The conversation about how much we all dread meetings isn’t a new one. There are too many of them. Most of them are colossal wastes of time. Heck, one in three people admit that they’ve felt drowsy or even fallen asleep in a meeting. But, when that meeting is happening virtually and people are only dressed appropriately from the waist up? Well, it becomes even more challenging to keep participants engaged in the conversation.
I sometimes find myself wondering how we’ll remember 2020 when we reflect on it in the future. Will our dominant memories be anxiety and uncertainty over how long the pandemic would last? The grief of losing so many people to the virus? Or the frustrations of canceled plans and events?
The relationships with IT has historically been driven by top-down decisions about which technology teams can (or must) use. However, in this age of remote work, it’s crucial that employees have the technology they need to collaborate and execute from anywhere in the world. To discover what works in this new world of collaborative IT, we spoke to three experts at Distributed 2020: Chet Mandair, CIO of Guidewire; Gopi Parampalli, VP of IT at EA; and Keith Pemberton, Sr.
We’ve all been there. You’ve prepared for an amazing meeting with Miro. The ice-breaker was selectively chosen to get everyone engaged from the start. Each frame was created with painstaking attention. The breakouts organized for maximum collaboration. The board is a work of art fit for a Miroverse template. As you kick things off, you get a chat message asking for the link to the board. Another asking for access because they can view but not edit.
Collaborating remotely has historically been a challenge — and now that so many more of us are home and interacting virtually, those challenges are more apparent than ever. Fortunately, Miro makes collaboration significantly more manageable. Simply put, collaboration is the act of working together to create something. It might be a website, a diagram of some kind, or a vision statement. The key is people coming together to work. But before Miro, there were other ways to collaborate online.
The perfect meeting is an elusive concept. We’re all familiar with the mind-numbing “I talk, you listen” model of the corporate presentation and the chaos of open-ended brainstorms with no clear takeaways. If our calendars are starting to look like brick walls of meeting blocks, this pattern can lead to frustration and burnout. It’s time to challenge the status quo and make meetings more efficient, engaging, and interactive.
During his lifetime, Carl Sagan was known for many things. He was an astronomer, astrophysicist, television producer, screenwriter, and celebrity-thinker who made advanced astronomy accessible to the layman and opened the window to space for millions of people around the world. For those without the time to read one of his books, we can remember him through some of the quotes he left behind. One of my favorites goes like this: “Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others?
Today I’m excited to share that Miro has passed the incredible milestone of 10 million people who rely on our platform to bring their ideas to life. This number represents nearly 300% growth since March 1st, as millions of teams across the world have adopted Miro to stay connected and build engaged, collaborative cultures while working remotely.
Miro pioneered the collaboration market with its online whiteboard back in 2011 (as RealtimeBoard). Early adopters quickly got the benefits of getting together in front of PC screens and collaborating as if they were in the same room, but had trouble defining how to use it for work every day; or, what’s possible, and what’s not? As the solution was completely new, we joined those early enthusiasts in an exciting journey to establish online whiteboarding practices.
I never thought I’d be such a huge fan of team retrospectives. I used to dismiss them as irrelevant for non-engineering teams, or as a twin of the post-mortem (which typically only takes place when something goes wrong, and too often involves feelings of regret and blame). But my attitude changed immediately when I started taking part in retros at Miro.
