This week, I sat down with Alina Shaikhutdinova, a Product Manager based in Amsterdam who’s been transforming the way admins interact with Miro, ever since she was in university.
Where are you based these days?
The last two years changed my life. I’ve had the opportunity to work from every place I wanted to! Originally I was based in Perm, but when COVID started I moved to Bali, then to Moscow, then to Sri Lanka, to Barcelona, to South Russia… I loved being in Sri Lanka the best. Now I’m in Armenia, but I’ll be moving to the Amsterdam hub soon.
What brought you to Miro?
When I started at university, Andrey Khusid, Miro’s Founder and CEO, came to talk to us and told an inspiring story about the future of work, and I felt really inspired. So, I joined a hackathon with 30 people. After the hackathon, I got a call from Andrey himself and he invited me to join the team. It was a big surprise for me, and I said yes!
Since then, it’s been five years of a crazy journey. I have been a Tech Support Engineer, a Junior Project Manager, a Technical Project Manager, a Business Systems Manager, and now I’m in this current role, Product Manager.
What’s your favorite thing about working here?
Our community and the people with which I work. My second favorite thing is the product. When I started uni, my dream was to be doing something really important and to be part of something bigger than myself.
What is your team responsible for?
The Business Tech team works to unlock bottlenecks and help improve some business processes. For example, our Sales Team relies on Salesforce to get their job done, so our team works to deliver data that they need to work in Salesforce. Our biggest project at the moment is bulk migration.
Tell me more about the bulk migration project.
When our team was founded, there were only two of us. We implemented the internal admin panel. Everyone at Miro uses the admin panel to learn more about our customers. Within this tool, we also perform migration.
In a regular migration, when a customer buys an Enterprise account, they want to combine all their employees into one space to better collaborate in one common entry point. Before bulk migration, the old admin panel looked like some kind of script you ran with the IDs you wanted to migrate, a kind of console without UI — you just put some entry data, clicked “run,” and that was it! It worked, but it wasn’t always predictable. With our team, we’re finally able to focus on bulk migration. It’s not perfect, but we’re in the process of improving it as much as possible.
What are some challenges your team has faced?
Currently, the our Customer Success Managers and Support Agents do all the migrations themselves, and this process is really tricky. There are always so many questions, trainings, and involvements. Then there’s our licensing model: Every customer has a different use case for the migration, and we need to deliver some general flow that will work for everyone, even when they have thousands of users who they want to distribute differently or company admins who own these enterprises but don’t understand the big picture.
But the biggest challenge is the amount of data that needs to be migrated. Three or four years ago, when we started to sell Enterprise, the biggest customers only had 50 licenses. Now it’s thousands and thousands of licenses — 40,000 users, with 100,000 boards that need to be consolidated. Now we have so much data!
What stage of development is this project in?
At this point, we’ve finished the second version of the migration project. Our next step is refining it. We really want to make a pro service migration offering. Right now that isn’t possible because we can’t guarantee a seamless migration process. Until we develop the third version, we won’t have the ability to set downtime for customers; all we can do is ask them to stop while we’re migrating. So, we hope to make some advancements and hire some more teammates to help us do that.
What kind of person would do well on your team?
Customer-centric developers who don’t just do the code, but who want to solve problems or address some tricky cases or bring some kind of value. We don’t have any developers right now who just do the code. This job isn’t about only coding; it’s also about bringing value and seeing real feedback from real users. All migrations are about expansion. When the migrations are good, the opportunities expand.
If someone wants to join our team, this is a unique opportunity to be with our customers in real-time mode. Product teams don’t normally get to chat with their customers like we do. It’s very inspiring work!
