From IC to Leader in Growth (ex-Miro)

Key learnings that transformed me through the 6-year journey at Miro

Nov 06, 2023

Before starting a new adventure, it’s essential to reflect on and learn from the past. This is the main intention behind writing this story. It has become a personal self-reflection covering various transformative stages of my last 6 years at Miro before I decided to move on and explore the uncertain future as an independent solopreneur.

I’d like to pilot this Substack newsletter with a personal introduction, as we will see each other more often here. I want this newsletter to become a "single source of truth" for my reflections on the topics that I’m most excited about: Product-led Growth, User Experience, and Career Growth. It will also become a new home for the Growthamates podcast 🚀 (Listen on Apple | Spotify). After 20th November, you can find the second season here with amazing guests from Amplitude, Canva, Coda, HubSpot, Dopt, and many more!

In the meantime, I’d like to share my story. In 2017, I joined Miro (formerly Realtimeboard) as their third Product Designer and became a founding Product Designer for Growth in an ambitious startup. In 2023, after 6+ years in the company, I decided to finish that incredible journey as Head of Growth Design and experiment with several new career directions. In this article, I will share the key learnings that transformed me through the 6-year journey at Miro.

Over six-plus years, I was privileged to experience exponential growth with the company:

The team grew from 50 to nearly 1,800 people.
The user base scaled from 1 to more than 50 million.
The Growth stream scaled from 1 small team to one of the biggest streams.
I scaled my team from 1 to 11 Product and Content designers.
Currently, Miro is a visual collaboration company valued at $17.5B.

As an intentional gratitude to that journey, I’d like to look back, reflect on that path, and share key lessons that transformed me as a professional and human along that way. I believe in diversity of experiences and mindsets, and I believe each individual has their own path. But I also hope this story can give a fresh perspective and a reminder to always seek out your genuine passion, especially for those who are finding themselves in challenging times navigating their careers.

Before we embark on this journey, take a moment to step back into 2017 and walk with me through several chapters of growth, challenges, difficult decision-making, and pivots that ultimately became the cornerstones to bring me to the current state.

Chapter 1. Growing as IC in a Startup (≈50 people, 2017-2020)

In 2017, Miro, with nearly 50 employees, ventured into several areas that eventually formed the foundation for future growth, like the Self-Serve business model, Enterprise offering, and building a Platform beyond the whiteboard tool. Joining the company as a new hire at that time took my breath away. I remember writing my diploma paperwork on the “Business models” topic while working on extremely complex and risky product updates, like Self-service monetization and the Freemium model.

When you’re a newbie and don’t know how to do all that stuff, it’s easy to give up. But if you’re eager to learn, if you can accept that you’re not the smartest person in the room — there’s an emotional strength to move forward.

During my first year in the company, I remember reading the book “Mindset: How We Can Learn to fulfill our potential” by Carol Dweck. This is where I learned about the term “Growth mindset”. Carol Dweck defined it as “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.” I think that attitude helped me stick to the defined path for the following years.

I would conclude that the “Growth mindset” is the main foundation for any person in the early company stage, and it’s an essential hiring criterion you need to incorporate to make sure the founding team will pass with you through the years.

While reflecting on this chapter, I defined key learnings that streamlined my growth as an individual contributor in a startup environment:

Dive deep into business, regardless of your role or title. Understanding how the business operates is essential, and it’s not only a job for C-level leadership or Product Managers. Having a business-related education, it was natural for me to combine both PM and Design hats when creating the product experience. You don’t need any permission to start asking business-related questions, dive into raw data, and operate with a mental model of a “mini-CEO.”
Knock the door to join all possible leadership meetings. It’s not always natural for leadership to involve individual contributors in strategic meetings, but I believe it’s essential if you want to build a reliable team and mutual trust. For the first several months, I remember having a physical notebook where I wrote down everything related to strategy, metrics, and unknown terms like WAU, NSM, and ARR and creating a personal knowledge base — this extreme curiosity helped me in the beginning.
Start with “Yes” to get more opportunities, then prioritize and delegate. Over my first 2 years in the company, I was an individual contributor in 3 to 4 teams simultaneously (several Growth teams, Enterprise, and Miro Labs). It was incredibly intense, but it afforded me a tremendous opportunity to not only learn the field but also master managing a substantial scope by myself. Later on, it became a great foundation for creating prioritization and planning frameworks, as well as operationalizing that scope within a bigger team.
Build your own growth while keeping your manager a supportive partner. Career transitions and promotions are not the responsibility of a manager. Being proactive and intentional about that in the first years is essential. When there was no performance review process at Miro, I created a simple ritual — showing my vision about the role, scope, skills, and responsibilities every 6 months and co-create opportunities to explore the next steps with my manager. I’m also grateful to have supportive partners in leadership and advocates who understand the process.
Create your own role by combining business goals with your passions. That one became a recipe for having enormous curiosity and passion to stick with one company for a long, and I think it’s important to tell about that in detail below.

Being in a startup can also open up unexpected growth perspectives. For me it happened after 1.5 years when I was presented with several opportunities and had to decide which of them I’m planning to develop myself in the next few years: Product Designer, Product Manager, or User Researcher. When having a decision-making moment like that, it’s easy to get into a mental trap called “all or nothing” and start thinking about radical shifts. In fact, there are many dimensions to explore and combine — you can change the domain, the role, or both simultaneously.

Looking at that choice from first sight, it feels breathtaking to try out a new role that opens up some learning, responsibility, and a sense of ownership (like Product Management). But there’s another approach:

Combine various elements of different roles you enjoy;
Build your own role;
Get the support of your manager by showing how your skills and strengths can be connected with business needs.

Eventually, I ended up staying loyal to the Product design field and together with my manager co-crated the "Lead Product Designer, Growth" role that inherited all beautiful aspects of business-driven nature from Product Management, which was largely dedicated to ongoing User Research, and of course Product design that is a unique discipline that makes you see the tangible outcomes of your work.

Staying on the IC track for 3 years in a startup environment in a company like Miro felt continuously encouraging. I remember the analogy: "1 year counts for 3," and it felt like true. This experience gave me very diverse knowledge: building Self-serve monetization, Freemium business model experience, 100+ experiments for Onboarding, Engagement, and finally building Miroverse which became a love mark for Miro customers. Miroverse was the last "0 to 1" project that I built hands-on before jumping into a new intentional career step — building a team and becoming a Growth Design Manager.

🎁 Bonus: 3 books that helped me grow as IC: “Mindset: How We Can Learn to fulfill our potential” by Carol Dweck, “Hooked” by

Nir Eyal

, “Think like a UX Researcher” by David Travis and Philip Hodgson.

Chapter 2. Transitioning to Manager in a Hyper-Growth (150 – 1000 people, 2020-2022)

There’s a widely recognized belief that typically people in the company are developing at a slower pace than the company itself. For example, if the company experienced a x3 exponential growth in 1 year, it’s hard to imagine how an individual can grow with that pace. At that point of rapid expansion, I saw 2 possible options:

Continue on the IC track (Staff, Principal, etc.): it must cover even more sub-domains and scope while delivering value hands-on.
Become a Manager: it requires building a purely new skillset, accelerating leadership, prioritization, and team building.

At that time, work had already become a lifestyle, a part of my personality, so I had to be very intentional about new steps I’d like to take moving forward.

I started diving into analytical psychology, and that self-awareness helped to connect "Product-led growth + Design leadership" through behavioral design. It opened up my curiosity to explore the people management track through my passion for psychology and behavioral design. I got prepared and read a bunch of books for 1 year before and during the transition. One of them was "Making of a Manager" by

Julie Zhuo

, where she said, "It’s tricky to balance IC commitments with management — attempting to do both, I was doing neither well." I learned that painful reality by myself as well.

Here are the learnings from my "IC to Manager" transition, and some examples from making that in a hyper-growth environment:

Make hiring #1 priority for the first year, and hire bar-raisers. You can’t deliver excellent products at scale by doing everything hands-on — you need a strong team. Missteps in hiring can cost months or even years. At the stage of hyper-growth, it’s becoming essential to level up the seniority of the whole team, and most important to bring bar-raisers with an open mindset to uplift the experience of the whole team. I learned that matching individuals with different seniority levels is also crucial, and huge seniority gaps between PM and Designer can require a lot of leadership involvement. I find it valuable to pair individuals with different levels while coaching both on how to make this partnership efficient.
Hire teams, not isolated individuals. I didn’t know that in the beginning. I was optimizing for pure talent rather than how exactly a group of various individuals will operate successfully in a team. At the stage of hyper-growth, the teams require a particular mindset, and the job of a hiring manager requires psychological knowledge to understand humans, not just reading their CVs. If I do that again, I would align even deeper and more rigorously with Product and Engineering partners on cross-functional team structure and skillset by asking: "What business outcomes do we expect from this team 1 year from now? What are the unique skills we’re lacking in the current team and want to bring from external? How do we imagine the growth and career path for these individuals for the next 1-3 years?". The framework "Optimisers, Builders, Strategists" from
Elena Verna
would be extremely useful at that time to align on expectations.
Shift yourself from IC work as soon as possible. As Julie Zhou said in her book, managing both can be quite dangerous. I learned that in practice. Having a variable scope of work and exciting projects was fulfilling, and I didn’t want to share it with others first. But can you produce great outcomes for the business by trying to deliver in 3 teams simultaneously with increasing complexity? The answer is "No". By not holding off the hands-on responsibilities, you are not allocating enough space for learning how to become a manager, and it will harm the brand-new team you’re building.
Provide guidance rather than dictating solutions. This is the most tricky part for new Product Design Leaders who are literally "thinking" with solutions in mind. Each time on a review session I tried to catch myself and rephrase the "solution" into "direction".
Give everybody else the voice in the room, and speak last. That was not obvious to me in the beginning. I learned that from the new teammate, and this feedback was a gift. Simply swapping the approach and asking everybody else to share their feedback about solutions, then summarizing and adding my direction was a significant multiplier to boost the group collaboration and creativity.

That was probably one of the most intense chapters with mistakes and learnings. However, it was also a very enriching phase for my personal development. Becoming a leader requires you to learn and adapt to new degrees of unpredictability: How to hire and onboard 3 people in 3 months? How to deliver on the roadmap with the understaffed team? How to prioritize quality vs. velocity for highly risky user journeys? How to make a hiring decision about a candidate that you’re not sure about?

Dealing with uncertainty was one of the main weaknesses I’d like to overcome on my personal and professional growth path. Later on, understanding that weakness and systematically working with that also defined where I ended up being today.

🎁 Bonus: 3 books from women leaders to support IC – Manager transition: “The Making of a Manager” by

Julie Zhou

, “Dare to Lead” by Brene Brown, “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott.

Chapter 3. Leadership at scale (1800+ people, 2022-2023)

Approaching that phase, I found myself in an already scaled company with 1000+ individuals. Scaling necessitates a larger team, and I took on the opportunity to scale it further to 10+ Product and Content Designers for Growth. That led me to become the "Head of Growth Design" at Miro — a title that I probably haven't seen that often.

Who is the "Head of Growth Design"? I like explaining that as a role in the intersection between Growth and Design Leadership. This combination was an ideal fusion of Product-led Growth, User Experience, User Research, and People leadership — all the disciplines that I'm passionate about.

This chapter was full of learnings that helped me better understand and experience leadership in Growth on a large scale:

Give the team enough freedom to build autonomy. For me, as a person who tries to keep everything under control, it was not easy at all. Over time, I learned how to give the team more responsibilities to prioritize, give them more freedom to make mistakes and learn from them. At some point, the team starts operating as an autonomous unit, and the role of a leader changes to supporting this "continuous learning" culture at a bigger scale.
Praise the team's achievements and "operate in service of others". There's an idea of an "umbrella manager" who is trying to create a feeling of clarity and safety in a highly complex environment. It's important to find time and be approachable for the team at scale and also establish additional "time for recognition." It can be a simple weekly ritual or also a bigger event that I used to call "The Time to Praise" and host it on New Year's Eve. That way, the team can share gratitude and feedback as a gift and make it meaningful to inform somebody else's plans for the upcoming year in a form that is way better than a typical performance review.
Help your teams align by building internal "shortcuts" and connections. A typical example from my experience is alignment between Growth and Core functions, which is quite essential to building consistent experiences. It's a unique feature of people who have been long in a company, as they have "shortcut" connections that can save days or weeks for new teammates in reaching that alignment. Using that strength and proactively sharing these valuable connections will create extra clarity for the team in a highly complex and uncertain environment.
"Inspire" over just "Manage". Finally, leadership at scale can become quite operational. There is a concept of "creative leadership" that requires leaders to be more like inspiring coaches who also provide meaningful creative guidance to individuals. It also requires having enormous energy that can be invested into human connections beyond demanding business priorities.

Being a leader at scale is highly challenging and at the same time highly fulfilling. I didn't expect to get here, as I didn't expect this chapter would push me forward to explore more risky experiments with my career and make a radical shift that I call "stepping into the unknown."

🎁 Bonus: 3 books to support leadership at scale — “Empowered” by

Marty Cagan

, “Creativity Inc.” by Ed Catmull, “The Effective Executive” by Peter F. Drucker.

Chapter 4. Stepping into the unknown

It's never easy to decide to move forward. In my case, it required several months of self-reflection, planning, and understanding "the why" behind that.

From a certain point, work became for me something more than just a role with certain responsibilities. It became a lifestyle, an environment in which I transformed and developed myself not only as a professional but also as a personality. To keep transforming myself as a personality, I needed to push myself towards new conditions that were unknown to me so far. Making this step was very scary and hard, but became inevitable on my growth path.

For me, that step forward was connected to a difficult decision to finish my 6-year journey at Miro and open up to uncertain new horizons.

Paul Millerd

describes a beautiful concept of "The Pathless Path" that sounds quite similar to what I'm about to experience. He is saying: "My current path is not a path. Every day is different. I'm literally dancing with uncertainty".

This is where I am today — dancing with several new projects and career directions, such as Growth Advising, Mentorship and Coaching, Growthmates podcast production, and writing in this newsletter. These things don't sound scary anymore but rather exciting 💫

🎁 Bonus: 3 books to support the independent path: “The Pathless Path” by

Paul Millerd

, “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett, “Psychology of the Unconscious” by Carl Jung.