The recent pandemic has changed the way we work and has forced millions of people to work from home. This shift has brought an unprecedented need for businesses to collaborate virtually. Miro, an online workspace for innovation, was on the front line of this change and quickly grew from 5 million users in May 2020 to 10 million in November 2020. Thanks to AWS, Miro has been able to handle this hyper-growth and serve over 50 million users today.

Creativity and speed are crucial ingredients for innovation; teams must balance high quality work with velocity. However, even with the best intentions and planning, people sometimes experience mental blocks and struggle to execute — resulting in frustration and stalled innovation.

Creating a new board from scratch can be time-consuming and results in a divergence of inconsistencies from the look and feel to methodology across projects. Custom templates help solve these challenges by providing a standardized starting point for your team’s work in Miro.

Whether you call it program increment (PI) planning, quarterly planning for product teams, or even big room planning, the reality is the same: These sessions are complex undertakings, even more so in our current hybrid reality. Every 8-12 weeks, dozens, hundreds, or — in some cases — thousands of product team members meet to to align on a shared vision, pinpoint cross-team dependencies, discuss features, and, ultimately, plan their product roadmap.

Creativity can be scary. Team members worry about being judged for an idea that is too out there, or they might be nervous about trying and failing. This temptation to stick with tried-and-true approaches is kryptonite for creative thinking — and it’s not just in your head. In fact, 85% of CEOs believe fear stands in the way of their company’s ability to innovate. But why?