Tons of post-its, notebooks scattered all over the place, and pieces of graphs and charts with comments, strike-throughs, and editions reappearing here and there. Basically just another day of our accelerator program, – at least, this is how things looked like at Startup Wise Guys back when we weren’t using Miro.
“Since we moved a lot of our operations to Miro, our workspace does look much neater and we are probably now greener thanks to Miro as well”, jokes Lauma Galite, the Head of Product at SWG.
Here at SWG we quickly realized – long before COVID disrupted our offline experiences – that we need a solution that would address some of the biggest parts of our day-to-day operations:
- Facilitate offline and online collaboration;
- Provide more transparency to all the processes;
- Help to keep track of ideas, progress, and results.
From internal brainstorming sessions on what the next accelerator program should look like to managing startups’ sprints, we use Miro pretty much as often as some people scroll through their Facebook feeds.
And as an ode to a platform that we now can barely survive without, we want to share how exactly it helps to manage things at SWG.
Because strategy discussions should be recorded
Each quarter, we gather up our SWG team for a big strategy day where we…well, discuss strategy.
Essentially, everyone is supposed to share their feedback for the quarter: worries, best practices, and other experiences we should stick to, improve, or just get rid of.
Now, if we lived back in the 50s, we’d have a nice secretary who’d be typing up the entire discussion, and then some junior guy/gal would have to compile something out of it. Cons:
- A lot of things can get missed because we do love to talk all at the same time;
- The final draft of the to-do list gets created by one person who passes all the info through their own judgment-check and you might get some distorted ideas.
But thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and many others, we now live in a digital age. So we use Miro to record all the shared thoughts and have a system in place that helps us make sure all the things related to the same matter end up in the same box.
This way, we have a very neat and digestible way of keeping the information and full transparency in regard to further actio
Because startups don’t need another challenge
We also use Miro throughout our accelerator programs. And not just for ourselves – for startups as well. Uldis Zeidurs, SWG’s Chief Geek Officer and a person who deals a lot with our startups, puts it better: “Startup teams are often scattered around the globe. So they need a few things – team collaboration (live editing, audio/video communication, task allocation), nice visuals (either for teammates or investors-to-be), and full visibility over their progress and bottlenecks”.
Miro also helps us build more efficient communication with startups. Time is tight and valuable during each and every acceleration program. So to run better-organized sessions, we have pre-built templates in Miro that startups should fill in at different stages of the program. Once they add their answers, we manage to get more productive discussions.
Live communication is the key
Alas, the pandemic almost wiped live communication from our vocabulary. So, you have to replicate it. And Miro does a heck of a job at helping us create a live communication experience at SWG.
And at this, we’ll send some special kudos to Miro for the following features:
- Video/audio capabilities. We love that we can speak with people while managing things around Miro – whenever we work on our post-its or other projects we keep within the platform.
- Voting plug-in. If the video feature helps us to manage the processes more efficiently, the voting plug-in helps to come to actual decisions. Quickly. Discussions are amazing, but it’s not always easy to get a yes/no from people, so voting really helps here.
