When you face similar problems again and again, you learn a thing or two. The key is to learn from those problems and practice those to perfection. In my early time as Product Owner, I knew what collaboration and trust are, but never worked to build those. These are few things, impact of which you can clearly see whether or not they exist.
In today’s Newsletter, I’ll share - How I used Miro for increasing collaboration in the team ?
I have been using Miro for over 5 years now. You can do pretty much everything with it. Well not code of-course 😀. But you can most of your day to day activities and tasks as a Product Owner. The good thing is, it comes Free with access to 1 board (with few features disabled). That is all you want for a start. If you are happy, go ahead and subscribe.
These are few things you can do with Miro as a Product Owner:
See, almost everything.
If you carefully observe, the support is spread out across entire Product Development Lifecycle. You can use these for your own productivity e.g. Notes, Monthly Planner OR you could use that for group collaboration e.g. Brainstorming, Retrospective (for Scrum Masters), Prioritization, User Story Mapping and more.
Miro improves collaboration by giving the ability to share the board to other team members allowing them to contribute on the board. Making that an interactive exercise. In years, I have used couple of these templates frequently. Let us go over few of those.
Brainstorming
Though you can use that at any given point when you want to get ideas, but this is mainly useful in the discovery sessions. Bring your team or stakeholders together and start using this awesome template.
Product Roadmap
You could essentially be using a strategic tool like Aha! to create product roadmaps. If you aren’t, Miro provides a very visual template where you can create your roadmap and customize it. Once done, invite your team and stakeholders to give an overview. This is immensely useful if you want to publish your roadmap on your product or support site.
User Story Mapping
We all Product Owners love story mapping. It’s very effecting as it helps the team understand the functionality at a high level giving an idea that tasks would be required in the functionality. Here is a great template that Miro provides for story mapping.
Kick-offs
Kick-off is a good stage for a Product Owner to showcase the Product Vision, high level strategy, accountability, goal, risks and more. Miro provides this extensive template to conduct Kick-Off. You can customize the template based on your structure and use.
Breakout Group
Everyone who is working in a remote setup already knows the effectiveness of a breakout session. Miro gets one step further. While software like Microsoft Teams help in setting this up, Miro helps in organizing the sessions effectively. By sharing the same Miro board with all groups and still letting the groups use their own space, makes the process easy and effective. Here is how Miro does that.
So these are a few examples where you can use Miro to collaborate with your team or stakeholders. There are tens and hundreds of templates available on Miro. Get a free account and check those out.
Tips for organizing collaborative sessions with Miro:
Share a link to the board with Edit access, in the meeting agenda.
Write 1-2 lines on how the session will be operated - team can contribute the ideas, everyone can see everything on the board.
Give 2 minutes at the start of the meeting to demonstrate how team can contribute to the board.
Encourage everyone to add their thoughts, inputs and feedback.
If you found this useful, I can help you facilitate product role transitions and coaching. Contact me here.
Nitish
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