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Embracing the Agent Revolution: Shifting from Scarcity to Abundance in Collaboration 🤝✨
The world of work is undergoing a seismic shift, and at the heart of this transformation lies the rise of AI agents. But are we truly ready to harness their potential? Brent Barkman, a leader in product areas at Miro, shares his insights on how to navigate this new frontier, moving beyond simply adding AI to fundamentally rethinking how we collaborate.
The Mindset Shift: From Scarcity to Abundance 💡
Gone are the days of protecting precious engineering resources and adopting a “Dr. No” mentality. The acceleration brought by AI agents opens up a universe of new possibilities. This isn’t about doing the same old roadmap 10x faster; it’s about rethinking the roadmap from the ground up, unburdened by previous limitations on what was practically achievable.
Key Takeaway: Embrace an abundance mindset to unlock your true potential and achieve anything in this new agent-driven era.
Agents as Teammates, Not Just Assistants 🤖
While many organizations are focused on agents as personal assistants speeding up individuals, the real game-changer lies in treating them as team members. This distinction is crucial. The risk of not getting this right is akin to the talented 2012 Dutch Euro team – a collection of superstars who couldn’t function as a cohesive unit and ultimately failed.
The Challenge: Decades of SaaS tool silos and the persistent problem of alignment create bottlenecks. AI doesn’t magically solve these; it merely shifts where they occur.
The Solution: Rethink teamwork with an agent-first approach.
Redefining Product Development with Agents 🚀
At Miro, the focus has shifted from efficiency of learning to taste and judgment. This means moving away from debating granular priorities and RICE scores.
The Bold Move: Just go spend the tokens, build both, and learn in production. This approach accelerates learning and development significantly.
Miro’s product development loop now involves:
- Discovery: Continuous discovery is emerging as teams move faster and the environment changes rapidly.
- Definition: AI agents are collapsing the definition phase, democratizing crafts and making everyone capable of doing everything.
- Delivery: Agent coding is dramatically accelerating delivery speed.
This shift leaves product people with a deeper focus on discovery.
Prototyping: The Next Big Breakthrough 🛠️
Prototyping, powered by AI agents, is having a massive impact, collapsing weeks of work into mere hours. This isn’t just about speed; it’s about quality.
The Old Way: Prototyping was an expensive process, yielding perhaps one or two iterations. The New Way: With agents, prototyping is cheap (spending tokens, not just human time). Teams can create 10-20 different prototypes, fostering divergent thinking and increasing the chances of building the right thing for customers.
This new approach also sees designers, PMs, and engineers collaborating on high-fidelity prototypes using tools like cloud code, Cursor, or Replit, moving away from traditional tools like Figma for initial builds.
Documentation’s Resurgence with AI 📝
While agent coding and prototyping grab headlines, documentation is experiencing a renaissance. Agents love this kind of work, which humans often find tedious.
Miro’s design system team built an internal site, miro.design, providing comprehensive guidance on building UX in Miro. Crucially, agents have access to this information, enabling them to leverage design systems, components, and tokens effectively.
The Encouragement: Give your teams unlimited token budgets. This isn’t about unchecked spending; it’s about transactionally buying productivity in a way never before possible.
Inspiring Innovation Across the Organization 🌐
This transformation isn’t limited to EPD teams:
- Go-to-Market Teams: Automated competitive intel processes now provide field teams with live agents for research and presentation prep.
- Finance Teams: Automated board prep allows for real-time Q&A, making leaders feel “superhuman.”
Key Learnings for Product Leaders 🎓
- Continuous Discovery: Discovery is no longer a start-and-stop process but an ongoing, productized element.
- Rolling Alignment: Vision and strategy are now communicated on a rolling basis, leveraging visual aids and agent-accelerated communication. Prototypes and demos are key.
- Evolving Team Structures: The traditional EPD matching model is being broken. AI agents fill functional gaps, reducing the decision-making loop and leading to faster movement. Hiring is shifting to prioritize problem analysis, identification, and an AI-native mindset.
- Leading by Example: Leaders are adopting new ways of working, like “vibe coding” feedback with agents to articulate complex ideas and avoid “WTF moments.”
Building an AI-Native Company: A Journey, Not a Destination 🗺️
Miro is on a journey to become an AI-native company. They acknowledge that there are no perfect playbooks and that everyone is figuring this out together. The key is to bring your entire team along for the ride.
Tips for Onboarding Your Team:
- Hackathon Culture: Encourage curiosity, learning, and experimentation outside of strict job functions.
- “Yes, and” Culture: Foster a collaborative environment where ideas build upon each other. Use the hashtag
#badversionto encourage early sharing and feedback. - Disarm Complexity: Use simple language and ask for the “over-the-beers version” to cut through jargon and focus on what truly matters.
- Normalize Learning: Embrace “Fail Nights” and share learnings from mistakes to create a culture of continuous improvement.
Final Thoughts:
- Shift to an abundance mindset: Embrace the opportunity and “go spend the damn tokens.”
- Agents as teammates: This transforms everyone into a builder, fundamentally changing how we view work.
- Scale your impact: Working with agents is like adding “100,000 super interns overnight.” It’s an iterative process of optimizing workflows and collapsing inefficiencies.
The agent revolution is here. By embracing a new mindset, treating agents as true teammates, and continuously adapting our ways of working, we can unlock unprecedented levels of innovation and collaboration.