Item: Miro
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Miro

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Miro for planning when mapping out software architectures, its handy to visualise how the parts fit together.

The team also uses Miro on retros, as we're able to use the vote feature to perform morale, psychological safety, and product confidence checks by voting on stickies numbered 1-5.

The product and delivery teams also use Miro extensively for longer term planning and to project the timescales of the initiatives we want to take on.

Pros and Cons

Pros

voting system, very handy for our checkins during retrospectives
comments are good to use for transient queries rather than leaving permanent stickies all over the place
The snap line connector is great for diagramming, it allows you to rearrange things as the system I'm building changes

Cons

Perhaps more guidance on how to use Miro consistently with a team?
I'm not sure if it's already possible, but being able to set a concrete order of a slideshow, at the moment it's done by the arrangement of frames, which means accidental reshuffles can cause unrealised rearrangement of slide order
Better handling of long text, the text box has a limit. Perhaps if there's more text than can be pasted into one, it will create multiple?

Return on Investment

We have had more consistently useful outcomes from retrospectives since we started using Miro to track our discussions. The cadence has also become more consistent as well.

Collaboration

It certainly has enabled us to plan projects and brainstorm with our remote colleagues much more easily than just discussing things on Zoom. Being able to take time to write down ideas and then come to them one by one is much more effective than trying to interject on a call with many people, and makes sure everyone has a change to contribute.

Alternatives Considered

Mermaid Chart and Notion

I've also used Mermaid for creating diagrams, though I tend to use Mermaid when the architecture is more formed up and I want to capture the shape of it in a more concise manner, than can easily be embedded into Markdown files in git repos or on notion. Miro is much better for the initial working out of the architecture however, and is much more accessible to get started with than trying to learn Mermaid's domain specific language. We also use Notion as a text based knowledgebase, which Miro is less good at as you can't group things into pages, and to my experience searching for the right bit of text is less helpful as many things are spread across stickies. It's a different sort of tool.

Key Insights

Do you think Miro delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Miro again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Notion, Mermaid Chart, GitHub

Likelihood to Recommend

It's really great for working out architectural systems, as the diagramming tooling is pretty good.

It's great for collaboration especially in retrospectives and brainstorming sessions. The ability to write as many stickies as we need and then have a record of that is very useful for tracking our concerns and celebrations and ideas over time.

It's not good for text editing, as the text box can be quite fiddly, and there's limited formatting options available.

I would say that it's also ok enough for slideshows, but it does rely on the frames being set up in just the right way for the order to be done properly.

Comments

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A well rounded and useful tool