How we use Miro at Miro
In the spirit of dogfooding, we use Miro a lot at Miro. We collected some examples of how engineers and team leads at Miro use Miro boards for work and personal projects. Let’s find out the features they use and love, and how you can do the same.
Create a diagram instead of writing too many words
Marta, Customer Support Team Lead:
“In the support team, we strive for an easy and open dialog with users. Besides solving technical problems, we engage also in user education, and we suggest how to conveniently and effectively adapt Miro to specific use cases.
We try to keep complexity to a minimum to avoid overloading people, so we explain many product and technical issues in simplified terms. This approach doesn’t always help solve an issue, because different services use the terms “team”, “account”, “profile”, and so on, differently. Therefore, for users to understand the meaning of each term in our realities, it’s necessary to define each term separately. This took a very long time, and it required constant refinements.
To give a more accessible explanation of the structure and the difference between plans in Miro, useful also to train new employees, we created a Miro board, where we schematically visualized a complex technical mechanism.”
What we used to create the board: frames, sticky notes, shapes, text
Plan sprints
Ivan, Canvas Experience Team Lead:
“We used to plan sprints in Jira, but it took a lot of time due to the complex interface and the inability to see the whole picture. We currently sprint on a Miro board with the Jira integration. We use a Kanban widget, which we break down by day of the week and by team member.
As a result, the Kanban widget holds two types of cards:
- Jira cards: tasks that result in code.
- Miro cards: activities not related to writing code. If the result of such a task is code, the card is converted to a Jira task directly from the board.
If we run into problems during the sprint, we write them down as topics for discussion during our retro. We run sprint retros here. Each team member can rate how happy they are with the sprint, and how safe they feel. If the grades get low, it’s a trigger to discuss and to identify the cause to improve the situation in the next sprints.”
What we used to create the board: frames, Kanban, cards, Jira cards, sticky notes, text.
Get to know the team while being remote
Ilia, Team Lead of the Activation and Engagement teams:
“When the team switched to remote mode, we lost an important part of work: live communication. The conversations we have when everyone works in the same place turn out to have a profound effect on team spirit, attitude, and how we feel about work.
We tried different formats to keep the conversation going: Zoom dinners, online board games, chat rooms. As a result, we chose simple conversations about what we are interested in. We took the popular icebreaker approach, brought it over to Miro, and made it a regular fixture.
On a separate board in Miro, we collect questions that people ask each other in everyday life: what kind of music you like, what movies you’ve watched recently. Every day, before or after a team meeting, we go to the board, pick a question, in a couple of minutes we come up with an answer, and then we share it with the team. We use basic functions on the board: stickers, text, pictures, and tables.
Sometimes, it’s interesting to go to the board and remember who from the team likes what. For example, it’s easier to choose gifts now. This approach doesn’t completely replace live communication, but it brings a remote team closer together.”
What we used to create the board: tables, sticky notes, uploads, text.
Plan initiatives and design technical solutions
Alex, engineer from the Business Logic Core team:
“In my team, we use the board to plan initiatives and design technical solutions for them.
For example, as we start working on a new initiative, we create a frame, add requirements, brainstorm ideas, collect several prototype circuits, and immediately carry out the necessary research. Then, we draw up a table to compare the solutions, and we make an estimate of labor costs. In a separate frame, we plan order and timing of the necessary work. At each stage, other teams can be invited to consult, validate solutions, and gather new ideas. As a result, each meeting is focused, and participants are immersed in the context in advance, or during the meeting.
To draw up a plan, we use the Jira integration, where you can use cards to create a graph of tasks and dependencies between them, adjust it as needed, select the next tasks, and track overall progress. All this information is stored on one board in a structured way. This avoids creating a bunch of documents with cross-references, and the sprint planning process becomes a simple matter of following along the graph.”
What we used to create the board: tables, frames, Jira Cards, text, sticky notes.
Learn languages
Ivan, Canvas Experience Team Lead:
“I’ve been studying English with a teacher remotely for several years. The course is based on Market Leader published by Pearson; it’s a paper textbook with a workbook. We hold classes on Zoom. Previously, each student would open their textbook on the right page, and we’d study the material together. This approach works well for offline classes, but not at all for online ones, so we decided to use a Miro board to make the process easier.
We have a shared board where the teacher adds image and PDF scans of the textbook, as well as teaching materials from other tutorials, if we decide to dive deeper into one of the topics. While learning new material, I constantly use text widgets for notes (for example, I write down translations of new words, or fill out words in crosswords). Right now, there are 4510 text widgets on the board.
In the workbooks there are tasks where you need to compare 2 sets of items. To do this on a board, it’s very convenient to use connection lines (arrows between widgets). To make it easier to navigate, I draw them in different colors.
Sometimes, the teacher adds video materials to the board using the embed widget. All materials are in one place, and it’s easy to find your way around it.
In visual notes, I keep a list of topics with links to frames that I’ve studied, or am to study. That’s also where I save new words to learn.
It’s great that now you don’t need to clutter textbooks and workbooks with handwritten notes; the teacher always sees your answers, and they can point out an error at any time.”
What we used to create the board: frames, sticky notes, text, uploads, connection lines, embed, visual notes.
Plan a major apartment renovation
Ivan, Canvas Experience Team Lead:
“I watched videos, read textbooks, and studied several building regulations for the design of premises. I drew the first version of the design project, then hired contractors to implement the project, and so the fun began.
Because there were so many moving parts, it wasn’t always possible to manage resources efficiently, and some workers were blocked. For example, the guy who was supposed to finish things off couldn’t do the job because he was waiting for the electrician to finish. The electrician was waiting for the plumber to finish. The plumber was waiting for the kitchen to be installed; and the kitchen couldn’t be put in until the floor was finished. Hi there, cyclic dependency. There was also the risk of forgetting to do some hidden work.
I looked at this situation as a typical project with a lot of dependencies, and visualized it as a task backlog on a board using the Kanban widget. I used card widgets, and specified dependencies using connection lines. Then the list of works that were blocking everything else became clearer. So I prioritized these first, to unblock the rest.
Later, contractors began to complain that they were in each other’s way while working in the same room, and that it wasn’t productive. We added colored tags to the cards with the name of the room where work was planned. If a lot of work items with the same tag color are planned for the day, it’s a wake-up call, and you need to reshuffle tasks around in a more efficient way.
We also redesigned all the electrics: we added lighting controls with elements of a smart home (master switches for different rooms, protection against leaks). For the electrician to understand exactly how to switch controllers, I made a diagram for him from pictures, where I drew the connections of switches and lighting groups with the help of text and connection lines. I also highlighted the connections of the inputs and outputs on the controllers, which he was very grateful for, and he did his job without any further questions.
I also kept checklists in visual notes when I needed to buy something, or just to remember to take something into account.”
What we used to create the board: frames, sticky notes, Kanban, cards, uploads, text, connection lines, visual notes.
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