Dear Leah #4: How I applied for Director of Product at Miro in 2021

My application, my strategy and the outcome of it

“Dear Leah” is my advice column, in which I tackle questions from the community. It’s a perk intended for my paid subscribers to get more focused, operational advice.

Submit your own questions to dearleah@productea.io or write them in the comments.

In this one, I show the entire process and my strategy when I evaluate candidates and how I used to apply for roles.

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Dear Leah,

In your podcast, you mentioned a couple of times that you applied for a position at Miro as leader. Can you give some more details on this process and how it felt? Are you comfortable with sharing more details in how you approach this process?

Pete

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Look at all these graphs and colors; she must be an excellent Product Leader!

Hey Pete,

For sure! Let’s spill the beans! I even found the Miro board I worked off back then.

For context, three years ago, I was approached by Miro, because they were looking for a Director of Product for their flagship, the whiteboard.

I was working at Smallpdf at the time leading the core product and happily listened to what they wanted me to do since I love the problem they were solving.

The Strategy challenge:

"How to get from 3mio weekly active users to 25mio weekly active users in 4 years with the Whiteboard. "

I had 15 minutes to present something by Loom. This was all the info I had, I spent about 4 hours on the exercise before I submitted my answer.

This is the full Miro board I submitted (~22 minutes) and what I prepared for a presentation afterward, including the outcome that I reached with it.

I’m walking through this video in detail about what I submitted and what I would do differently today.

Let’s look into a detailed write-up of my process:

My process (paid)

1. Market segmentation and definition

2. Competitor Sweep

3. ICP Assumptions

4. Your levers & Altitude Maps

5. Know when to yield and when to fight

6. 2024 vs. 2021

1. Market segmentation

The first step is to go to Google or your favorite LLM and get an overview of the market. There’s really no more excuse not to do that, especially with AI tooling making it so easy for you.

The Compound Annual Growth rate (CAGR) is not that important, but you pick a market that is appropriate for the company you’re applying for.

For instance, since I applied here for a director of product, it would be wrong to focus on an extreme niche market inside whiteboarding that is just way too small. (For instance, Whiteboarding in a corporate environment in Germany)

It depends on the position and area of influence you apply for and that should be reflected in the size of the market.

You can alternatively also ask this back before you solve the challenge with an assumption: “Before I start diving into this, I was thinking about framing the challenge around the market of ‘blabla’, is that ok?”

That gives you confirmation that you’re on the right track without too much effort.

2. Competitor Sweep

Understand who the main competitors are. Again, this is simple with LLMs, but I would do one thing differently in a submission at this level:

Don’t forget to list use case competitors instead of just direct competitors.