Quick Answer (TL;DR)
Miro was not an overnight success. Founded in 2011 as RealtimeBoard by Andrey Khusid in Perm, Russia, the company spent eight years building a collaborative whiteboard product that few people urgently needed. Then remote work became mandatory for millions of knowledge workers in 2020, and Miro was the only product that could replicate the experience of standing in front of a physical whiteboard with a distributed team. The company grew from 5 million to over 60 million users in three years, reaching a $17.5B valuation. But the growth was not simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Miro's product decisions in the years before the pandemic positioned it to capture the moment when it arrived.
The Pre-Pandemic Foundation
Before 2020, Miro (then RealtimeBoard) was a well-regarded but relatively niche product used primarily by design teams for remote workshops and brainstorming sessions. The company had raised modest funding and was growing steadily but not explosively.
The whiteboard software category itself was small. Most teams did not think they needed a digital whiteboard because they had physical whiteboards in their conference rooms. The use case was narrow: remote teams that needed to collaborate visually in real time. That was a real but limited market.
What Miro did during those early years, however, was build the infrastructure for scale. Three decisions made during the pre-pandemic period turned out to be critical.
Building for Real-Time at Any Scale
Most collaboration tools in 2015 worked well with 2-5 simultaneous users. Miro invested heavily in real-time synchronization that could handle dozens of users on a single board simultaneously, with cursors, sticky notes, and drawings all updating in real time without lag or conflicts.
This technical investment seemed like overkill when most boards had 3-5 users. It proved essential when companies started running all-hands workshops with 50+ participants on a single board. The product handled the scale because the architecture had been built for it years earlier.
The Infinite Canvas Decision
Most digital whiteboard tools at the time used fixed-size canvases or page-based models. Miro chose an infinite canvas: users could zoom out to see the big picture or zoom into specific areas, and the board could grow in any direction without limits.
This decision shaped how teams used the product. Instead of creating multiple documents for different aspects of a project (user journey, sprint board, retrospective), teams put everything on one Miro board and navigated between sections. The infinite canvas turned individual artifacts into a connected workspace, which increased both the value per board and the switching cost of leaving Miro.
Integration Strategy
Miro built integrations with the tools that product and design teams already used: Jira, Confluence, Slack, Figma, Microsoft Teams, and Google Workspace. These integrations served two purposes. First, they reduced friction for adoption because Miro fit into existing workflows rather than requiring teams to change their habits. Second, they created distribution channels because Miro appeared in the integration marketplaces of larger platforms.
The COVID Inflection Point
When offices closed in March 2020, product teams, design teams, and engineering teams suddenly needed a way to replicate activities that had always happened in person: sprint planning, retrospectives, design critiques, stakeholder workshops, user journey mapping, and brainstorming sessions.
Miro was positioned to capture this demand because of three characteristics that competitors lacked:
Familiarity. Miro's interface resembled a physical whiteboard closely enough that teams could transfer their existing workshop practices to the digital format. Sticky notes looked like sticky notes. Drawing tools worked like markers. The spatial layout was intuitive to anyone who had stood in front of a real whiteboard.
Real-time performance. With entire teams working remotely and running synchronous workshops, the technical investment in real-time synchronization paid off. Competing tools that had been built for asynchronous or small-group collaboration struggled with the scale of real-time workshops.
Template library. Miro had spent years building templates for common team activities: sprint retrospectives, user story mapping, affinity diagrams, customer journey maps, and design thinking workshops. When teams needed to run these activities remotely, they could start with a Miro template and adapt it, rather than figuring out how to recreate their in-person process from scratch.
The growth was staggering. Miro went from 5 million users in early 2020 to over 35 million by 2022 and 60 million by 2024. The company raised at a $17.5B valuation in 2022.
Key Product Decisions During Hypergrowth
Template Ecosystem as a Growth Engine
Miro expanded its template library from hundreds to thousands, covering use cases far beyond its original design and product management audience. Templates for sales kickoffs, executive strategy sessions, HR onboarding, and educational workshops brought entirely new user segments onto the platform.
The team also opened template creation to the community, allowing consultants, agencies, and individual practitioners to publish templates that other users could discover and use. This created a marketplace dynamic similar to what worked for Canva: more templates attracted more users, and more users motivated more template creators.
The template strategy was effective because it solved the cold-start problem for new use cases. A project manager who had never used a digital whiteboard could find a sprint retrospective template, share it with their team, and run a productive session within minutes. The template did the work of both onboarding and activation.
Enterprise Sales Alongside PLG
Miro's enterprise motion developed organically. Individual teams adopted Miro through the free tier. Usage spread across departments. Eventually, IT and procurement noticed that dozens of teams were paying for separate Miro subscriptions and initiated a company-wide deal.
The enterprise sales team did not need to convince companies to try Miro. They needed to consolidate existing usage under a single contract with enterprise features: SSO, admin controls, compliance certifications, and dedicated support. The conversation was "your teams already use this; let us make it official" rather than "you should evaluate this tool."
This bottom-up motion is consistent with the product-led growth pattern: win individual practitioners first, then convert organizational usage into enterprise contracts. The approach significantly reduced customer acquisition costs because the product had already proven its value before the sales conversation began.
Board-Based Product Model
Unlike document-based tools (Google Docs, Notion) or project-based tools (Jira, Asana), Miro's fundamental unit was the board. A board could contain any combination of content: sticky notes, diagrams, embedded documents, live data from integrations, drawings, and images. This flexibility meant Miro could support virtually any visual collaboration use case without the company needing to build purpose-specific features.
The board model also created natural collaboration points. Sharing a Miro board link was the equivalent of inviting someone to a virtual room. The spatial nature of the content made it easier for multiple people to work simultaneously without stepping on each other, because they could work in different areas of the infinite canvas.
Lessons for PMs
1. Build for a Market That Does Not Exist Yet (But Might)
Miro spent eight years building a product for a market that was small and growing slowly. When remote work exploded, Miro was one of the only products mature enough to handle the demand. The lesson is not "predict the future" but rather "build a product that is genuinely excellent for its current market and architecturally ready to scale if the market expands."
Apply this: When evaluating your product's market size, consider what external changes could expand the addressable market. Build for current demand, but architect for potential demand. Use the TAM Calculator to model different market expansion scenarios.
2. Templates Lower the Barrier to Adoption for New Use Cases
Every new template Miro added expanded the product's addressable market without requiring new features. A sprint retrospective template turned Miro into a retrospective tool. A customer journey map template turned it into a UX research tool. A sales kickoff template turned it into a sales enablement tool.
Apply this: If your product is a platform or general-purpose tool, invest in templates and pre-built workflows that demonstrate specific use cases. Each template is a mini product-market fit experiment that requires no engineering investment.
3. The PLG-to-Enterprise Path Requires Bottom-Up Proof
Miro's enterprise deals closed faster and at higher values because the product was already embedded in the organization before the sales conversation started. Enterprise buyers were not evaluating Miro against competitors. They were formalizing usage that was already happening.
Apply this: If you are building a product-led growth motion, track shadow IT adoption (teams using your product outside of a formal company contract). This usage is both a risk (compliance, data security) and an opportunity (proof of value for enterprise conversations). The Product Strategy Handbook covers how to build enterprise readiness without losing your PLG foundation.
4. Category Timing Is Partly Luck, Partly Preparation
Miro's explosive growth during COVID was partly luck: the pandemic was not predictable. But the company's ability to capture the moment was not luck. It was the result of years of investment in real-time performance, template libraries, and integrations that made Miro ready when the market suddenly expanded.
Apply this: You cannot control market timing, but you can control product readiness. Build your product's technical foundation and ecosystem for the market you want, not just the market you have. If the timing never comes, you still have a better product. If it does come, you are positioned to capture it. Like Figma's bet on browser-based design, the infrastructure investment pays off when the market catches up.
What You Can Apply
If your product is in a small but growing market: Study Miro's patience. The company spent eight years building before experiencing hypergrowth. Invest in product quality and technical infrastructure even when the current market does not demand it. The foundation you build during slow growth determines how much fast growth you can capture.
If you are riding a market tailwind: Miro's challenge after COVID was retaining the users who had adopted during a crisis. The template ecosystem, integration depth, and board-based product model created enough value to retain users even as offices reopened. Growth is only valuable if you can retain what you acquire.
If you are building a PLG product with enterprise ambitions: Follow Miro's sequence: free tier for individual teams, paid tier for growing teams, enterprise tier for organizations that have already adopted organically. Do not build enterprise features until you have bottom-up adoption to convert.
This case study draws on public interviews with Miro CEO Andrey Khusid, Miro's funding announcements, reporting from Forbes and TechCrunch, product growth data from G2 and Okta's Business at Work reports, and analysis of the visual collaboration category from Gartner.
FAQ
How much of Miro's growth was attributable to COVID vs. product quality?
COVID created the demand, but product quality captured it. Multiple digital whiteboard tools existed in 2020 (Lucidspark, MURAL, Google Jamboard, Microsoft Whiteboard), yet Miro captured the largest share of new users. The real-time performance, template library, and integration ecosystem that Miro had built over the previous eight years gave it a significant advantage when the market expanded suddenly.
Did Miro retain users after offices reopened?
Yes, though growth slowed from the pandemic peak. Miro retained most of its user base because remote and hybrid work became permanent for many organizations. The product also expanded beyond remote-only use cases: teams continued using Miro for workshops, planning sessions, and visual collaboration even when working in the same office. The infinite canvas and template ecosystem provided value beyond the "we need a virtual whiteboard" use case.
How did Miro compete with Microsoft Whiteboard, which was bundled free with Microsoft 365?
Miro competed on product depth and purpose-built experience. Microsoft Whiteboard was a basic drawing tool that lacked Miro's template ecosystem, real-time collaboration performance, and integration breadth. For teams that needed to run real workshops and planning sessions, the free bundled option was insufficient. Miro's premium pricing was justified by the productivity difference.
What role did the template marketplace play in Miro's growth?
Templates served three functions: they lowered the activation barrier for new users (start with a template instead of a blank canvas), they expanded the product's addressable use cases without engineering investment, and they created a community of practitioners who had a stake in Miro's ecosystem. The template marketplace turned Miro from a tool into a platform.
How did Miro handle the transition from PLG to enterprise sales?
Miro built an enterprise sales team to formalize and consolidate the bottom-up usage that was already happening. The sales conversation focused on governance (SSO, compliance, admin controls) and cost consolidation (replacing multiple team subscriptions with a company-wide contract) rather than product evangelism. This is a common and effective pattern for PLG companies that reach enterprise scale.