Miro redefines collaboration tools with the AI-driven innovation workspace

Miro, the online collaboration software provider, recently introduced Innovation Workspace, which it is touting as the most significant product update in the company’s history. This AI-powered platform is designed to optimize the product design and innovation process; more than that, it signals a major shift in Miro’s strategic direction and its position within the broader collaborative workspace market.

According to the company, Miro’s goal with Innovation Workspace is to address the “massive disconnect between how organizations want to work and how they’re actually working” by providing a centralized, intelligent canvas for the entire innovation lifecycle. This is intended to reduce reliance on multiple tools and overcome challenges such as information silos and communication barriers. All features that were announced as part of the launch are currently in private or public beta and will become GA on a permanent basis before the end of Q4.

Functional and Competitive Implications for Miro

In my estimation, this launch is important in two major ways. First, at a functional level, Innovation Workspace directly addresses common organizational challenges that hinder innovation, such as fragmented workflows and communication breakdowns. As a former CMO at a product-led company, I’ve worked closely with product and development teams and know that these obstacles can significantly hinder productivity and delay time to market. By providing a centralized platform with AI-powered tools for prototyping, gathering feedback and project management, Miro aims to foster a more streamlined and efficient innovation environment. Specifically, Miro is incorporating AI features like Sidekick, which provides contextual suggestions and automates tasks, and Catch-up, which uses AI to summarize important changes and decisions made on board to help everyone stay informed.

AI features like these are likely to be a critical factor in driving adoption. These features are designed to be easily integrated into the user’s workflow, minimizing the learning curve and maximizing efficiency. Miro emphasizes making collaboration “more interactive, engaging and immersive” through features such as interactive stickers, new smart widgets and integrated video calling.

Second, on the competitive front, this launch could reposition Miro within its market. Miro has a strong reputation for visual collaboration and innovative features. However, with Innovation Workspace, Miro can evolve from a whiteboard provider to a comprehensive solution for managing the entire innovation lifecycle. This change could be a crucial differentiator to set Miro apart from competitors like Mural, Lucidspark and FigM’s FigJam, which focus primarily on visual collaboration tools. While the competitors just mentioned excel at brainstorming and visual collaboration, they seem to lack the depth of project management and AI-driven features that Miro is now offering. For example, Mural’s AI focuses primarily on generating and clustering mind maps, while FigJam’s AI is limited to design suggestions. Conversely, Miro uses AI in a wider range of activities, from project planning and task management to automated feedback analysis.

By bridging the gap between visual collaboration and structured project management, Miro has positioned itself in a unique market position with Innovation Workspace. Its strength lies in its highly visual and flexible platform, which helps users with real-time collaborative brainstorming, ideation and design. Its extensive template library also supports this by providing pre-built frameworks for various innovation methodologies, including design thinking, agile development and customer journey mapping. This “canvas-first” approach, along with integrations for popular development tools like Azure DevOps, GitHub, and Trello, make Miro a valuable asset to development teams.

While Miro excels at visual planning and collaborative design thinking, it’s not a replacement for dedicated project management tools with granular task management features like Jira or Trello. Instead, Miro can be a useful complement to these tools, allowing teams to visually collaborate and generate ideas that inform managed tasks in more structured platforms. This combination can increase engagement and clarity during the early stages of development, leading to a greater sense of purpose and understanding as teams complete their tasks.

If organizations are looking for that granular task-level detail within Miro, many of these key project management tools can be integrated directly into Canvas or through third-party integrations like Zapier. However, addressing Miro’s project management limitations through plugins can lead to a complex ecosystem. Organizations may need to integrate multi-vendor solutions and manage an expanding technology stack. This need to navigate the challenges of syncing data across platforms and balancing the cumulative costs of these additional tools could potentially offset the initial appeal of Miro’s visual collaboration capabilities.

Miro’s potential benefits and success factors

According to Miro, the objective of the new functionality is to provide an enterprise-level platform for teams involved in the development and launch of new products and services. The potential benefits for businesses are substantial: increased efficiency, enhanced collaboration and accelerated time to market. For example, by centralizing communication and reducing task management friction, the Innovation Workspace can reduce meeting times and streamline workflows, leading to faster product development cycles. Early user feedback suggests the platform has helped teams cut project timelines by 15% and increase cross-functional collaboration by 20%.

Other parts of Miro’s offering also play key roles. The Miro Developer Platform provides a powerful set of APIs and SDKs that allow developers to extend Miro’s functionality, build custom integrations, and embed Miro boards in other applications. This open-platform approach and support for more than 160 integrations and 6,000 proprietary applications should enable businesses to tailor the Innovation Workspace to their specific needs by connecting Miro to their existing technology stacks.

As an example of its open platform approach, just this month, Miro announced the integration of Adobe Express into its platform. With a public beta release planned for late November 2024, this integration will allow users to access various Adobe design tools without leaving the Miro environment. The goal is to simplify the creative process by enabling the creation of images, editing of graphics and the use of templates within the collaborative workspace, eliminating the need to switch between applications. This initiative reflects Miro’s ongoing efforts to expand the functionality of its platform. It gives users the benefit of remaining focused on the task at hand using tools that are likely to be familiar to them.

To gain further insight into the Innovation Workspace, I sought hands-on feedback from my colleague Jason Andersen, vice president and principal analyst for application platforms at Moor Insights & Strategy. Here’s what he had to report.

A hands-on test of Miro

Miro was nice enough to give us access to his platform so we could try things out. The experience was quite good. The interface was understandable to anyone with a background in drawing applications, and access to AI features was obvious. Two things stood out while we were on the platform.

First, AI features are an excellent starting point for achieving higher quality results in less time. For example, I built a quick mind map for a basic application, shown in the first picture below. Honestly, it was just an okay first draft; it would take many more iterations to make it usable by a team of product managers and architects. But by taking my basic thoughts and putting them into the AI ​​generator, I produced a much better revised draft, which is shown in the second picture below. Developing the request for the AI ​​generator took less than a quarter of the time compared to creating the map myself, and it was something I could easily modify and hand off to a product team.

Second, the templates and integrations are great. The platform comes with several preloaded templates to structure products, as well as integrations with toolkits from Jira, Azure, and AWS. All of this makes documenting contextual processes, flows, and infrastructure very straightforward. I would say that while this is a great way to add to the usual work tools, Miro can help users by taking the concept further. I’d like to see user-defined flows to walk teams through an entire innovation/ideation process that can then upload relevant content to integration points where work is done and measured.

Some of this appears to be possible based on quick testing. For example, I was particularly pleased when I was able to generate an entity relationship diagram from the mind map above. But I’m thinking of a more agent-driven approach like we’re starting to see in other platforms like Salesforce and ServiceNow. It could be a great way to expand on what Miro has already done very well.

Drawing conclusions

Andersen’s comments show that Innovation Workspace delivers on its promise of enhanced efficiency and collaboration through AI and integrations. However, it also highlights the potential for Miro to further evolve the platform by deepening workflow automation and creating a more integrated experience that connects the entire innovation lifecycle.

It will be particularly interesting to watch how Miro uses its canvas-first approach and extensive integration capabilities to meet the increasingly sophisticated demands of enterprise customers. Miro’s commitment to security and compliance, evident in its advanced security features and Enterprise Guard add-on, is likely another key factor in its adoption. Market response to Innovation Workspace may depend on Miro’s ability to capitalize on its strengths in AI, user-centered design, and platform scalability. If it can do this effectively, Miro is positioned to be a strong contender in shaping how product teams approach the innovation lifecycle, from ideation to execution. As the lines between different categories of work software continue to blur, Miro seems well-prepared to navigate this evolving landscape.