Being remote doesn't mean you have to miss on the collaboration advantages from face-to-face meetings
December 25, 2021

Being remote doesn't mean you have to miss on the collaboration advantages from face-to-face meetings

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Miro

I use Miro with fully remote teams. I've used it in sessions going from two people to over 100 simultaneous users. In Agile events, like retrospectives, refinements, and planning sessions, I take advantage of how Miro allows me to emulate using a whiteboard, and the constant interaction between participants that happens in face-to-face situations. I also use Miro during internal training sessions that require interaction between the participants. Miro is also useful in distributed team scenarios, where we want to collect feedback from team members in an asynchronous way. Lastly, I also use Miro in other situations that require a collaborative effort, like brainstorming sessions.

Pros

  • Emulating a whiteboard in several scenarios, particularly in situations where collaboration between up to 6 or 7 people is required.
  • Integrating with other tools tends to work well. Jira, for example, even includes bidirectional synchronization - adding the link to a Jira issue creates an interactive representation for it in Miro. Pasting website links add a preview of the website with a link for it. Pasting youtube links adds an embedded player.
  • Grouping all the boards that a team or session requires in a single location, due to Miro's "infinite wall" approach.

Cons

  • Tables can be improved further. While this is a feature that has a decent implementation at the moment, it could definitely be easier to use and more flexible - for example, merging and unmerging cells can sometimes be a painful experience.
  • Folders and subfolders are a basic features that Miro doesn't have. While projects allow some form of organization similar to a folder, not being able to create folders and subfolders in a project means that they quickly become a mess if we create more than 7 or 8 separate boards.
  • The user interface can sometimes be annoying to use. It's really easy to misplace something by mistake, and it's frequent that first-time users end up messing up a board without even realizing it.
  • Miro enables us to have collaborative sessions in a fully remote environment without losing any productivity when compared to similar sessions in a physical environment.
Miro is not a perfect tool, but it's really useful. It has a good set of features and, while they have a margin for improvement, the functionality they provide is valuable. New features appear frequently, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing: it's good that we're getting extra functionality, but user interface changes are sometimes questionable. Miro really shines when you need to simulate the classic whiteboard meeting in a remote environment. However, its sometimes clunky and merciless interface can be annoying to use.
Miro integrates well with a fairly decent set of commonly used tools. The integrations aren't perfect, but they provide good functionality: for example, the integration with Jira allows creating Jira issues from Miro posts and creates a visual representation that is kept in sync with the actual issue. While there is still a margin for improvement, both in terms of available integrations and core functionality, what is already present is good enough to cover the basic needs.
Miro enables fully remote teams to collaborate easily, in a way somewhat similar to being in the same room - with added benefits, like integration with other tools. Miro also enabled large-scale events (with over 100 people), like PI Planning sessions, to take place in a fully remote environment without any significant loss when compared to having them face-to-face.

Do you think Miro delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Miro's feature set?

Yes

Did Miro live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Miro go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Miro again?

Yes

Atlassian JIRA Align (formerly AgileCraft), Slack, Zoom
Miro is well suited for fully remote scenarios involving strong collaboration between participants. If it would be a lively discussion around a whiteboard with plenty of post-its in a face-to-face scenario, Miro is a good replacement in a remote situation. Agile events like retrospectives, refinements, or planning sessions, for example, can really make use of Miro's functionality. Miro also works well for collecting asynchronous feedback or for asynchronous discussions in a free-form way. On the other hand, while I didn't notice any performance issues while using Miro with over 100 users, I wouldn't recommend it. Miro's interface still needs some work and new users tend to make costly mistakes by sometimes misplacing something that impacts everyone. It's simply too easy to make mistakes. Even though it supports basic Kanban boards, Miro isn't a tool I would use for tracking, as it offers no form of collecting metrics or reports. It's great for free-form discussions, but it's not a good tool if you need to get something organized out of it.

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