Miro Analyzes Petabytes of Data to Continuously Improve Its Business — and Its User Experience
With Snowflake, Miro drives product and business improvements, standardizes processes and delivers 99% uptime for vital data and insights.
70%+Miro team members using data products built on Snowflake
2Petabytes processed to optimize Miro’s product and business
Industry
TechnologyLocation
San Francisco, CABringing people — and their ideas — together
Innovation doesn’t happen without collaboration. Genuinely new, fresh ideas often require diverse teams from different disciplines to come together and combine their brightest ideas. However, bringing people together isn’t always easy, especially for widely distributed, cross-discipline teams. Miro aims to break down these collaboration barriers by bringing teams and AI together to plan, co-create and build the next big thing, faster.
Serving more than 100 million users in 250,000 organizations, Miro is an AI innovation workspace that empowers cross-functional groups to flow from early discovery through to final delivery on a shared, AI-first canvas. From small teams running product development initiatives to Fortune 500 companies collaborating end-to-end across their entire organization, Miro offers tools to support all sizes and types of projects. That means its platform is an active, constantly evolving product with a wide variety of features.
“Our aim is to constantly improve Miro with new tools and better workflows,” explains Maria Carrillo Minulina, Data Engineering Manager at Miro. “That means we need to understand how our users are leveraging our product and its features, what works and what doesn't. For that, we need to collect and transform a substantial amount of data.”
As it continued to grow, Miro needed a data platform that could scale seamlessly, improve governance, standardize processes and support all users — including those without technical expertise. That’s why it deployed Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), as a central hub for product data, internal reporting and AI functionality.
Story highlights
Insights that drive product and business improvements: A unified data platform ensures everyone at Miro gets the insights they need in a timely manner to make vital product and business enhancements.
Standardized processes — even for sensitive data: With Snowflake features such as automatic classification of data, Miro can standardize processes and handle sensitive data in a highly governed way.
- Consistent insights at scale: Miro uses Snowflake to process 5 billion events — and other data and integrations — while still delivering up to 99% uptime for data users.
Miro finds a new way to collaborate on its own data
“It was always a challenge to make the most of our data,” says Carrillo. “We saw each team coming up with their own ways of managing insights, and that was making it hard to standardize and get a global view of the business.”
A big part of this challenge is the product itself: Miro offers users a wide range of diagrams, images, connectors and, more recently, AI tools. That means every user will approach the platform differently.
Understanding these diverse user journeys is vital to improving a product like Miro and ensuring users are able to make the most of the latest platform features. But these insights demand significant amounts of data. In Miro’s case, that means billions of events creating multiple petabytes of data that must be stored, transformed and analyzed.
It was a really big deal for us to find a fully managed, turnkey solution for everything data-related. Snowflake was the right solution for Miro, as it allowed us to scale resources independently and instantly without performance bottlenecks.”
Maria Carrillo Minulina
Data Engineering Manager, Miro
Unifying data, from boards to the boardroom
To bring together its decentralized data ecosystem, Miro deployed Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud.
From product data and financials to insights from third-party marketing and sales tools, Miro now unifies everything in Snowflake. It then transforms data with dbt, and uses Looker to turn insights into dashboards and reports.
“Having a single, central data platform means we can have all critical data assets ready by 9 a.m. every day, and derive insights faster than ever before,” says Carrillo. “We can process so much data so consistently, and at speed, allowing us to power a huge amount of metrics. That helps us understand where the business is going and change course, if needed.”
Crucially, these insights are available to everyone at Miro, whether they’re a data specialist or a nontechnical analyst. Plus, with Snowflake Cortex AI, teams can use natural language to query and enrich data, bringing even more nuanced insights to everyone at Miro.
“The feedback has been really positive across our teams, particularly for Cortex AI,” explains Carrillo. “We’ve seen a substantial rise in adoption and usage across all domains over the last few months.”
Helping every Miro user get the best experience
With Snowflake, Miro processes huge amounts of data about its collaboration tools, and how users engage with different platform features.
This is vital in ensuring that every customer gets the most out of Miro — and the new features it’s constantly adding. For example, when it began rolling out AI tools that help users interact with boards in new ways, the team quickly discovered many users weren’t making the most of AI features.
“Once we had the data in front of us, we could see users weren’t hitting the toggle to use these tools,” says Carrillo. “It was then easy to bring that data to the product team, investigate the root causes and collaborate to reduce friction and boost adoption.”
With a single source of truth in Snowflake, Miro’s product, design and engineering teams can collaborate easily to optimize the product experience for every user — improving customer retention and, ultimately, driving revenue.
Tracking such a multi-faceted user journey is normally complex, but Snowflake offers so many ways for us to make this easier and keep delivering the best product possible.”
Maria Carrillo Minulina
Data Engineering Manager, Miro
A future of secure, scalable analytics and AI
Miro is now embracing what AI has to offer, with the majority of team members now using AI features powered by data in Snowflake.
Looking ahead, the company has plans to adopt more Cortex AI features to continue serving users, empowering analysts and lowering the technical barrier to entry for data consumption. “Snowflake delivers a lot of this functionality out of the box, and things like semantic views make it easy for us to push our AI ambitions further,” says Carrillo.
Similarly, Miro plans to continue tightening the security of its platform. It’s already exploring Snowflake features such as automatic classification to detect and tag sensitive data, and ensure proper access controls across its data ecosystem. “But we want to take this further,” adds Carrillo. “With Snowflake, we’re making sure we have the guardrails, the alerts and the governance we need to achieve the highest levels of security.”
With an even safer data environment, Miro will be able to continue expanding its product with new features and AI innovations. And that will help it attract even more users and continue offering them the best experiences.
“Snowflake plays an important part in our business,” says Carrillo. “With rapid insights, we can continue optimizing our product and making smart business decisions. And with around 99% uptime across our data tooling, we know everyone can get the insights they need — when they need them.”
