Continuity in Collaboration
Varun Parmar, Chief Product Officer at Miro, discusses his empathetic approach to leadership, his playbook for thriving in hypercompetitive markets, and the innovations that will define the future of hybrid work.
Episode Notes
Varun Parmar has spent decades as a product leader, helping to define successive waves of category and product innovation at companies like Adobe, Doculus, EMC, Box, and now, Miro. He’s gone from executive to entrepreneur and back again. During his journey, he has observed that “over time, every product either becomes better or worse. It never remains the same.”
It’s an important reminder to build with intention, even when you’re building fast and beating your head against the wall. And it’s one of the many subjects he discusses with Jesse in this episode of Breakthrough Builders. You’ll hear how he helped guide product strategy during Adobe’s successful transition to the cloud, how he developed his own guidelines for making headway in sectors with dominant players, the value he places on staying close to one’s craft, and why he’s confident that Miro will reach its ambitious goal to have 500 million users working together inclusively and seamlessly around the globe.
(2:42) Reflections from helping to lead the SaaS transition at Adobe
(7:06) The role of customer empathy in product design
(13:40) How to determine the right frequency for updates and releases
(15:33) Thriving in a hypercompetitive market: 3 learnings from ‘taking on’ Microsoft
(21:58) On the opportunity to join Miro and the ambition to forge a path toward effective, distributed work for all
(31:33) Advice for builders: Bet on people. Never let go of the craft. Declare the destination.
Guest Bio
Varun is the Chief Product Officer at Miro, the visual collaboration platform with 35M+ users. He has worked in leadership roles at companies with high-growth, category-defining and innovative products such as Adobe (#1 in the world for creative and digital publishing software), Box (#1 in the world for cloud content mgmt. software) and EMC (#1 in the world for storage software and systems). In addition he has deep domain expertise in the collaboration market, enterprise content management and business process & workflow management markets; having spent 20+ years building businesses, including managing cross-functional teams spanning product management, design, engineering, marketing, sales, corporate strategy and business development.
Helpful Links
Computer World: Miro looks to move beyond the whiteboard
Recent appearance: Lessons from uncharted growth territory
+ Episode Transcript
[00:01:01] Jesse Purewal: From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas, fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences. As flexible work becomes the norm, teams need new ways to work synchronously and asynchronously. Miro, the visual collaboration platform used by the likes of Dropbox, Under Armour and Typeform, is leading the charge to create a new tech stack for work. One that empowers remote, hybrid and in-office teams to communicate and collaborate across, formats tools and time zones.
Today, I got to sit down with a leader who's spent his entire career in collaboration, and who's now driving innovation at Miro. That's the company's chief product officer Varun Parmar. Varun's vision for Miro is to have 500 million users in a world where teammates are further apart, yet able to be more connected than ever. This may be a lofty goal, but Varun has spent over two decades building products in hyper competitive markets that have been used and loved by billions. In our conversation he imparts some of the core product philosophies he's gathered as an entrepreneur and a corporate executive, like the importance of moving fast and being the first to hit your head against that proverbial wall, how to drive both product led and customer led growth in tech, how to compete with 800 pound gorillas in the category, his perspective on organizing career decision making around people and other topics. We started out by talking about Varun's time at Adobe working in product strategy and his instrumental role in the company's transformation from package software to the cloud.
[00:02:42] Varun Parmar: I had three different roles during the seven year period. So the first one was I was part of the corporate strategy team, and I worked on putting the foundation for how Adobe could transition from desktop based shrink wrapped software provider to one that's actually delivering services in the cloud through the subscription pricing model. There was one phase of my growth. The second was I did a couple of integrations around some big acquisitions Adobe did, which was around Macromedia. So the famous company around the Flash run time, for those of you who remember, that as well as Dreamweaver, which was a very, very popular web authoring software. And I worked on the first generation creative suite, CS1, where we built six packages and brought the products across both the companies together. And it was just transformative in terms of what you can do, in terms of driving growth, using cross price elasticity of demand across the install base.
And then the third one was just focusing on the document cloud and transitioning Acrobat as a business over to cloud services. And the big learnings that I had were mostly around there are things that happen around your business where it is unclear what the answer is. But you have strong indication that's coming from different stakeholders from what's happening in the marketplace that you need to start acting. And you need to start acting not because you know the answer, but because you know where you're standing is not the right thing. So status quo is not acceptable. So I have one of a core philosophy that I learned at Adobe, which is you got to move fast. You always got to move fast because you have to be the first person in the room that hits their head against the wall.
And the reason for that is when the market environment around you is changing, you actually don't know what the right answer is. In fact, nobody knows what the right answer is. So the right thing to do in that very moment is to be the first one who figures out that the path you're on is either right or wrong. So when you hit the wall, you are the first one who can figure out, do you need to turn left or do you need to turn right? And that's been a core learning for me in terms of watching firsthand a company that was doing a couple of billion dollars in revenue, all of a sudden being presented with this massive tectonic shift in the market in terms of how software was delivered and how software was priced, which we now know is software as a service or cloud computing. And how the company quickly went about transitioning and disrupting itself before others disrupted.
[00:04:58] Jesse Purewal: And how can people who are building at say mid-market or enterprise companies take the spirit and the letter of that lesson that you learned and that philosophy that you live by and apply it. So if I'm building inside a larger company, how do I adopt the philosophy you just said and use it to help drive growth in the company and in my career?
[00:05:18] Varun Parmar: I think speed is relative. So it's a question of relative velocity, I would say. And obviously if you have a large organization, you want to make sure that everybody is coming along and people understand the reasons behind why you're doing it. And because of that, it might take a little bit of time. So I think that the key learning here is you as a leader, someone whose job is to make sure that they're looking around the corners, placing the right bets, that you are very clear and communicative with the rest of the organization and the rest of the leadership team in terms of what the core philosophy is around how you want to run your product organization or how you want to run the company. And I think if you can drive extreme amount of clarity around that, then in my experience, there are usually enough smart people with enough experience around figuring out how to operate in that organization.
And every company is a microcosm of cultures. It's a melting pot of different experiences and things that people hold near and dear. But if you at the highest level can set that tone around how you want to operate. And what is the core philosophy that you want people to subscribe to in times of uncertainty, in times of disruption, in times of when markets around you are changing, then I think the teams figure out. And yes, in a 100,000 person organization, it might mean that moving fast is doing things in a matter of six months. In a 15,000 person organization, it might mean doing things in three months. In a 1,000 person organization, it might mean doing things in three weeks. And then in a 10 person organization, it might be doing things in three hours. But it's all this notion of relative velocity.
[00:06:53] Jesse Purewal: And tell me, Varun, what is the role of customer empathy in your mind as a builder? Particularly as you attempt to bridge velocity and speed on one hand with making the right call on the other.
[00:07:06] Varun Parmar: Customer empathy, or just empathy towards whatever you do, your team members, your partners, your field organization, if you're a product person, your customers, is at the heart of everything that you should do in order to deeply understand the problems that are key out in the marketplace that need to be solved. So oftentimes what happens is that companies start to become ivory towers, where they are really inward focused, and they're not actually going out there and spending time with the customers. And that's when products start to go off track in terms of hitting the nail on the head or not.
And so one of the things that I practice myself and I promote that inside of the product team, wherever I go is the amount of time that you're spending out in the customers and deeply, deeply understanding what their needs are. It's okay to be slow upfront, but once you figure out what that wedge is because you've done enough due diligence, then you should go with extreme amount of velocity and tenacity and energy to go attack that problem. And sometimes it can take three months, sometimes it can take nine months, some time it can take like 16 or 17 months, but you need to continuously be at it till you figure out what that deep need is, and then go and attack it.
[00:08:14] Jesse Purewal: You've certainly had your finger on some incredibly powerful, addressable markets and unmet needs. I want to focus on the company that you started, Doculus, which ended up becoming part of Box and became your entry point into the organization. Talk about what that journey was like joining as the general manager on the apps and enterprise side, moving from becoming a founder and CEO into becoming the GM of a business and eventually chief product officer, where you got to build an outstanding product and a team, and really bring the category along.
[00:08:47] Varun Parmar: Prior to being a founder CEO, I ran a decent sized product organization and a business, and I had built several products in large corporations all the way from EMC, over 30 billion in revenues, to Adobe, four or four billion when I was there. So I had that pedigree and experience of operating in a large organization. So in many ways, when I got into Box, it was just second nature for me. Box, as we all know, operated in a hyper competitive space with a lot of 800 pound gorillas. And so the company needed a team and an individual to join the organization that could build new product lines and I started to focus on workflow. I had worked in places where I understood workflow and we started to build a product and the business around that. And because of this entrepreneurial journey, and because there were scars to show in terms of what works and what doesn't work, it was a good fit.
[00:09:36] Jesse Purewal: Let me go back to your point on having worked inside an enterprise technology business before going on the entrepreneurial part of the journey. I wouldn't say that there is a right or a wrong way to conceive of anyone's journey, certainly there are examples of people building careers in tens of thousands of different ways. But there's something particularly distinctive about actually achieving many sustained years of growth and being part of a transformation inside a company, inside a category, before moving into an entrepreneurial role. Just reflect on the unique value of having spent that time inside an organization like Adobe before starting a business or being part of a founding team, and what the vantage point was like.
[00:10:23] Varun Parmar: So I'll share a couple of examples in terms of things that really helped and a value system that I built around. So I think the one thing is that when you work for a big company, one of the things that big companies do is they spend an inordinate amount of time around strategy, around competitive differentiation, around your place in the market. And given the fact that I actually worked part of the corporate strategy team at Adobe for three and a half years, it is ingrained in me everything that I do, every single bone in my body. I first think about the market position, how can we create the wedge and how can we go after something that's more defensible and start to create a business around that? And when I went into the entrepreneurial journey, what I knew was I probably don't know how to sell to an individual who wants to use our product, but what I knew was, how could I sell to executives in big companies?
And it's funny that the first deal, the first revenue that we brought in at Doculus was half a million dollars. We didn't do a $5,000 deal. We didn't do a $5 million deal. We actually did a half a million dollar deal because we convinced an organization that the product we were offering, they could actually package it up as an overall product and that would give them a massive amount of competitive differentiation. So the first thing is around this notion of strategy and creating a space and having an understanding of the customer, that's one. I think the second thing for me was Adobe back then, and I think it's true today as well, deeply cares about the end user experience. They on one part build products for creatives and creatives tend to have an extremely high bar in terms of what a great looking product or a great feeling product or great visual product is.
And that's where I basically built my love for beautiful experiences and caring about everything that we shipped. And I think we brought it over as part of the startup and everyone that we hired and every piece of a pixel that we shipped was something that had an immense amount of love and caring and affection that the team worked on. In fact, I have a core product philosophy, which is over time every product either becomes better or worse. It never remains the same. And I think that it's a key thing that all of us on the product side have to deeply understand, which is every single release that you're doing. And you might be shipping every week, every day, every month, every quarter does not matter. But the stuff that you ship it either makes the product better, or it makes it worse. It's never the same.
And the reason for that is that users, when they interact with the product, they say, "Hey the product used to work like this. This new feature, is it better than what it was in the past?" Or they try to compare you relative to all the other experiences they're seeing. Once you get that in your mind, then you start to build products in very different ways. You raise the bar in a pretty dramatic way, and then you try to figure out what can you do to basically start to deliver that user delight, which is again a big thing that I think I learned at Adobe or one of these bigger companies that I brought it over to my time at Doculus.
[00:13:11] Jesse Purewal: To get to experiences that have the degree of love and caring that you're talking about and persistently make them better. Do you tend to advocate for taking bigger, fewer, less frequent swings at updates, iterations, enhancements, feature ads, versions, and so on? Or do you think there's more power in the more frequent, more persistent, potentially more incremental approach to moving forward in innovation?
[00:13:40] Varun Parmar: The approach I take is the following. If you're trying to create a net new experience, something that is net new, and you have a very strong hypothesis that is validated through initial research, that it could be a game changer. You want to make sure that the entire experience allows the user to see the value is delivered, right? And if you don't deliver the entire experience, then the user will not be able to connect the dots in their mind in terms of what you're trying to do. So when you're trying to do certain things where you're like, "I have a clear idea of what value looks like, and it's a combination of these six things that need to uniquely come together for the user to understand things." Then in those cases you have to move fast, but you need to have those six elements available before you can actually deliver value to the user.
There might be other things where the value is already established, and you're trying to do what I refer to as plus one strategies. You're trying to optimize things. It's the first derivative, or it's the second derivative of what is already out there. And it's incrementally chipping away. And it's not necessary to have all the six things available at the same time, in which case you can move fast and you can incrementally deliver things, because all those six things are not going to appeal to every single one. So I think there's a spectrum and obviously there's stuff in the middle as well. Depending on what you're trying to do, you have to be explicit around the strategy. And I think most successful companies do both. They do big product announcements and then they do incremental releases. And I think you have to figure out where you're trying to move the needle and what kind of capability it is, to figure out where on the spectrum it falls.
[00:15:15] Jesse Purewal: I want to return to the other point that you made about that in terms of big companies spending time on strategy and deeply understanding category and unmet needs and everything like that. Talk about the market strategy, the competitive strategy, some of the dynamics that you were up against there as you were part of the growth journey within Box.
[00:15:33] Varun Parmar: Yeah, for sure. It's a market that is hyper competitive. It's hyper competitive because you have the likes of Microsoft bundling things as part of Office 365 and making things available. And the question is how do you not only survive, but thrive in this environment? And what's fascinating, Jesse, is that for those of us who've been following the stock market and what's been happening, obviously it's not been fun if you are in tech and you have a lot of public stocks that you own, but what's fascinating is that Box as a company went to an all time high from a stock price perspective when the overall market was down about 40% or so. And obviously kudos and a great job do Aaron and the team out there for a phenomenal execution and stuff.
But as a product person, I spent three years at Box and I've been in the content management space for well over 15. And what I found was that there are a few things that you should subscribe to, and these are life lessons for those who are trying to compete against the Microsofts that might be helpful. So I think the three things there or learnings, one is when asked, "What's the best way to compete against Microsoft when they have massive distribution powers, particularly around office and stuff." I think the answer is the best way to compete against Microsoft is not to compete with Microsoft. Never go head on against them because where they have a distribution leverage, you got to be very, very careful.
I think the second thing is when they have a distribution leverage, they're actually generally selling into the IT slash CFO personnel where the ROI is extremely important metric and it's extremely hard to disrupt. Because when you have literally 25 different software categories that are getting packaged up as a $35 per user or $50 per user, the ROI for the CFO is so strong that it's very, very hard to dislodge them.
So then you have to think about when you're trying to create a category, you have to be in a place where you're trying to deliver value to end users or business users, as opposed to IT and CFO. And that's the second sort of core principle to compete against Microsoft. And then the last thing is you have to make sure that you always integrate in a very deep way against Microsoft. So there's never a situation that you find yourself with the customer where they say, "Oh, guess what? We're not going to be replacing Microsoft, but you don't play well with Microsoft." So as long as you don't directly compete with Microsoft, go after the end user or business users, and you deeply integrate with Microsoft to neutralize their positioning, you actually have a winning formula.
So then the question is, how do we translate that into a winning play at Box? And we just stumbled upon, for example, the e [inaudible] space where it was a large and high growth market where Microsoft did not have a product. The real benefit to the technology was being delivered to businesses where they had wanted to digitize a particular transaction, because it was part of a business process where people could not go into a physical location and sign certain things for their mortgage application, for a bank loan or whatever it is, because of everything that we've lived in the past two and a half years. And very rarely actually you find the confluence of all of these things, where you find a large market that is growing really, really fast, where there is no 800 pound gorilla, where there is no inherent stickiness in the product, where you can start to run this takeout place. And I think Box was able to identify that and then do some phenomenal execution in terms of delivering products and platform services that a market is reacting to.
[00:18:48] Jesse Purewal: Yeah, as you're talking, the definition of collaboration is changing beneath your feet and you are part of that change and that transformation. And it's so interesting to hear you reflect on the way that you triangulated customer empathy and the market need and the competitive dynamics. And then just being relentlessly focused on executing around the needs that are here in front of you, and then also for the long term. Maybe talk about that for a second, the idea of leading at two speeds where you want to capture emergent needs that are on the roadmap for two, three, four or even five years out. But if you don't capture some of the near term opportunities to either dislodge competitors and take share, or move the needle forward or incrementally. Sometimes you don't get permission to go that far into the future. So how do you think as an innovator about innovating at two speeds?
[00:19:39] Varun Parmar: Yeah. First of all, I completely agree with you, Jesse, in terms of it doesn't matter what you're going to do in a year two or three years, if the foundation is not strong, if you're not able to make sure that you can hold to your existing customers. That's lesson number one, if you're a SAS business, what's the number one thing that kills other businesses if you're actually not able to renew. It does not matter what new air are you're going to bring at the top. If the bucket has a hole, there is no business, that's it. That is the crux. You got to do whatever you need to do to make sure that the existing customers are secure, that you're building certain modes, that you're building stickiness. Because everything that you do as an organization in most of the cases, is stuff that you're building on top of the foundation.
There's always a cash cow. There's always a business that actually funded the growth and expansion of new product lines and new initiatives. So I think in many ways, it's a tango where you need to dance fast, but you also need to slow down. And you need to make sure that the first principle here is that you protect and defend your core before you start to expose yourself on new things. And unless you basically secured the foundation, you should not go into new initiatives. But having said that, there is only so much defense you can do with the past, right? So oftentimes you'll get into these endless conversations and I like to say, "Attack the future, and then don't spend too much time defending the present.2 And this is not to say that, "Hey, you should not protect your base." It is to say that you need to innovate.
So when we talked about earlier in the segment around Adobe transitioning from desktop software to going over to cloud services, the thing that we were trying to do was we were trying to acknowledge that there is something that's happening around us that we need to go and attack. And it was less around defending the $800, $900 million business we had around Acrobat. It was more around attacking the future and how can we drive growth? And so while you have to protect your businesses from a culture perspective, from a operating principles perspective you always have to have a mindset that you're actually going and attacking the future. And that's where your best minds are focused on while making sure that the execution on day to day is happening and is all secure.
[00:21:45] Jesse Purewal: I want to ask you about Miro. So you've been with Miro about a year. You're the chief product officer there. Talk about what you loved in Miro before you joined a year ago. And what's got you excited about being part of the leadership team there?
[00:21:58] Varun Parmar: So not many people know this, Jesse, but I was actually living in the San Francisco Bay Area for close to 20 years and very happy raising two really awesome kids with my wife. And I actually relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area over to Amsterdam about a year ago, like you mentioned. And I relocated to join Miro as their head of products. And people ask me, "Hey, why did you do that?" And there's always a professional answer and then there's a personal answer. And I'll share both. On the professional life, I think there comes a time in everyone's professional career when they start to think about their legacy. Of everything that I've done as a professional, what is it that I'm going to leave as a lasting impact? And I've had some successes, I've had some products that have scaled to tens of millions or hundreds of millions on the shoulders of great brands like Adobe and others.
And I've tried new things. So being a startup entrepreneur and scaled those products and had my learnings there, but I've been waiting for that platform or the opportunity where you can have an impact at scale. And for me, the definition of scale is something that is being used by 50% of knowledge workers. So if you say that there's about a billion or so knowledge workers, half of that is 500 million. And I think there's really four companies in the history of software that have actually achieved that. Microsoft about 30 years ago with the office franchise about a billion and a half people on the platform, about 16 to 18 years ago, it's Google with Google Docs or Google Workspaces, about two and a half, three billion people on the platform. And then I would say over the past couple of years, it's a combination of Slack and Zoom, starting to hit that 500 million and in some cases Zoom actually going past that.
And I truly believe that Miro could be that fifth company that has an opportunity to redefine how teams work in this new hybrid world to get stuff done. And I think every this generation of software companies, they had something, a tectonic shift that happened that they rode, which fundamentally allowed them to build this great product and impact the lives of humans at scale. And I think for us, the big shift is hybrid. And I think everything that we've learned in terms of how humans have worked over the past 50 years is going to change. It's not going to be fully in the office, it's not going to be fully in remote. It's going to be a mix of that. The definition of hybrid is that you have a team of individuals where one or more team members are actually in time zones and geographies where majority of the team is not.
And some of the things that you used to do synchronous cannot be done synchronous, and you need to think about ways in which those can be done asynchronously, but that do it in a way that that team or that individual doesn't feel that they've been left out. So the fundamental thing that I think that we are starting to work on, I think there's a new emergence of a work stack that's going to emerge, that it's going to support this hybrid ways of working that blends synchronous and asynchronous ways of working. Where you can tell when your synchronous versus asynchronous. And there's a single tool that actually supports this. And to me, that is an opportunity of a lifetime. That to me, was a platform that really, really resonated and attracted me. And on the personal side, my wife and I, we had lost two years of family time and being locked in a home in the Bay Area. And we saw the opportunity to travel Europe and explore things with the kids, which was also very fascinating for the family.
[00:25:23] Jesse Purewal: Yeah, the journey must be awesome and rewarding for everybody. Talk to me about the category position that Miro has. I love your thesis on where Miro can go and the opportunity even to sit alongside some of those names you mentioned. Talk about what it will take to move the category forward, to get to a position of leadership for Miro.
[00:25:43] Varun Parmar: Yeah. I think to talk about the feature, maybe I can spend a little bit time talking about the past and the evolution. So I still remember I had a chat with Andrey. Andrey is Miro's founder and CEO, and he mentioned to me, there aren't that many companies that have created net new experiences. Oftentimes all you find is people doing something better on a different platform. For example, Google Docs is just like Microsoft Office done in the cloud. Zoom is just maybe a better version of WebEx and so on and so forth. And I think we are very fortunate that we are amongst that small number of companies that have created net new experiences. So Andrey the team, the founding team, 11 years ago invented the virtual whiteboarding category. There was no product in the market. They invented the category and they launched the product.
And then a few years in, they invented the whiteboard platform category. And then five or so years ago, we invented the visual collaboration platform category where whiteboarding is just one of the many use cases that we support on visual collaboration. And while the rest of the world is catching up to whiteboarding, Miro is actually a visual collaboration platform. And we have users and companies including Fortune 500 across different verticals and geographies are using us for product development workflows, for learning and development workshops, for onboarding employees in this hybrid world. And these are not use cases you would consider as whiteboarding use cases. You would never have a new employee join your organization and Qualtrics, Jesse, and say, "Let me hold your hand and take you to a conference room, because I want to whiteboard and onboard you to the organization, right?" That's not what we think of whiteboarding use cases.
So we believe that as a company, we have demonstrated to the world that we have discipline as well as results to show in terms of evolving the product into each and every new category, and we have ourselves created these categories and created these capabilities. And that will require us to deeply practice user empathy. That's something that we talked to earlier on, how do we deeply understand what the problems are that users are trying to face? So when I said the problem with hybrid is not that one day Varun is in the office and the other day he's not. Because that, as we have practiced empathy and gone and talked to thousands and thousands of our customers.
The problem is that you have a team that is heterogeneous in their time zone and how they work and how do you now bring all of them on the same page and how do you then start to innovate and get this team to be as productive as other teams are in the organization. And to the earlier point, we're going to move fast. We're going to hit our head against the wall. We're going to be the first ones to hit. And if we hit, we know we need to turn left or right. But as long as we don't hit, we'll keep moving. But once we hit, we'll be the first ones to figure it out. And that's how the strategy is going to evolve and manifest in the product.
[00:28:23] Jesse Purewal: I love it. And I'm realizing you're actually creating a product and building a company that is an employee experience business. I mean, yes, you're building on the backs of whiteboarding and visual collaboration as categories. But when you put hybrid in the way you defined it at the center of the innovation agenda and the category creation and build agenda, what I'm hearing between the lines is really there will be experience gaps that people have if they don't have the tools that they need to get to a more equitable and fair arrangement and experience in their work, conditional on how they choose to live in our new world order here. And so what I love is the idea that by staying in touch with user needs, thinking deeply about the human conditions that surround those users and what might make them want to opt in or opt out of a given tool or give feedback to their leadership teams around what's being used at work. What is it like to be building an experience first business in a new place?
[00:29:28] Varun Parmar: That's actually a great question, Jesse. I would say for me, it all comes down to a single thing. Products or great product experiences are built by teams that care. And so as an organization, as a leader, what you have to do is you have to be empathetic to the cultural nuances and differences and preferences for how people operate. And quite honestly, it has been a learning journey and it wasn't easy and it took a while and it took a couple of missteps and you learn from them and you get better. And now you have the skills and competence to work with people across different cultures and bring that into a melting pot where you are actually leveraging the best of what everyone has to bring together.
But the fundamental thing I would say is that you have to focus on bringing sets of people who actually care. They have to deeply care about what they're doing, because if they do, they are going to ship something that is going to be absolutely spectacular and amazing. And if they don't in the first time, they will figure it out the second time or third time or fourth time or fifth time. I think what's really amazing at Miro is that we have individuals that deeply care. And for us then is to make sure we are nurturing and growing and supporting and fostering their great talent so that they can actually move to the next level in terms of building those experiences. And that's been really rewarding. That's been so much fun for me personally, building those friendships at work and then building those great experiences that we believe is going to fundamentally redefine how work gets done over the next 20 years.
[00:31:06] Jesse Purewal: I love it. Love it. Varun, you are not a lifer anywhere, but you're clearly also not a job hopper given the intentionality that you have taken to building your career, building product, building teams, and as you say, starting with people. But wherever there is intentionality, I think there's also serendipity. So talk about the mix of those two in your career and what lessons you think the balance between them has for people who are thinking about the progression of their own careers.
[00:31:33] Varun Parmar: That's another great question. And I have some insights to share in terms of how I've built my career. So the first thing is that anytime I get a new job, I always, always, I always bet on the person. That's it. 90% of the decision that I make is on the person. I am only evaluating the person. I spend a lot of time figuring out back channel this and that, but my bet is on this person. And will this person teach me something? And is there an immense amount of opportunity for me to learn? Obviously the company, the brand, the business, the macro context is extremely important. I'm not saying ignore any of these things, obviously you do that. But that's just par for the course, right?
What really matters is I have actually built my entire career over the past 22 years by betting on people. And that's it. And knock on word, I think it's worked so far. Obviously at certain phases in my career, I optimize for certain things. Like right now, I'm optimizing for impact. And we talked about a billion people, not that many companies out in the world that can allow you to get that platform. Somewhere in the middle part of my career, it was around competence, and in the early part, it was mentorship and so on and so forth. But that, which is what is it that you're trying to optimize for? Be extremely clear about it. And while sure integrity is part of it, the secret formula is bet on a person, optimize for learnings, discount everything else.
And then the last thing I would say is that whenever I take a job, I always think about what N plus one looks like. Sometimes I have documents written in terms of where I want to be N plus one, which is not this current role, but the one after that. And in order to achieve that role, N plus one, what is the set of experiences and competences that I must have in order to get there, which actually then gives you a lot of clarity in terms of option A versus option B versus option C, and you never have to get confused around that. So people, optimize for learning and think about N plus one.
[00:33:31] Jesse Purewal: You've talked about the role of mentors, of influential colleagues. I'd love for you to reflect going all the way back when you were young, in terms of what lessons you learned that you've been able to carry forward all the way until this moment.
[00:33:45] Varun Parmar: Yeah, absolutely. Growing up in India, my dad who comes from a very humble background from the ground up basically, built a very, very successful business across multiple product lines with multiple manufacturing units spread over. And I grew up in an environment where I would listen in on his conversations. He's on the phone and he's talking about expansion and he is talking about customers. So I think for me, what's always been a guiding pole for me, is can I be half a successful as my dad? It's probably going to take more than a single lifetime for me to fulfill that, but it is so inspiring. It is unbelievably inspiring is that when I get up, and sometimes I get emotional about this, is that he's an individual who actually didn't have anything, and he did exceptionally in his life. I think the other thing that I've learned from him, and this is a very important observation, because at some point we all become managers or managers of managers and so on and so forth, is that no matter where you get in terms of your professional success, you cannot let go of your craft.
And I saw this person who had hundreds if not thousands of people working for him directly or indirectly, always get to the craft of what he did. And he was a chemical engineer, specialized in polymers, and he could get into the details of things. He knew his product. He knew his business to the details.
And what I find oftentimes is that we become managers and we become directors and we become VPs. And somehow we feel our job is to manage people and let go from the craft of what we are great at. And what I've found is that in my experience, the world's best products are built by people who never let go of the craft. Because if you are closer to your craft, you can actually mentor, guide and make decisions that actually have a 10X, 100X impact on the trajectory of the business. And so even today I would write specs. Even today I test features. Even today I go and get my hands dirty with the engineers, with the designers, with the product managers in terms of what we need to build, how we need to build. And I think that's an important ingredient that folks should consider as they think about the professional journey.
[00:35:49] Jesse Purewal: And Varn, if you had to leave the builders listening today with the single biggest piece of advice that you've gotten, there's been a ton of wisdom you've already deployed in this conversation, but what would be the primary takeaway you'd advise people to go home with today?
[00:36:04] Varun Parmar: The one thing I would leave the listeners with is, before embarking on a journey, make sure you explicitly define what the destination is. And the reason why I think that's important is that today there's an over emphasis on agile and incremental stuff and so on and so forth, which lets you get to a local optima, not to the global maxima. What I find many builders and many product teams do is that they don't declare the destination. If you don't declare the destination, then you don't know where you're going. The team doesn't know where you're going, the organization where doesn't know where you're going, and then you just get stuck in the local maxima. So always, when you're embarking on a product journey, always define the destination and then course adjust during the way.
[00:36:46] Jesse Purewal: Love it. Varun, it's been a wide ranging conversation. I appreciate you distilling your perspectives and your experience and your wisdom. Namaste to you and best of luck on the category creation journey that you've got ahead of you at Miro, and the new experience with the family in Amsterdam. Take care.
Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave a rating and a review and tell a friend. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original, hosted an executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. An awesome team of people puts this show together, including our show writer, Todd Bagnull, and our head of social media, Chelsea Hunersen. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco, our show coordinator is Nicole Genova. Editing and music are by producer Sterling Shore and executive producer, Katie Sunku Wood, with sound engineering by Ryan Krava. At VaynerTalent in New York, Samantha Heapps, Hanna Park and Ivana Lynn provide publicity in promotional support. The shows designers are Baron Santiago and Vinsuka Chindavijak. Our website is by Gregory Hedon. Photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, Ben Hawken, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.