On a Friday, one of Miro’s architects pointed a bunch of agents at the company’s AI engine and rebuilt it. He demoed it Monday. There was a kickoff Tuesday. A few months later, it was the headline of Miro’s user conference.
What’s interesting is what Miro didn’t do in response. No reorg, no new framework, no AI-native process. Just the same three milestones they’ve always had: kickoff, solutions review, and pre-release review before launch.
Our guest today is Jeff Chow, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Miro. He leads product and engineering at Miro, which helps cross-functional teams work together, making it an unusually good place to watch what AI is actually doing to how teams build.
In this episode, Jeff shares:
Why he froze Miro’s process on purpose and replaced the artifacts instead
What problem with only working with an agent that agrees with everything you say (AKA the “yes-man” agent)
How “process barnacles” build up as you scale
And why saying “no” is about to become the hardest job in product
1. Don't change the milestones. Change what shows up at them.
Miro runs three milestones: kickoff, solutions review, pre-release review. Jeff has deliberately left them alone.
“A big part of our early tenets was we’re not gonna change that. It’s the shorthand of the organization. You can just say, ‘Oh, we have a solutions review next week’ and everyone gets it.”
What did change is the artifact. Jeff’s description of the old solutions review will feel familiar:
“The PRD plus maybe 50 art boards of a Figma file. Maybe you have a product manager reading off of slides, and then the designer goes through the art boards like it’s a flip book, and then 45 minutes pass, and we’re all a little bit dead in the eyes.”
Now, PMs show up with a working prototype on real data that a few teams have already tried, plus a vibe-coded fake landing page that forces them to tell the story.
Product takeaway: Before you redesign your whole process for AI, ask whether the meeting is the problem or the thing you bring to it usually is. The ritual is a shared context, is expensive to change, and is rarely the bottleneck.
2. Your agent isn’t a stakeholder. So don’t treat it like one.
Here’s a failure mode that didn’t exist a few years ago: someone spends a week building with an agent, walks into the kickoff, and is genuinely confused when the team still wants to debate it. They feel aligned. They’ve been collaborating for days — just not with any humans.
“Your agent’s like, ‘Great idea, Jeff. You’re a genius. Wow, why didn’t I think of that? You’re so wonderful.’ And clearly you didn’t put the contrarian skill in, so literally it’s just blowing smoke...”
The fix Miro landed on is being explicit about what a given conversation is for. The prototype is there to communicate why and what — not how. Early on, kickoffs kept turning into design crits, with people relitigating button placement in a meeting meant to decide whether the problem was worth solving at all.
“People are like, ‘Well, technically, is that the button you’d put there?’ And it’s like, wait, are we really doing this right now?”
Product takeaway: Easy agreement from a model isn’t validation. Build the disagreement back in — a critique step, a sub-agent told to argue the other side, a named skeptic in the room — and say out loud what you’re trying to decide before you show anything.
3. Most of your process exists to prevent expensive mistakes
Jeff’s read on why product orgs look the way they do is that almost every ritual is risk management wearing a rigor costume.
“Annual planning, OKRs, all the way down to certain roadmaps — it’s all about making sure that if we’re gonna really invest that much money on this project, it better work. Without realizing it, it becomes an optimization culture instead of an invention culture.”
That made sense when a bad bet cost a quarter of engineering time. It makes less sense now, but the process doesn’t update on its own.
“What we have to do is just embrace the fact that actually it goes so much faster. You should take more ambitious risks.”
The part Jeff seems most energized by isn’t ICs swinging bigger — it’s that his leaders are now pushing their teams to think bigger, which he says he never really saw before. The old default was five tweaks to a button because that’s what the conversion target asked for.
Takeaway: Go through your planning rituals and ask what each one was invented to protect you from, then check whether that thing is still expensive. Some of it is load-bearing. Some of it is a premium on a risk you stopped carrying.
4. The Friday refactor that became a keynote
Which brings us back to the story at the top. Miro’s big agentic push didn’t come out of planning.
“One of our AI architects just decided one day to get a bunch of his agents to work and refactor our AI engine, and then demoed it to us. It was basically a Friday. Monday, he’s demoed it, and we were like, ‘Okay. Here we go.’”
It unlocked something the team had assumed was years away. Ask Miro to run a retro now, and the agent pulls the full project history onto the board next to it — a week of human work — so the team can argue from actual data.
But Jeff is clear that the interesting part is the org’s response, not the tech:
“It’s not just technology helped create that, but an IC engineer invented it, brought it to the table, and then cross-functionally we were willing to yes-and that experience.”
He has a great name for what usually happens instead: process barnacles.
“You start developing the process barnacles where maybe it’s like, oh, here’s a big bet, and maybe it didn’t work the first time. And then your next thing is not to, like, let’s Apollo 13 and throw the scraps on the table and try to solve the problem. It’s to have a meeting and talk.”
Takeaway: Your constraint probably isn’t ideas — it’s whether an unfunded thing that already works has anywhere to go. When someone shows up with a demo nobody asked for, the useful question isn’t whether it was on the roadmap. It’s how fast you can get it a kickoff.
5. Saying “no” is the next organizational crisis
Here’s the flip side Jeff sees coming.
“If everybody can do something, how do you say no?
When building is cheap, everything looks one more push away from working. Someone has to call it.
His answer to who does that: he thinks of product orgs as fractals. An APM polishes one small rock. A GPM has more rocks. A director has more still. Jeff’s own job is the same shape, just at a bigger scale.
“There’s no, ‘Are you a top-down decision or a bottoms-up kind of organization?’ We’re collaborating at different altitudes.”
That’s why a solutions review at Miro isn’t a gate — the point is to let people cook. But when the answer is no, it comes with a reason a person can actually hear. Internally, they call it explaining it over beers.
“You need to have a human element where you’re explaining it to a normal person. No weird syntax.”
Takeaway: Scarcity used to do your prioritizing for you, and it isn’t anymore. Get explicit about who kills work, what evidence they need to kill it, and how that reasoning gets shared. A clear “no” costs you one uncomfortable conversation. A “no” that nobody's willing to give costs you the roadmap.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
1:55 Jeff's product path: From founding three businesses, joining Google, TripAdvisor, InVision, and now Miro
4:20 Why Miro refused to rebuild its process around AI
7:20 What shows up at kickoffs and solutions reviews now
14:15 The false confidence trap: Say no to "yes-man" agents
16:30 From optimization culture to invention culture
20:20 How one IC's side project reshaped Miro's AI engine
24:30 "Product barnacles" and why saying no is the next crisis
29:30 Conclusion
Links
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