✨Reflect 2021✨- Async AMA with MURAL's Chief Product Officer Agustin Soler
Async AMA with Agus
Q: What's the last thing you used MURAL to do?
Agus: We’re easing into quarterly planning right now, so I’ve been working with the different product teams on OKR planning in a MURAL. I’m able to work asynchronously with my team leads, see where they think we should be focusing on, and clearly see the big picture of our increasingly complex organization at the same time.
Q: What's something you're excited about on the roadmap for 2022?
A: Asynchronous collaboration has been on my mind a lot. We worked with Atlassian on a Meet-Less campaign and it has really been resonating with our community. Burnout and meeting fatigue are very real. MURAL was just included in an HBR article last week about the importance of bringing more asynchronous work into remote and distributed team environments. We have some additional features to enable async collaboration and strategy and innovation coming up that we’ll be sharing details on in the near future.
Q: What feature do you think is underutilized in MURAL?
A: The first one that comes to mind is the Outline. It’s an unsung hero for navigation and organizing your meeting structure. But it also is a great way to leave facilitation tips if you’re creating a template to share internally to scale a best practice. When we create murals for async collaboration, instructions and FAQs in the outline also help keep everyone on the same page. Two other features that I want to highlight are: Laser pointer (hold H key) and “Pop out mural objects” (hold X key to magnify).
Q: What’s your favorite team icebreaker and why do you like it?
A: Any icebreaker that builds connection and gets people excited is my new favorite. We asked the team recently to add an image to a mural that represented how they spent the company-wide Q4 “rest & recharge” day off. It turned into a big celebration of families and pets and activities that are meaningful to us.
The best ideas happen when thoughts aren’t challenged right away, and there needs to be room for error. Building trust and playfulness into meetings is vital for this. That’s why we dedicate time for warmups and energizers in both our company all hands meetings and our department syncs.
Q: When you are prioritizing needs and ideas, how do you make the hard choice to focus on which priorities?
A: This is asked a lot, by both members and my colleagues across the company who use MURAL every day and are constantly coming up with amazing ideas. It comes down to strategy and vision, which we align on at the executive level. You need to define which area of the customer experience you will make bigger bets, and in which areas you will just deliver. If you just deliver table stakes features, you won’t differentiate or be playing to wow (a MURAL value). However, if you don’t deliver them, you won’t even compete. So we need to do both.