners to get to each step; and get working on becoming the best version of yourselves.

7. The Alignment Flight Path

This tool, part of the Team Toolkit inspired by Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development (“the forming, storming, norming and performing one”), is for the “norming” phase, when the team comes together and starts to bond.

We imagined the best form of teamwork — an aerial display team (like the UK’s Red Arrows). After all, who isn’t impressed when the individual planes converge on one flight path in perfect alignment? It’s a feat that requires skill, trust, and practice, and this tool is designed to inspire the same in your team.

8. Problem-solving No Mystery

Based on a well-known board game, this tool helps teams solve big problems with high energy, creative thinking, and collaboration. But instead of a suspect, you have your colleagues, and instead of a murder mystery, you have a problem to solve using teamwork, analytical detective skills, and problem-framing and problem-statement tools. 

Players will learn that problem-solving is much more successful when it’s a team effort. While the game was originally imagined as a real-life workshop, you can take the game online and use breakout rooms and virtual whiteboards. 

9. The Team Reward Staircase

Part retrospective, part learning exercise, The Team Reward Staircase is all about celebrating successes. Because we believe that happy teams deliver better outcomes. 

Whether a task or project is coming to an end or your team simply needs a boost, set up your Team Reward Staircase. It’s still okay to discuss learnings and mistakes, but keep on a positive trajectory. Enjoy positive anecdotes and award some prizes to anyone who deserves (or needs) one! 

10. Team Bounce Back 

Disagreements happen. This is a fact of any team or organization. They can happen within teams or across them. And the worst thing you can do when there’s an issue is sweep it under the rug. 

The Team Bounce Back template is all about uncovering the “why” — the root cause of the issue, which is far more important than just treating its symptoms. When you acknowledge that problems happen, you can start to recover from them, and how you recover and learn from them is what’s important.

This exercise includes Lean techniques, conflict resolution methods, and soothing visuals to help teams bounce back from conflict. Ultimately, it should help you make better decisions as a team and reduce the risk of future mistakes. 

For collaborative, cross-functional organizations

11. Meeting Solar System

We’re on a mission to make all meetings a positive, productive experience, starting with the Meeting Solar System. Because we know that meetings are controversial, especially in hybrid and async environments. 

In your meeting “solar system,” you’ll affix your sun — the purpose of your meetings — then you’ll plot your meetings and assess them objectively: Does every meeting add value?

This gives you a chance to really evaluate your meeting cadence and agendas, ensure that invitees know what’s expected, and make the most of everyone’s valuable time. 

12. The Stakeholder Radar

This battleships-based tool makes identifying stakeholders and assessing their levels of engagement fun!

In our experience, stakeholder management can be overlooked and is often put off to one side for another day. But with the Stakeholder Radar, the sense of playing a game can increase engagement and team play, adding energy to an activity that previously might have felt like a chore. Use it when you’re starting a new project or team to help scan your environment, identify your stakeholders and get them onboard.

13. The Stakeholder Engagement Mirror

The Stakeholder Engagement Mirror helps users proactively engage, develop, and improve stakeholder relationships through empathy. 

Stakeholder management often infers a power imbalance. We try to create more balance and mutual understanding with this tool’s mirror visual, which can be especially useful when you’re moving from stakeholder management to stakeholder engagement, and to make sure that your team’s needs are aligned with those of your stakeholders’. 

14. The Grid Start

Inspired by Formula 1 (and also the phrase “car crash”), The Grid Start helps teams figure out interdependencies and cross-business responsibilities. while avoiding crashes and pile-ups between people and teams.

Its purpose isn’t to create the type of competition that drivers experience on the track each week! In fact, it’s designed to create an environment where everyone has a chance at achieving success and safety; it’s an opportunity to get off the starting line together. 

15. The Diversity + Inclusion Maze

Diversity and inclusion are as unique to a team as the individuals that make up that team. So, it’s important that a team can have open and honest conversations about what diversity and inclusion mean to them.

The Diversity and Inclusion Maze helps teams navigate these discussions and, in turn, boost their performance by harnessing the power that a diverse and inclusive culture brings.

Whether you’re trying to solve big problems, celebrate wins, figure out your north star, or simply understand yourself or your colleagues better, visuals can excite, create empathy, make people think deeper, and ultimately, spark the type of innovation that organizations need now more than ever. 

Olina Glindevi: Passionate about helping people unleash their creative and communicative potential using visuals as a collaborative tool, Olina Glindevi is a qualified Agile practitioner with experience in Agile Coach, Scrum Master, and Release Train Engineer roles. As Co-Founder of The Visual Agile Coach, Olina combines her dedication to Agile with her creative qualities, speaking at international conferences and delivering training to help people explore using visuals in their own Agile practices.

Ben Walder: With over 25 years’ experience as a change and transformation professional, co-founder of The Visual Agile Coach Ben Walder has a strong track record in Financial Services and FinTech. Starting out in project management and progressing through program management to Head of Change, Ben always seeks to make a positive difference for all involved in delivering change.

What makes an innovation successful? The history of innovation is littered with great products that people simply didn’t need or want. From Segways and Crystal Pepsi to a long-forgotten Harley Davidson perfume, it’s clear that creativity and technical ability will only get you part of the way there. True success hinges on your ability to build something that meets an existing problem or gap, and products that fail to resonate will ultimately disappear.

This final installment in our series on the fundamentals of innovation velocity examines why customer-centricity — a deep, data-backed understanding of customer needs and preferences — is so crucial for innovation, yet also so challenging. Drawing on Miro’s ongoing research on the state of innovation, we will show why customer-centricity supports a quick and steady pace of innovation, highlight the top challenges identified by our research, and look at some potential solutions.

Let’s dive in. 

By enabling flexibility, customer-centricity supports speed

In today’s rapidly changing world, customer-centricity bolsters speed through flexibility and is more important than ever. Yet, among global enterprises, over four in 10 information workers and decision makers agree that customer preferences now change so quickly that it’s difficult to keep up.

This poses significant challenges to developing the products or solutions best-suited for today’s customers, since the end goal is a moving target. But this is where innovation velocity comes in.

When asked why a quick and steady pace of innovation is important for their organization, 63% of global decision makers say it enables them to respond quickly to market needs and customer preferences. In fact, this is the number one reason why speed matters to these leaders. And the second reason why speed is top-of-mind? It enables organizations to stay ahead of the competition.

Here’s why customer-centricity and speed are so deeply connected: When customer insights are considered an ongoing priority, teams can keep the end user top of mind throughout the product development process. Rather than being an afterthought or getting lost in the shuffle, customer needs and preferences remain at the forefront. This means that, when disconnects emerge or new data indicates that a product might not be quite right, teams can make the necessary adjustments — and without losing too much time. 

Organizations overestimate their ability to understand customers 

Our first global innovation survey showed that, although 84% of enterprise leaders regard customer-centricity as crucial for innovation, nearly six in 10 consider it a nice-to-have rather than a must-have. This reveals a fundamental disconnect: While everyone knows that they need to understand their customers in order to innovate quickly and successfully, the situation isn’t so simple.

Indeed, our research has repeatedly found that leaders and information workers likely overestimate their level of attunement with customers. Although nearly everyone reports being satisfied with overall levels of customer-centricity in their organization, when we take a closer look a more nuanced story emerges — and reveals clear areas for improvement.

According to our March 2024 innovation survey, only 19% of global decision makers rate their organizations as “really strong” on gathering customer insights — and the number drops to 15% among information workers.¹  Similarly, 17% of leaders and 18% of workers gave their companies top marks when it comes to turning customer insights into actionable product recommendations. 

Overall, global decision makers and information workers alike cite a lack of alignment with customer insights as the top challenge to innovation at their company.² Despite widespread agreement that organizations must foster a culture of customer-centricity, there’s no doubt that many are falling short. What’s getting in the way?

Information workers shed important light on how and when customer insights get lost in the shuffle. When asked about the biggest weakness around customer-centricity in their organization, the top spot is a big one: 34% of workers surveyed say that their company lacks customer insights altogether.¹ What’s more, 28% percent of information workers reported that customer insights are either outdated, difficult to access, or simply not a priority at their company. 

Our research also shows that leadership preferences and customer insights are sometimes opposed, and this power struggle can push the user into second place. We find that nearly ⅓ of information workers say that leadership preferences often outweigh customer data in their organization — and, interestingly, 27% of decision makers agree.

Tools are another important consideration with respect to gathering, analyzing, consolidating, and sharing customer insights across organizations, and our research finds that there is ample room for improvement.² For example, less than half of global information workers agree that their company’s current tools centralize insights across multiple sources for easy access, and only 44% find that their tools facilitate regular feedback from customers. Meanwhile, nearly one in four information workers report that their company’s customer data is distributed across too many tools and is difficult to access. And a company can have the best data possible, but if it isn’t easy to access or use it’s likely to fall by the wayside. 

Three ways to boost customer-centricity now

Although most enterprises aren’t as customer-centric as they should or could be, some small adjustments can improve things significantly. In particular, our research indicates three key areas to examine.

1. Intentionally prioritize and recognize the value of customer data

First, it’s important to gauge how team members feel about the role of customer insights in the company’s innovation efforts in general. Do individuals and teams feel that customer-centricity is a clear priority for the company’s leaders, or are customer insights considered a nice-to-have rather than a must-have? In order to build a culture of customer-centricity, everyone must be aligned on the importance of customer data at each stage of the innovation process.

2. Take stock of existing customer data

Next, consider the state of your company’s customer insights. How does your organization gather these data points and how often? Insights must be accessible internally, so it’s critical to verify whether teams know when, where, and how to locate this critical data. Unless employees have access to customer data, they can’t be expected to tap into them in their work. 

3. Rethink current tools, tech, and processes

Last, take a close look at the tools and processes your organization and teams use to gather and share customer insights. Do team members know where to look or even have access to the relevant tools? Is there a clear process for building in customer insights throughout the innovation life cycle and, similarly, for making needed changes to projects in flight based on customer data? Here, an anonymous pulse survey of your organization can shed new light on how team members really feel about the role of customer-insights in their daily work.

Innovation hinges on customer-centricity

Our ongoing research on innovation reveals that customer-centricity, along with collaboration, a sense of purpose, and adaptability, are the core elements of innovation velocity. When organizations can maximize these four areas, they are able to innovate faster, better, and smarter. 

Customer-centricity seems easy on the surface, but as we’ve seen, enterprises tend to overestimate their own ability levels and sometimes let it fall to the wayside. However, in today’s competitive landscape, you cannot afford to lose sight of your users. 

By ensuring that customer insights are prioritized, accessible, and built into the innovation process, you can boost your innovation velocity significantly — and, ultimately, create products that the world needs now. 

In our borderless digital economy — with digital information circling the globe in milliseconds — it may seem like your data lives everywhere. But in reality, where your data resides can have legal and compliance implications. While data privacy laws mandate how personal data should be processed and stored, they can also dictate where data should be stored. This type of requirement is called data residency.  

Below, we’ll dive into the importance of complying with data residency and Miro’s solutions that can bring about greater innovation in the process. 

What is data residency?

Data residency refers to the physical location where data is stored, including on-premises servers, cloud storage, or remote data centers. 

Data residency has become increasingly important in the past decade with the passage of regulations like GDPR. The main rationale behind these types of data residency regulations is so countries or economic zones like the EU can enforce stronger protections of their citizens’ data — and penalize companies that don’t comply. Because when data leaves its borders, that’s much harder to control.

Data residency can be complex: Here are 3 reasons why you want to get it right

For global enterprises, complying with data privacy regulations is a monumental challenge. According to FTI Consulting, 71% of CEOs and COOs list data privacy as their number-one risk, yet implementing localized solutions is difficult. Complying with a patchwork of regional laws like GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, and Australia’s Privacy Act adds complexity. Here’s why data residency is worth the effort and why it matters for your business. 

1. Avoid legal and compliance issues

Companies must comply with data residency laws specific to each jurisdiction they operate in, which can vary significantly across countries and regions. Companies out of compliance expose themselves to risks, including lawsuits or losing the right to do business in a country. 

2. Skip hefty fines

Fines for violating data privacy regulations can cost companies up to 20 million EUR or 4% of global turnover in the EU or up to 50 million AUD in Australia. The financial implications of these fines are enough for companies to take notice — and take action to stay compliant. 

3. Create trust and transparency

Showing that you have data residency in a country demonstrates that you understand the local compliance environment and are invested on the ground level in that country. This can go a long way in building trust with customers and breaking into new global markets. 

Miro’s data residency solutions

At Miro, we believe that security shouldn’t be a barrier to innovation, which is why we’ve invested in capabilities to enable enterprise companies to safeguard and control their data. Our Innovation Workspace brings the most advanced data protection and governance features —

including data residency — to online collaboration. The benefits bring more control and better performance:

• Miro is designed so customers have enhanced control over personal data stored in collaboration workspaces. 
• Built-in data residency removes barriers to integrating new software into your existing tech stack and gives companies confidence that they can meet regulatory compliance and protect user data. 
• In-region compute infrastructure enables faster performance. 

How it works

Miro’s data residency ensures that in-scope production data, metadata, and backup data are stored in data centers in-region, making it easier to meet compliance needs. We also use in-region compute infrastructure, eliminating the need for cross-border data transfers between in-scope IT elements. 

We’re committed to helping enterprises navigate these data protection complexities with easy-to-use solutions that give users clarity and control over your data. Companies that use Miro for innovation can also implement data residency to meet their needs. For example:

• Miro provides a higher level of control and compliance over your company’s data by ensuring all your board content is hosted in EU-based or Australia-based data centers to meet the highest standard of data residency compliance.
• U.S. enterprise customers can opt to host their data in U.S.-based data centers.
• Companies doing business in Australia have the choice to host all of their board content —  including compute infrastructure, production data, backup data, and metadata — in Australia. 

Prioritizing data residency for trust and compliance

Understanding where and how data is stored in your organization is crucial as part of your security and compliance strategy. Miro’s flexible data residency solutions empower companies to store and manage data in-region, ensuring regulatory compliance while maintaining the trust and confidence of their customers. 

By aligning with local data privacy laws, you can mitigate risk without inhibiting innovation. Whether you need your data hosted in the EU, U.S., Australia, or all three, Miro’s solutions make it easy to protect and manage your data, so you can focus on building great things.

The new year brings new updates to Miro! From new tool integrations to huge Miro Docs updates, these exciting new updates are designed to streamline workflows, boost collaboration, and make projects more dynamic. Dive in to see how these new features will transform the way you work.

Catch-up

Save time catching up. We know how busy you can get, and it can take a lot of time to catch up on updates to your workspace. With Catch-up, you can get AI-powered visual summaries of board changes and comment threads, highlighting what needs your attention so you can prioritize quickly and reduce catch-up time.

Synced Copies

Keep everything connected and up-to-date with synced copies.

Synced copies let you seamlessly embed content, like frames, prototypes, diagrams or docs, from one Miro board into others. When the original content is updated, changes automatically reflect everywhere it’s embedded, ensuring consistency across teams and projects. By eliminating duplicate work and simplifying content reuse, synced copies save time and make collaboration smoother, no matter where you’re working in Miro.

New Integrations: Figma, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and more

Improve your workflow by integrating your favorite tools directly into Miro. Bring Google or Microsoft documents, data from Looker or Power BI, and designs from Figma right into your workspace. With Miro, you can have everything you need at your fingertips, allowing you to get work done faster all in one space.

This new integrations feature is currently beta.

Updates to Miro Docs

Turn scattered content into actionable insights with our Miro Docs updates. We’re making it easier than ever to bring your work together in a structured Doc – helping you to communicate, collaborate and share your work easier than ever before. Here’s what’s new:

• Improved image controls: Images in Docs just got an upgrade. While you could already add visuals to enhance your content, you can now resize and align them to fit your layout perfectly. Whether it’s screenshots or other visuals, your Docs will look polished and professional.
• Drag & drop for tables, code blocks, grids, and synced copy widgets: Seamlessly integrate content from the canvas into Docs. For example, embed code blocks from brainstorming sessions into technical specs or use Data Tables to organize roadmaps and timelines – all with a simple drag-and-drop functionality.

These updates are designed to streamline your workflow and help your ideas take shape with less effort.

Export Miro Docs to PDF

Share and present your work with ease with the new PDF export feature. Whether you’re preparing for a client presentation, a team meeting, or sharing final reports, this update ensures your content will look professional and can be distributed with ease.

This update is designed to make collaboration even smoother and help you easily present your ideas in a universally accessible format.

Custom AI Inline Prompts for Miro Docs

Use prompts to edit, clarify or guide your content with the exciting Miro AI update for Miro Docs. Custom AI Inline Prompts in Miro Docs gives you the freedom to ask AI to do anything you wish with your Doc content. 

Whether you want AI to summarize a section, propose next steps, rephrase content or provide detailed insights, you can ask it to do all of this and more. These customizable prompts fit to your needs, helping your work faster and smarter, without having to leave your workspace.

Text Color Formatting in Miro Docs

Take control of your content’s appearance with Text Color Formatting in Miro Docs. This allows you to edit the appearance of your Miro Doc. Whether you’re highlighting key points or adding emphasis, this feature helps you customize your text for clearer communication and visual impact.

Miro Accessibility: New keyboard actions

Make work more efficient for all users and teams with the new keyboard actions update. 

• Diagramming connections: you can now create diagramming connections using the command palette. This update allows actions like creating connector lines between objects without relying on pointer interactions, enhancing accessibility and enabling diagram creation via keyboard, assistive technologies, and voice control. 
• Resizing and grouping: You can now leverage keyboard shortcuts to resize and group multiple objects.

Whether users rely solely on the keyboard, or prefer keyboard shortcuts to speed work, these new enhancements save time and improve user satisfaction. Learn more about Miro Accessibility.

New year, new plans! Miroverse, the community template gallery, is here to help you hit the ground running. Whether you’re mapping out content, planning launches, or staying on top of team projects, these calendar templates will help you stay organized and focused all year long:

• Kusuma Sukma’s Hobonichi Reflection Calendar is designed to facilitate personal reflection and goal-setting for the upcoming year.
• Keiko Ogawa’s 2025 Calendar can be used for a variety of purposes throughout the year, or copied frame by frame to be used on a monthly or quarterly basis.
• Ellia Colley’s 2025 Team Calendar gives you a bird’s eye view of your team’s monthly milestone goals, time off, and important notes and events.

And why not check out the new offsite planning template from our very own Chief of Staff, Lotte? As part of our How I Do It In Miro series, Lotte shares how you can plan offsites and in-person events for your hybrid teams using Miro – perfect for the new year!Have your own ideas? Publish templates to Miroverse and share your expertise with 80M+ users.

Stay tuned for February!

We hope these new features will elevate your experience in Miro, making your projects more efficient, collaborative, and engaging. From AI-powered tools to seamless integrations, we’re committed to helping you and your team work smarter.

Try out these updates, and as always, happy collaborating!

For years, servant leadership has dominated Silicon Valley. Leaders have been taught to listen more than they speak, empower their teams by stepping aside, and let autonomy drive innovation. This philosophy promises trust, collaboration, and empowerment. And, for a time, it worked well.

But that era is over. The world has changed and today’s fast-paced, hyper-competitive environment demands something different. While well-intentioned, servant leadership slows decisions, stifles bold action, and falters in moments when innovation is critical.

Instead, what the world needs now is opinionated leadership. This is a style defined by clarity, decisiveness, and a willingness to take risks. Opinionated leaders don’t shy away from responsibility, they own it. And rather than waiting for alignment to emerge, they create it. I’m not talking about micromanaging. I’m talking about steering the ship with conviction — especially when the waters are choppy.

The fall of servant leadership

When I first stepped into decision maker roles, servant leadership was the gold standard. I believed that by empowering my team, staying out of their way, and fostering collaboration, the best ideas would surface naturally. This philosophy guided me for years. 

But cracks in the model eventually emerged. As the tech industry grew and changed, small teams at startups disrupted established companies and assumed norms. Employees at larger organizations needed cross-functional alignment, which was bogged down without having a clear decision-maker. Even when autonomous teams converged to a decision collaboratively, they knew that it might not stick without leadership’s backing. 

Brilliant engineers and designers experienced this every day — pouring their hearts into bold ideas that they believed to be high priority, only to hear later from leadership that they didn’t align with the company’s strategy. The promise of servant leadership was falling short because leaders often failed to provide necessary clarity and focus. 

Fast-forward to today, where we’re navigating relentless competition, rapid technological advancements, and economic uncertainty. These pressures demand a leadership style that cuts through ambiguity, drives bold decisions, and ensures alignment. 

Why Silicon Valley needs opinionated leadership now

Opinionated leadership is rooted in action and clarity. Where servant leadership thrives in calmer times, opinionated leadership is built for periods of unrest and uncertainty — like the current moment.

This style of leadership isn’t about micromanaging your team. It’s about owning the big calls, reducing ambiguity, and setting a high bar for execution. Opinionated leaders articulate a clear vision, rally their teams around it, and take responsibility for the risks involved. This makes them significantly more hands-on than a traditional servant leader. 

Traits of opinionated leadership

Opinionated leadership is a skillset. Here’s what it looks like in practice:

• Clarity over consensus: Decisions don’t have to be unanimous, but they must move the business forward. I make it a rule to end every meeting with a summary of our decisions. This removes ambiguity around next steps and gives clarity on expectations.  

• Decisiveness backed by listening: Before making a call, I ask my team to present a few options, including the pros and cons. We discuss them openly. Once I’ve heard every voice, I make the final decision, share my rationale, and assume ownership of the risks. 

• High standards in action: Opinionated leadership only works when you model decisive action and high standards. I recall a Miro summit where an equipment issue almost derailed a presentation. Thankfully, the participants (two senior leaders) improvised a solution on the spot, using the materials available to fill in for the missing items. Leaders need to embody how to move fast and solve problems, because the world won’t wait.

• Empowering within boundaries: Leadership isn’t about micromanaging every detail, it’s about creating intentional limits. I set clear priorities — “We will focus on customers A, not B” — so my team has the freedom to innovate within those boundaries.

How opinionated leadership unlocks innovation

Innovation requires risk, yet fear often holds teams back. In a recent Miro survey, 62% of leaders identified fear as a major barrier to innovation. 

But opinionated leadership isn’t deterred by fear. By owning the risks of bold decisions, leaders create psychological safety for their teams. At Miro, this approach has driven unprecedented innovation.

When Jeff Chow joined Miro as our head of product, he set a clear, ambitious vision: structured documents, AI, and prototyping. By focusing the organization on these three priorities, he aligned every team and freed us to work at our highest potential. The result? The most significant product changes in our company’s history, delivered in record time.

Challenges associated with opinionated leadership and overcoming them

The biggest misconception about opinionated leadership is that it’s dismissive. In reality, it only works when leaders balance decisiveness with listening.

I’ve learned this balance through experience. Early in my career, I hesitated to assert my point of view because I didn’t want to appear controlling. But when I failed to show up with a clear perspective, my team felt unsupported and directionless.

Today, I embrace my role as a decision-maker while ensuring that my team’s voices are heard. I use structured debates, clear priorities, and intentional communication to balance inclusion with action. Ultimately, I know that my team needs to feel confident in our direction in order to do their best work — and it’s my job to nurture that confidence. 

The future of leadership

The world of work has changed significantly since my early days as a leader. Markets are more competitive, innovation is harder, and the stakes are higher than ever. In this climate, servant leadership simply doesn’t deliver the results companies need.

Opinionated leadership is the answer. It’s the only way to move quickly, align teams, and take the risks required for breakthrough innovation. Leaders at every level need to step into their power by adopting this style. 

Leaders, I offer this advice:

• Ask the tough questions: What decision am I avoiding because it might be unpopular or I’m afraid?
• Focus on action: What’s the best decision I can make today to unblock my team?
• Be clear and intentional: What boundaries can I set to help my team focus and succeed?

Leadership isn’t about being perfect. It’s about showing up, making the right calls, and inspiring your team to deliver their best work. The companies that succeed in this new environment will be led by those willing to lead boldly.

At Miro, we’re on a mission to empower teams to get from idea to outcome quickly. That’s why we launched the Innovation Workspace, which is built on four core beliefs, including that security shouldn’t be a barrier to innovation. This belief is made manifest on the canvas, which is equipped with the most advanced features for data protection and governance.

What’s more, Miro is expanding its data residency offerings to help our customers meet the stringent privacy requirements and the regulatory frameworks that govern data protection. Following our successful implementation of the EU data residency solution, we’re excited to announce a new program tailored specifically for Australia.

The challenge

Collaborating across global teams and using multiple services to store sensitive data can make  innovation projects challenging. Most enterprise organizations must comply with regional regulations and internal company policies to ensure privacy and data security standards are met.

When leaders are considering which partners to engage for their organization’s innovation work, stringent data residency requirements and employee privacy are among the main criteria guiding their decision.

At Miro, we’re fully committed to supporting these needs.

Miro’s Australia data residency solution

Our new Australia data residency program is designed to store customer content within Australian data centers. The key pillars of this solution include:

• In-region storage
  We ensure that in-scope production data, backup data, and metadata are stored within Australian data centers, helping you meet your compliance needs around data storage.
  
• In-region compute infrastructure
  We use in-region compute infrastructure, eliminating the need for off-region data transfers between different IT elements. This reduces latency, giving you lightning-fast product performance.  

Learn more about Miro’s data residency and security practices and policies. 

They say a craftsperson is only as good as their tools. The same can be said for a Scrum team. While people are at the heart of a successful Scrum project, they’re only as effective as the tools that drive their processes forward.

This article explains the importance of Scrum tools, walks through best practices for their implementation, and highlights our favorite applications that you need in your Scrum tool belt for better team alignment and product development outcomes.

What is a Scrum workflow?

A Scrum workflow is a structured process that guides teams in implementing the Scrum framework — part of Agile methodology. It’s a series of steps and events that Scrum teams work through to deliver products to stakeholders. 

These workflows consist of defined roles within the Scrum team — including the Scrum Master, product owner, and developers — agile events, and tools that facilitate collaboration and efficiency when working through the Scrum process. 

Scrum events, in these workflows, include: 

• The Sprint itself
• Backlog refinement
• Sprint planning
• Daily stand-ups
• Sprint reviews
• Sprint retrospectives 

Throughout this workflow, emphasis is placed on collaboration and iterative progress toward the project goal. Teams work through short work cycles, called Sprints, to deliver incrementally improved products for stakeholder feedback. 

While the Scrum team is at the core of this workflow, tools play an integral part in keeping contributors on track, aligned, and productive. 

Scrum tools are specialized software applications that are designed to support Agile teams as they work through Scrum workflows. 

They range from tools that help to visualize task boards and timelines, to integration tools that connect Scrum documents to critical operations platforms like Jira, Asana, or Confluence. 

These tools provide essential functionalities for the Scrum team, like: 

• Planning
• Refinement and prioritization
• Task management 
• Progress tracking 
• Meeting management
• Collaboration and communication 

Scrum tools help to align teams around a common source of truth, connect them with reliable communication, offer document sharing functionality, and act as the foundation on which Scrum scenarios are hosted and managed. 

Because of this, Scrum tools play an invaluable role in centralizing work-to-be-done, reducing chaos, and ensuring alignment across the team. The downstream effect of this is better productivity and efficiency, along with clear and transparent communication between team members, and with stakeholders. 

We’ll profile some specific Scrum tools that Miro offers later. But first, let’s explore some best practices and common pitfalls to avoid when deploying Scrum tools. 

Before onboarding a new tool, teams should do their due diligence to ensure that the application will help, not hinder, their existing workflow. The goal is to solve specific problems and enhance existing outcomes, not create new complexities that get in the way of creating great products. 

To ensure a positive outcomes, we recommend the following: 

1. Define clear objectives. Establish the goals and outcomes that your team is looking to achieve, define success characteristics, and identify specific areas that can be improved by new tools. 
2. Vet and choose the right tools. Research and vet various tooling options and select the ones that tick the most boxes on your requirements list. 
3. Provide training. Ensure that all team members understand how to use the application effectively. 
4. Customize workflows. Make the new tool your own. Tailor the tool’s templates, features, and visual workspaces to your team’s needs and processes. 
5. Integrate with existing tools. Connect the Scrum tool with existing platforms to ensure that it plays well with the other critical applications in your tech stack. 
6. Encourage usage. Empower teams to use these tools across all Scrum cycles going forward to ensure that it becomes newly ingrained in their workflows. 
7. Review and adapt. Regularly assess the tool’s effectiveness. Adjust settings or workflows as needed to improve efficiency over time. 

At the same time, you should look to avoid some common pitfalls when implementing Scrum tools. 

Specifically: 

• Overcomplicating the setup. Adding too many features or creating overly complex workflows can confuse the team and reduce efficiency. Start with a simple setup and scale as the team becomes more familiar with the tool.
• Ignoring team feedback. Overlooking input from the team may lead to low engagement and poor adoption of the tool. Regularly seek feedback to refine processes and ensure the tool meets the team’s evolving needs.
• An overreliance on tools. Scrum tools should support, not replace, Agile principles. Overemphasizing the tool while neglecting collaboration and adaptability can hinder team dynamics and reduce overall effectiveness. Use the tool as a facilitator, not a crutch.

Of course, the implementation process for your Scrum tools will depend largely on the applications that you ultimately select. More complex tools — or onboarding multiple tools at once — will likely result in a rockier implementation process. 

Selecting an all-in-one platform that can handle a wide range of Scrum-related activities, however, will make implementation and adoption faster and more impactful. Miro is one of those all-in-one platforms that can be onboarded quickly, and expanded to meet your team’s needs. 

Miro offers a suite of templates and integrated tools that teams can use to facilitate each of the Scrum events outlined earlier in this article. 

This includes an online Scrum board on which to plan workflows and collaborate in real-time or async, dozens of templates for various stages of the Scrum workflow, and built-in tools to effectively manage meetings and track progress toward Sprint goals. 

Scrum workflow templates available in Miro include: 

In addition to these templates, Miro offers native features to facilitate successful meetings at all stages of the Scrum workflow. 

This includes: 

• Workflow status trackers to keep track of tasks, risks, overlapping work, and dependencies. 
• Private mode, which allows Sprint team members to add comments during retrospectives without being influenced by others on the team.
• Forecast timelines that help you visualize an entire week, quarter, or year of work. 
• An estimation app that helps you estimate scope of work, resource requirements, and costs. 
• A timer that’s displayed on screen to keep events within your desired timeframe. 
• A dot voting widget that democratizes decision making and makes easy work of prioritizing ideas, features or tasks.  
• A story point or t-shirt sizing widget to help with high level estimation and driving to a shared understanding of the work to be done.
• A polling widget to get team or stakeholder feedback on important topics or priorities. 

Finally, Miro natively integrates with Jira and Azure DevOps, ensuring that Scrum teams can push and pull task lists and critical information between their core operating tools. 

A company can bring together the brightest and most capable minds they have. But if those people can’t communicate effectively, share ideas, track progress, and establish a single source of truth, it’s very difficult for them to succeed. 

That’s why finding, onboarding, and perfecting the right Scrum tools should be at the top of the priority list for any product management team.