In 2018, Miro was hardly a blip on the radar in the Design world. Fast forward two years, and suddenly Miro is solidly the number one tool for brainstorming and ideation. What led to this sudden spike in awareness and engagement? While the rapid shift to remote work certainly didn't hurt, Miro's relentless focus on thoughtful design and customers' needs helped them build relevant and intuitive products, putting them in position to capitalize on changing work trends.

Recognizing that teams within the same company often speak different languages, Miro enables people to develop a shared understanding. Their collaborative digital whiteboard invites teams to brainstorm, diagram, document, and share their ideas.

Charting Miro's exponential growth

UX Tools administers an annual survey of design tools, which allows us to track Miro's rapid ascent.

In 2018, Miro wasn't so much as a blip on the radar.

In 2019, it wasn't included as a default response, yet 157 respondents wrote it in as their tool of choice.

But in 2020, it suddenly is the number one software used for brainstorming and ideation. 899 respondents said it's their primary tool, while 478 said it's their secondary tool.

That's a mind-boggling 472% growth in one year (and that's only calculating people who said Miro was their primary tool)! Yes, the pandemic accelerated adoption, but Miro had the right foundations in place.

Interestingly, Mural, a similar digital workspace tool, didn't see anywhere near the gains of Miro. Only 34 respondents listed Mural as their primary tool for brainstorming and ideation, while 95 listed it as their secondary.

Clearly Miro is doing something right. Let's dig in and see what we can learn.

What has led to Miro's success?

Customer centricity

Miro understands that deeply understanding customers is at the core of great products:

"We always want to learn from our users. Our users can tell us a lot of important things and we can learn a lot from their usage of the product. We have both a well-defined core audience and main use cases."

Combining customer interviews and product usage analytics creates a robust, holistic, and accurate view of your product. Uncovering feedback patterns across customers and understanding actual behavior empowers you to build useful and usable products. What makes people sign up? What behaviors lead to retention? To frustration? To abandonment? Identifying, understanding, and responding to these patterns can really help scale your business.

Miro also realizes the value of defining and focusing on specific audiences. If you build a product for everyone, you're effectively building for no one. You need to take a stance, determine your audience, and build a product to fit their distinct needs. By deeply understand their use cases, you can provide a uniquely relevant and valuable tool.

Additionally, Miro understands that people aren't static. Industries, roles, and responsibilities are constantly changing, so Miro continuously researches, reviews, and updates their core audiences and use cases.

Intuitive and supportive design

Miro leaned into product-led growth, meaning they needed to create a flexible and accessible product that target users can quickly understand and derive value from. The tool needs to be clear, concise, and intuitive, so users can quickly adopt and understand it, regardless of their background.

Great experiences balance guidance, support, and flexibility, allowing power users to ramp up quickly, while simultaneously providing enough assistance to apprehensive neophytes. Miro purposely provides flexible support, such as step-by-step guidance, navigational assistance, and an array of templates, that users can choose to explore or ignore based on their current needs.

"Miro does not believe in the one-size fits all approach to UX. Every user is different, and their different needs must be met."

After users quickly jump in and use the platform, Miro makes it easy to explore and learn the more nuanced aspects of the tool. They provide in-product tutorials and learning videos to help users become more effective and productive, and they offer a vast array of templates to help jumpstart and inspire users' creativity and ideas.

Freemium business model

Miro focuses on delivering fast time to value — letting the product speak for itself. By making it freely available, they eliminate barriers and invite users to try it out. Once users realize how great the product is, they'll turn into loyal fans, advertising and advocating on Miro's behalf.

When users are able to quickly adopt, experience, and benefit from a product, they'll invite their teams and convince their companies to upgrade to a paid plan. Allowing users to try and evaluate a product upfront builds trust and loyalty, leading to more informed purchase decisions and higher retention.

Additionally, Miro benefits from viral loops. Since it's a collaboration tool, viral loops allow them to expand within organizations. Once they have one avid fan, that fan can lobby her entire team, or even organization, to join.

Miro makes it easy to share your creations and invite others to join your team. As an added benefit, robust sharing helps sustain user engagement and retention. If your team members become engaged, they'll share their work with you, and you'll mutually prompt each other to log into Miro.

As the pandemic winds down, remote work isn't going anywhere. While some teams will return to the office, digital collaboration will still be paramount.

While Miro's success feels like it happened overnight, the company has been around since 2011. They spent time laying a strategic foundation by investing heavily in identifying and understanding their users and use cases and designing simple, intuitive, and supportive experiences. From there, they believed in the value of their product and trusted that users would too. The market has spoken, and for now Miro is the premiere digital collaboration tool for brainstorming and ideation.

Miro has positioned themselves well, but they do face stiff competition. Figma, a design tool heavyweight, recently announced Figjam, their own version of the digital whiteboard, and they're offering it for free for the rest of the year. Figma is also known as an innovative, customer-centric, and design forward company, and it enjoys a dominant and beloved suite of existing design and prototyping tools, which could lure some customers away from Miro. It will be interesting to see how things play out over the coming year, but one thing's for sure, designers and teams are certain to benefit!

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