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.

Whether you are running a design sprint, defining your brand’s tone of voice, customer journey mapping with a remote team, or something else, there are any number of ways you can organize your Miro board. After all, you have an infinite canvas. Possibilities are endless. But how do you know where to start? Should you use a linear, circular, or more free-form layout? How can you use frames, templates, and color-blocking to give your attendees both structure and space to be creative?

The problem of too many redundant meetings isn't anything new. It is a trap many teams fall into, even in the office. It’s the trap of copious no-agenda, purpose-less meetings – and lots of them. But did you know that we’re actually having more meetings since going remote? According to a recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the average meeting count has gone from 5.9 meetings to 6.9. Yikes. Being remote, however, is helping us master meetings in a new way.

Bringing all the right people along the creative journey of designing new web and product experiences is complex. At each step, collaboration is imperative; from the birth of a creative idea, to conducting user research, through prototyping concepts there’s a chance for misalignment amongst the core design team, or with collaborators and clients.

How many of your meetings take place online these days? If you’re like so many of the Miro users we hear from, your answer is probably “all of them.” And, with such a reliance on video calls to stay in touch, you may also find yourself and your teammates struggling with fatigue, dwindling engagement, and a lack of alignment.

Working as part of a distributed team at a large organization is rife with challenges. In this webinar, you’ll hear from three key members of the Mailchimp team – a project manager, UX researcher, and service designer – on how to boost efficiency, creativity, and alignment using Miro’s collaborative online whiteboard.

In March 2020, I had to transition four business classes with over 150 students to a fully online experience, due to COVID-19. Since the class simulates a business environment, I knew I could interact with my students the same way I interact with remote corporate teams, through clear and timely communication. In this post, I’ll go over what worked for me, and give some tips for how you can set your own classes up for success in a remote environment.

As the COVID-19 crisis was escalating in the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) found itself in the midst of a crisis. Some 40% of key NHS healthcare workers had been forced to self-isolate with unconfirmed coronavirus symptoms in their homes, leaving a colossal gap in the workforce at a time when they needed to operate at full capacity. And since the virus was unconfirmed, many of those isolations were completely unnecessary – the result of runny noses from allergies or common cold symptoms.

In February of 2020 the world-renowned INSEAD business school introduced its first course in product management, designed and taught by professor Manuel Sosa and lecturer Ayman Jawhar. Unfortunately, the severity of COVID-19 became apparent shortly after the course began. Like countless universities around the world, INSEAD’s Singapore campus shut down and the new class – and its 45 students – were forced to go completely virtual.

In the new normal of remote work, we rely heavily on technology to collaborate more effectively and re-create the connection of being together. Each of the apps we use is like a virtual conference room, providing a digital space to communicate, make decisions, provide feedback to one another, and update each other on the status of projects. But there’s one conference room staple that’s missing from these tools: the whiteboard.