Meet Shipra Kayan, Designer Advocate, at Miro
September 17, 2021We are lucky to have so many wonderful sponsors of this year’s DesignOps Summit conference–and we thought you might like to get to know them better! We’ve asked all of them some questions that get to the heart of why they’re passionate about enterprise design and design operations. Shipra describes what it’s like to work at Miro, and what makes their products and services special to enterprise professionals.
Rosenfeld Media: Why are you sponsoring this year’s DesignOps Summit?
Shipra Kayan:
We here at Miro want to empower teams to create the next big thing. Our mission and values are deeply aligned with those of the design ops community. This is a community of people who empower designers to do the best work of their lives. We want to support this community, as well as learn from it to ensure that Miro is the best tool for design team alignment and to build team culture.
Rosenfeld Media: What excites you about enterprise design?
Shipra Kayan:
The value of design operations manifests most clearly with teams that haven’t built the design operations muscle yet. At its best, the design operations team creates an environment where designers can do their best work.
What excites me is the incredible amount of leverage you can have as a design ops practitioner. Even if you don’t directly manage anyone, you have the ability to impact the happiness and productivity of a dozen PED squads.
Rosenfeld Media: What is the professional experience like for designers and DesignOps people at your company?
Shipra Kayan:
We are building up the design operations muscle here at Miro, and looking for founding members of our design ops team to guide us through hypergrowth. Our design team is multi-faceted, fun, and highly collaborative. We have been growing exponentially as a globally distributed team, and are building out a centralized product excellence team reporting directly to the CPO that designs and owns our team rituals, practices, and tools across AMPED (Analytics, Marketing, Product, Eng, Design).
Rosenfeld Media: What is your culture like, who would new employees work with, and who are the champions?
Shipra Kayan:
Our culture at Miro is highly collaborative, we get to know our team-mates personally, we care deeply about each other. At the same time, we are growing rapidly and our processes are evolving with us. Most teams work in tight-knit small groups so that they can move fast, with checkpoints to connect across silos.
You will work closely with our head of design and report to our head of product engineering excellence to advocate for and build out the design process. This team reports directly to the CPO, and operations is considered core to our success.
We plan to return to our hubs 3 days a week, and are looking for team members in Amsterdam or Berlin who will thrive as part of these local, collaborative communities.
Rosenfeld Media: What types of value and benefits do you/your product bring to the practice and our community?
Shipra Kayan:
Miro is a virtual whiteboard with an unlimited canvas and tons of integrations. It is used and loved by design teams across hundreds of companies. Miro is versatile, so while designers and researchers use Miro for their jobs, here are some ways in which we see design operations use Miro:
1. Onboarding: Many teams create a Miro board as the starting point to onboard their new team members. It provides an unlimited visual canvas to add pictures of the team, link off to various resources and tools, and is easy to keep up to date.
2. Meetings, Retrospectives & Team Building: Miro can be used in creative ways to facilitate meetings. From sketching exercises, to weekly visual standups, many design ops leaders rely on Miro to ensure that the design team stays connected and aligned across silos with team rituals. Here is one of my favorite templates: https://miro.com/miroverse/love-bomb/
3. Planning: Miro is used for the “whiteboard” collaborative part of planning before a project plan becomes formalized in JIRA or Asana. We also see small teams use Miro as a starting point for the week, with lightweight kanban planning boards for more casual for day to day planning than JIRA.
4. Documenting processes: Just like the onboarding guide, most teams have their design process mapped out in a Miro board. Traditional Wikis can seem rigid and can be hard to update – so Miro is a great way to draw out your unique processes, comment on them, and keep the map up to date.
Rosenfeld Media: What else should our community know about you?
Shipra Kayan:
I have built and managed hybrid design and research teams for over a decade, and have consistently advocated for design & research ops early in any team’s evolution. As a design leader, I know I wouldn’t be successful without excellent operations.
We are here to learn as much as to share what we are seeing as emerging best practices for design ops. Reach out to me on Slack if you want to see or share examples of what teams are doing on Miro, I can’t wait to connect with this community.
View Miro’s sponsor page for their scheduled sponsor activity sessions and more.
