Varun Parmar
Varun Parmar is the Chief Product Officer of Miro and has over two decades of experience in the tech industry. Prior to joining Miro, Varun held executive positions as Chief Product Officer at Box and Syncplicity (acquired by Dell EMC) and spent six years in product management at Adobe. He also co-founded Doculus, which was later acquired by Box.
Design Skills
A binary 'high quality vs. low quality' triage of shipped features helps calibrate the organization's taste and standards.
"Our design leadership team does a triage of everything that got shipped into high quality or not high quality. It's just like a binary function... The reason why we believe it's not high quality is be..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Internal empathy is as critical as customer empathy for distributed teams to understand cross-functional perspectives.
"The first one is practicing empathy to gain insights. It's not just practicing empathy in terms of customers... but given our distributed nature... we have to make sure that we actually practice that..."
Regular, informal product demo rituals can spark serendipitous collaboration and solve technical blockers in hours that would otherwise take months.
"We have something called as Miro Connect, which happens every other Friday... you've got a bunch of product teams sitting around tables... and you're going from table to table and you have teams that..."
Leadership Skills
Product leaders must balance the duality of driving accountability among peers while driving continuous improvement within their own teams.
"The number one thing that a product leader on the product leadership team needs to do is drive accountability with others in the product leadership team... When you go back and you work with your team..."
Leaders can build radical trust by soliciting and receiving tough feedback in front of their entire direct report group.
"Every offsite that I do with my leadership team, usually there is a one to two hour session where it is feedback to Varun, and I actually do it openly... I want to show my vulnerabilities to everyone,..."
In competitive markets, the goal of speed is to discover failure points before your competitors do.
"What you want to do is that you want to be the first one to hit the brick wall... speed is something that you should accelerate for the organization... can you be the first one to hit the brick wall w..."
Use the three-horizon model to ensure the team isn't neglecting long-term innovation for short-term maintenance.
"It's like 70/20/10 across horizon one, two, and three. Horizon one business... generally there's about a 70% allocation... Horizon two, which is an adjacent thing... usually that tends to be around 20..."
True product organizations should include marketing and analytics as core members, not just supporting functions.
"We call our org, it's called AMPED, A-M-P-E-D. This is actually going back to our earlier point... removing barriers or silos cross-functionally. AMPED stands for analytics, marketing, product, engine..."
The primary role of product leadership is to act as a rapid-response unit for unblocking teams.
"My fundamental approach to solving that is to ensure that the product leads who are working on these capabilities can instantly raise their hand and call out that there are challenges that they are ru..."
Marketing Skills
A community-driven template gallery (like Miroverse) acts as both a retention tool and a powerful SEO acquisition engine.
"I think the other accelerant in all of this is the templates that we have, in particular the role that Miroverse plays in all of this... It actually got indexed by Google... that was another sort of a..."
Product Management Skills
A rolling roadmap with tiered confidence levels (80% for near-term, 50% for mid-term) balances predictability with agility.
"We have a rolling six month roadmap that gets updated every three months and the first three months of that roadmap, we have a 80% position level... For the next three months... we have a 50% [level]."
View product development as a zero-sum game of 'chess points' against competitors where every release either increases or decreases your relative standing.
"Every single day, every single time somebody is pushing your code to production and you're releasing a feature or an enhancement, you are making the product better or you're making the product worse,..."
A company's growth trajectory is often capped or enabled by the strength and distribution of its competitors.
"The success of a company is a direct relation of what the competition allows you to do. I feel like not many people talk about that, but in many cases in my professional career... every single instanc..."
Formalizing the transition from problem definition (P0) to solution definition (P1) prevents teams from jumping to features too early.
"We have a product process that we follow, which starts with a P-strat, which is a strategy, and then we go into P0, which is definition of the problem, then we go into P1, which is definition of the s..."
A simple, three-part motto (Value, Speed, Quality) can align an entire product organization's performance and reward systems.
"We have a motto in the product org, it's very simple, single sentence, deliver customer value faster with high quality. That's it. Everything that we do... is based on this one single statement and it..."