In my recent discussions with business leaders across various industries, a common thread has emerged: budget cuts and reorganization. While the COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in hiring and spending, today’s inflation, interest rate increases, and general economic uncertainty are forcing businesses to cut back. One of the most prevalent cuts I’m seeing is around tech stacks. While this might feel nerve-wracking, I see it as a positive.

With a blink of an eye, July is over, and we’re ready to celebrate the most outstanding Miroverse templates and their creators. The competition was tough, with over 180 templates published across a variety of use cases, from roadmaps to retrospectives. Below, we’ll lay out the most popular, high-impact frameworks published last month.

Raise your hand if you’re going on vacation this summer or just got back. Hopefully you raised your hand! June, July, August, and September are the most popular months to take time off. That makes sense; it’s summertime. We’re between our big projects and events. Our customers, clients, and coworkers are all taking time off. It’s the perfect time to step away from work.

On-premise, off-premise, or hybrid software deployments. There’s no shortage of options for companies and IT teams looking to create robust, secure, and scalable networks for their employees and end-users. But with more options comes more research and decision-making, as each choice comes with its own benefits and drawbacks that can impact everything from cost to performance and data security.

A windowless conference room with a dozen people elbow to elbow isn’t the best environment for innovation to thrive. Yet, that’s often where we expect productive work to take place. Many of the best thinkers work most efficiently in deep focus mode, but our modern work culture doesn’t protect that time and space.

AI is already changing how teams work. It can do things like automate manual tasks and find trends in large data sets, just to name a few. But when we talk about its features, most of what we talk about is how it manages our busy work and makes it more efficient. This lets teams focus on building the next big thing. In a sense, it’s like a really smart assistant who takes on the tasks you’ve outgrown. But when it comes to diagramming, especially here at Miro, AI takes on a new role.

With an updated canvas built to level-up your Miro experience, Intelligent Canvas is here to help teams get work done faster and more efficiently. The new Intelligent Canvas focuses on three key areas: Included as part of Intelligent Canvas are several new diagramming updates that will blow your current diagramming workflow out of the water. Think: less manual work, less hacking shapes, fewer complexities, faster creation, smoother experience. Sounds good? Let’s get into it.

As part of the new Intelligent Canvas, Miro users can now generate diagrams from text.

For a decade, CEOs have been consistently concerned that current business models are at risk, while their satisfaction with innovation performance has been low. This growing uncertainty reveals a stark disconnect between the urgent need for reinvention and the underwhelming results. Today, CEOs find themselves wrestling with a tumultuous economic and geopolitical landscape, while simultaneously racing to innovate with the help of new tech, like generative AI.

Way back in 2011, Miro changed the way people work together to build the next big thing by building our own big thing: The canvas. The canvas is an infinitely scrolling surface — a place as big as your imagination — that gives people the freedom to play, brainstorm, and create. The building blocks may have been simple, just a few sticky notes, shapes, and colors, but they inspired teams to dream and experiment together.

Would you rather look at a spreadsheet that has hundreds of rows of raw data? Or a simple and intuitive chart that pulls out and summarizes the key insights? For most people, the answer is a no-brainer: They’ll take the chart over the eye-glazing spreadsheet any day. That’s the power of data visualization.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, innovation is the key to staying ahead of the competition. But focusing solely on acceleration and growth isn’t the solution: As you add staff, partners, and tools, you may be taking on additional security and compliance risks, creating bottlenecks in your processes ultimately hindering your own path to success.

Cloud technology is ubiquitous in modern organizations—in fact, 85% of organizations are projected to be “cloud first” by 2025. But despite this pervasiveness, there is still significant ambiguity surrounding cloud costs. In a recent Cloud Zero report, less than half of survey respondents reported that they have “healthy” cloud costs and 58% said they were too high.

Poor alignment kills projects. In fact, according to a report from TeamStage, 37% of projects fail because of a lack of clearly defined goals, and 44% fail due to a lack of alignment between business goals and project goals. But what if the project you’re working on is really complex? What if you need to align hundreds of team members across multiple departments and timezones — all with their own organizational goals, perspectives, and expertise?

Whether you’re an executive who just expanded your team or a designer embarking on a new project, change—while it can be exciting—is hard. One of its biggest hurdles is aligning multiple stakeholders on evolving goals, messaging, and strategy, a challenge so formidable that it often halts change right in its tracks.

An organizational chart (often called an “org chart” for short) is a visual representation of your company’s structure, including its hierarchy and how departments are connected. In most cases, this diagram is relegated to the company intranet or a random folder. And while you might dust it off for the occasional presentation or update it when you remember, it’s typically viewed as a piece of stagnant documentation as opposed to what it could be: a beneficial resource.

Design workshops help UX teams foster a user-centric mindset as they align and iterate on a design that meets the needs of their users. These workshops require the ability to not only collaborate, but also visualize ideas in a way that can be consumed by development teams actually building the product. Yet not all design tools were created equal. Some tools promote collaboration but don’t allow wireframing, while others are excellent design tools but make it hard for teams to work together.

Curious about submitting your first template? Join us for our next How to Become a Creator training on August 8. You’ll learn about the submission process and what makes a good template, and get a Q&A with the submission review team. You can also visit the Creator Toolbox to learn more.

Companies are investing big in cloud infrastructure worldwide, with no signs of a slowdown on the horizon. We’re talking an eye-popping $1.35 trillion worth of spend being driven toward cloud services by 2027. That’s no wonder, given that 89% of organizations recently surveyed in Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud report say they’ve already adopted a multi-cloud strategy. Cloud is the backbone of many modern organizations.