Of the many challenges of innovation, a perennial struggle is enabling members of a team to share and capture their new ideas so they can build on them collaboratively, quickly, and easily. The need to do so remotely inspired Miro founder and CEO Andrey Khusid to conceive the idea of an online whiteboard platform used for brainstorming, planning, and team collaboration. Today the company has evolved into an AI innovation workspace. In this episode of The Committed Innovator, McKinsey senior partner and innovation leader Erik Roth speaks with Khusid about the problem Miro seeks to solve, the process of scaling the business, and how it is adapting in the face of generative and agentic AI. This is an edited transcript of their discussion. You can follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.
Erik Roth, McKinsey: For those who don’t know, what is Miro and why do people use it?
Andrey Khusid, Miro: Miro is an AI innovation workspace that helps teams progress from the discovery of the project to the solutioning and delivery in one end-to-end workspace. We started 14 years ago with an idea of bringing a digital whiteboard into a browser. We evolved to building the most known visual collaboration solution in the market, and now to building the AI-driven innovation workspace that helps teams build the next big thing. We just crossed 100 million users worldwide—a big milestone for us. We also serve more than 250,000 customers including the biggest enterprises in the world, nonprofits, educational institutions, start-ups, and small businesses.
Erik Roth: Take us back to the founding moment. What was the problem you were trying to solve, and what early design choices did you make?
Andrey Khusid: I was running a creative agency in the 2010s and had some customers who worked remotely. Figuring out how to serve them best was the start. Among the design choices, the number-one thing we tried to do was create a universal experience across different visual use cases. At that time there were many different tools—for making diagrams, for mind mapping, for brainstorming use cases. We wanted to create one universal canvas where you could do different jobs that were all connected.
Erik Roth: What were some non-obvious bets you made in those early days?
Andrey Khusid: A lot of those different tools were “single player” in nature—focused on serving individual users—and we wanted our tool to be collaborative. We didn’t sell individual licenses. The minimum number of licenses you could buy was five. You could use it alone, but you had to buy the package of five licenses. Our goal was to make people understand this was a collaboration tool.
Erik Roth: What trade-offs did you have to make? Do you look back on some of those decisions and think, “I’m so glad we didn’t do that, because it would have taken us in a totally different direction?”
Andrey Khusid: One of the big trade-offs we made early on was not to go into on-premises solutions. When we were still a $1 million business, there was a big customer who offered us $2 million to build them an on-prem solution. We said no because that was not the direction I saw the market going in. I was betting on early adopters of the cloud.
Erik Roth: So Miro was a bet on remote collaboration, prepandemic. What other bets were you making back then?
Andrey Khusid: The main bet was on a visual, multi-use-case tool that’s not limited to one workflow—a universal visual collaboration layer that can serve different lines of business and help all types of professionals do their jobs. Why would a user want to switch between tools and have to learn all these new interfaces every time? So we bet on a more horizontal platform in the visual collaboration category rather than try to go deep on a few use cases.
Erik Roth: That means you needed your customers to adopt the product enterprise-wide to get to scale. How did you do that?
Andrey Khusid: We realized there were a lot of individual users coming from bigger companies. Some were using the free version, and some were paying with a credit card. We had the head of sales start working to pick up those individual users and turn them into enterprise accounts. Then in early 2017, a big US financial services firm asked us to create an enterprise offering. They were undergoing an agile transformation and needed a lot of offices across the country to operate in the same way. That was the only time in the company’s history that I put the commitment on certain features into the contract—I wanted our company to understand that building an enterprise offering is a serious obligation. We delivered, this customer is still with us, and their whole company uses Miro now.
Erik Roth: As you think about Miro’s evolution from a visual collaboration workspace to an AI innovation workspace, what part of the innovation workflow are you trying to solve? Or is it meant to be an end-to-end solution?
Andrey Khusid: Our belief is that every team, regardless of the scope and type of innovation they’re engaged in, goes through the same process of discovering the problem, defining the solution, and delivering it. They can be in operations optimizing a supply chain, in marketing preparing for the next launch, in product management shipping a new digital or physical product, or in services optimizing the service in a bank or telecom company. All of them go through the same process of discover, define, deliver. That is why we believe building blueprints that enable that workflow for the organization is the best approach.
Erik Roth: How did you get people to see the value of it?
Andrey Khusid: We quickly realized that the blank-canvas problem is real for users. What’s the best setup for the type of innovation you’re trying to do? So we created templates people could use to discover which was the most relevant for them; then they can customize it or build their own. That was a big unlock for growth and for adoption of the product.
Erik Roth: Do you find that people get stuck at the concept phase? We often see that conceptualizing the innovation is the slow piece.
Andrey Khusid: A lot of companies are well optimized on the delivery side, with milestones and deadlines. But the majority are not well optimized on the discover and define side. That’s seen as more of a black box—spread across different tools and media—and they lack process around it with defined steps and measured outcomes. I think there is a big opportunity for companies to accelerate innovation and improve outcomes by approaching the discover and define phases similar to how they approach the deliver phase, with clear milestones and urgency.
Erik Roth: How does Miro help with that?
Andrey Khusid: The way every company innovates is unique, so we try to enable people to work in the way that works for them. If they like to brainstorm on physical sticky notes or do offline sketches, they can do it, and then bring it to the platform. If they prefer to do a write-up or a PowerPoint presentation, they can bring that to the platform. We are trying to create that universal workspace where all types of people can come together and make decisions, and progress from step to step. The speed of innovation depends on team dynamics, and we are supporting those.
Erik Roth: Can you give us an example of how Miro helps with innovation? A lot of research supports the idea that creative friction, or collisions of different concepts and ideas done in a psychologically safe context, yields the best outcomes.
Andrey Khusid: We try to create tools to support this aspect of the creative process. An example is the interactive widgets on the canvas. One of the most popular is a spinner wheel that helps encourage sharing. You will have team members who are extroverts or introverts, and especially in a digital-first setup, not everyone is comfortable to speak. Our spinner wheel picks up everyone who is in the board at the same time. You click a button to spin the wheel, and it decides whose turn it is to share their idea. It’s a small tool, but it can unlock major insights and help surface ideas that might not come out otherwise.
Erik Roth: Is there one leadership habit or practice you’ve learned over time that you wish you had known earlier?
Andrey Khusid: Yes, think of it as day-one thinking, a strategic capability that works like this: If I start building a product today, I have to ask myself, what should the project look like? And you try to always work toward that.
Erik Roth: What if that interferes with other thinking? How do you decide to kill a beloved feature or aspect of the product that has been there for a while if it conflicts with whatever the day-one thinking is?
Andrey Khusid: We just kill it. I’ll give you an example. We just introduced our AI Canvas. It’s a new toolbar, a new layout for the product. For now, we keep the previous toolbar and see what customers pick up and adopt. If they like the AI Canvas and it solves their problems better, we’ll immediately kill other modalities that are not relevant anymore.
Erik Roth: Are there any unique rituals or artifacts you use that help encourage and support the way you innovate, bring things to market, and interact with customers?
Andrey Khusid: Yes, one of my favorites is this concept of bringing forth a “bad version” of an idea. This encourages people to show their artifacts as early as possible, avoiding the desire to do something polished first, which can waste a lot of time. Three weeks or months later when you finally bring it to stakeholders, you might realize it’s not what was needed.
Erik Roth: Is there a story behind the name “Miro”? Is it a reference to the Spanish artist?
Andrey Khusid: When we started, we called the company RealtimeBoard because it was an available domain we could get for ten bucks. I promised if the company took off, we’d come back and rename and rebrand it. When we did so in 2019, the agency we worked with came up with Miro, which I loved because I want to provide a canvas to make everyone a little bit of an artist when they do their day-to-day work. If you look at the work Joan Miró created, you’ll see shapes with very special colors. If you zoom out on Miro boards, they also have that kind of look.
Erik Roth: Miro has gone through multiple growth phases. Given it’s a virtual collaboration tool, COVID-19 must have been one of the more interesting times for you.
Andrey Khusid: We were 200 people when COVID started, and we had around five million users on our platform. Eighteen months later, we were 50 million users with 1,800 people in the company. It’s been a massive scale-up. When the pandemic started, we were mostly an office culture and had to quickly adapt to remote-first processes that would allow us to scale effectively across multiple regions and locations. If I could do it again with what I know now, I would build our processes and culture from day one with the goal of sustaining any kind of setup—remote or in-office.
I would also think bigger on the product side. During the pandemic, we suddenly had competitors see the opportunity of visual collaboration spaces and start to offer their own tools, which pushed us to think bigger and innovate to the next horizon. That’s how we arrived at the AI innovation workspace. To do the whole innovation life cycle, we realized we would need to use not just visual tools, but move to structured data, documents, and other formats. We’ve built a whole suite that supports that end-to-end journey. Having competition enter our space has been good for us.
Erik Roth: What’s next for Miro?
Andrey Khusid: We announced our new AI innovation workspace recently because we believe that in the future we’ll need a platform where human intelligence and artificial intelligence are working together. We tend to use LLMs [large language models] now as an individual activity similar to what single-player online gaming used to be. We’re looking to enable the innovation workspace equivalent of multiplayer online gaming environments. We’re betting on team intelligence, where people work in groups and cross-functionally. Right now there is no one solution that supports that group, cross-functional work.
No matter how much you increase individual productivity, time to market and value can only accelerate if the whole team can work together, and faster. That’s what we are looking to bridge—individual productivity gains with the faster and better-quality outcomes at the team level.
Erik Roth: How can that kind of AI-driven innovation speed up time to value?
Andrey Khusid: Typically you start the process of innovating a new product with a workshop that might take a couple hours, and the output would be a bunch of sticky notes. Someone has to synthesize those notes, come up with insight, then set in motion the next actions in the process. That can take days, or weeks in some organizations. By then the energy generated in the workshop has dissipated and you have to get people restarted so they can identify their next steps based on that summary of the sticky notes. That takes another week or two. Finally you create prototypes, which takes another few weeks.
With our AI innovation workspace, we’re trying to enable a process where you condense what can take days, weeks, or even months down to just two hours.
Erik Roth: I can’t help thinking that maybe this is the one place where AI hallucination is a benefit as opposed to a problem.
Andrey Khusid: Exactly. I get a lot of questions about hallucination of the models, and I think that for the discovery and definition phase, it’s a benefit. It lets you explore the edges and come up with more creative ideas and solutions than you can in a more deterministic setting.
Erik Roth: What’s your model of innovation inside Miro? How do you balance top-down and bottom-up innovation?
Andrey Khusid: You need both. We have a product vision led by the product leadership org, and I’m part of that. But there are a lot of ideas that can emerge from the bottom up. We run hackathons every six months, and there are about 30 to 35 ideas in each. A lot of the ideas are so good they’re almost ready to ship immediately, but it takes a few months to build them into the platform.
Also what’s important is how people come up with those ideas to improve the platform. To build that culture, you need people who care about users and customers, who are curious about all that, and who are going the extra mile to serve them and bring their best ideas. Combining those two approaches—a strong conviction where the company and product should go, along with empowering people to bring their best ideas on a regular basis—makes the innovation velocity and quality work for us.
Our general approach is to be forward-thinking and reinvent ourselves before we get disrupted.
In the past, innovation was coming from observations and feedback on how users and customers use your software, but now technology is creating new opportunities. LLMs, gen AI, and agentic technology are offering new ways of doing things that haven’t been available before.
Innovation is a team sport that is broadly accessible. Every human can innovate.
Erik Roth: Before we wrap up, let’s do a lightning round. First, what is the most overhyped innovation myth you wish would die?
Andrey Khusid: That there are only a few people out there who can innovate. Innovation is a team sport that is broadly accessible. Every human can innovate.
Erik Roth: What’s your favorite Miro board to use?
Andrey Khusid: The strategy board. I use it to map everything in my head—all the competitors, the market movements, the research, everything happening. It’s a massive board where all the pieces come together. It lets me make sense of those pieces, to set up the next horizon.
Erik Roth: What’s one constraint that constantly makes Miro’s product better?
Andrey Khusid: We move fast and with conviction. We like to learn fast and iterate. We are not trying to make something really excellent by spending a long time thinking about it.
Erik Roth: Finish this sentence: Innovation is hardest when...
Andrey Khusid: When you don’t have the same mindset across the organization.
Erik Roth: What’s one piece of advice for how people can make their innovation better tomorrow?
Andrey Khusid: Ensure you are in front of your customers and users all the time. It’s not just asking them what they need or what problems they have, it’s observing their behaviors. You need to understand how they do things and what problems they face. Without that, innovation is happening in isolation.
Erik Roth: Andrey, thank you so much for speaking with us.
Andrey Khusid: It’s been a pleasure.
Have questions or topics you would like for us to cover? Please reach out at The_Committed_Innovator@mckinsey.com.
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