Behind the scaffolding: Maintaining luxury during a resort renovation
Behind the scaffolding: Maintaining luxury during a resort renovation
https://hotelsmag.com/news/behind-the-scaffolding-maintaining-luxury-during-a-significant-resort-renovation/
Michael Gordon is the general manager of the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club and president of Gate Hospitality Group.
Luxury hotels are defined by exceptional service, best-in-class amenities and thoughtfully curated experiences. To fulfil those goals, renovations and upgrades are a common conversation among hotel leaders.
Every year, hotels invest in upgrades to keep their property refreshed, but when it’s time for a major overhaul, or a once-in-a-lifetime renovation, planning, communication and promotion are essential to a property’s top-rated service and continued success. Here are three tips to ensure your renovation goes as smoothly as possible—for your team and guests alike.
1. Planning: There are countless factors that determine when a major renovation will take place. Is the resort on the beach where it constantly faces harsh conditions? When was the last upgrade? Has guest satisfaction changed due to aging amenities? Competition also plays a role in building this plan. Spectacular, modern resorts will continue to enter the market. So, when the competition invests and sets new guest expectations, long-term planning becomes more critical to not just remain relevant among the competition, but to be a leader in the industry.
Typically, planning a major renovation begins a minimum of three years prior to construction, and it may be longer if local and state approvals or permitting are needed. Strategic decisions must be made around questions like: How can we lessen the impact on guests? Do we have a sister property in close proximity that we can utilize? Should we complete the work in phases or all at once?
At Ponte Vedra Inn & Club in Northeast Florida, we are building a new oceanfront Surf Club and state-of-the-art Sports Club. Given that these are major amenities, we knew it was important to establish interim services to meet those needs before construction could begin. While these amenities would be temporary, it was essential that they still provided a luxury experience with the highest level of service for our guests.
2. Communication: Once a plan is in place, communicating with staff and guests becomes the top priority. Clear communication and training with on-site service staff allows management to set expectations, generate excitement and ensure teams feel prepared to deliver the same luxury experience despite interruptions.
Employee town hall events are a great way to announce plans to your team, transparently answer questions, and begin building anticipation. For employees whose work location might be impacted, use this opportunity to provide reassurance that their jobs are safe, but they may be moved to another area throughout the renovation.
Once the renovation project is announced in the town halls, use department-level meetings to tailor communications based on the service area. This is the time for guest-facing staff to go above and beyond to create memorable stays – don’t hesitate to communicate that clearly with your employees.
Once team members are aligned and confident, implement your digital communication strategy. Consider a dedicated landing page on your website that outlines the renovations, open amenities and any special accommodations that are being offered. If you have the ability to add a description of the renovations and any potential implications in your booking portal, that provides guests with more prior awareness.
In this phase, you may also utilize augmented reality to truly envision the final results. This technology allows you to transport a guest beyond the construction zone and instead, see their future stay. It can be utilized in-person, on a website or via social media, helping to connect with a variety of audiences.
Across all of these communication channels, emphasize the unique experiences that are available throughout construction. For an oceanfront resort, paint the picture of the sun rising just outside their balcony door. Highlight amenities like breakfast in bed, special wine and whiskey paired dinners, or taking a shuttle to a sister resort that can amplify their experience.
3. Promotion and offers: Another key to maintaining pristine guest experience is finding ways to provide added value without significantly reducing rates. A challenge with temporarily reducing rates can arise when renovations are unveiled and guests have a perception that rates have now skyrocketed. Instead, consider your amenities and ways you can provide an enhanced visit. In my experience, food & beverage credits, resort credits that can be used toward a spa treatment or recreation activity, or promotions like book three nights to get a fourth night free, have been very successful. Lean into creativity by running flash sales for holidays or even days like “National Plan A Vacation Day.”
For resorts that cater to a group audience, communication and special offers are important to maintaining their business. You might enhance their experience by adding a custom cocktail to their dinner menu or including a golf course-side satellite bar to their networking hour.
Maintaining luxury during renovations is no easy task; it requires extensive planning, management of buy-in and team member execution, meticulous communication and creative promotion. In the end, these historic renovations are the lifeline that carry a resort into the future, if they are done right with guest experience top of mind.
Plan the Perfect 3-Day Weekend in This Oft-Overlooked Florida Destination
Courtesy of VisitStPeteClearwater.com
https://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/florida/the-tampa-bay-area/places/clearwater/experiences/news/how-to-spend-three-perfect-days-in-st-pete-clearwater-florida
Doughnuts with a side of frolicking dolphins, anyone?
Picture soft white sand beaches and glowing sunsets, and you’d be forgiven for thinking I was somewhere in the Caribbean. You might even be surprised to learn I was somewhere where no passport is required to get there: St. Pete-Clearwater, Florida. If you only have three days, here’s how to make the most of them in this oft-overlooked destination.
Day One: Trying My Hand at Sushi Rolling
I had arrived in St. Pete-Clearwater expecting a beautiful beach trip and instead found the kind of place that made me pause and want to text my family: ‘We all need to come here together.’
After an easy half-hour drive from the Tampa airport, I checked into my 16th-floor room with incredible beachfront views at the Wyndham Grand on Clearwater Beach and headed straight to the Pallavi Luxury Spa for a hot stone massage and pure relaxation (a must for weary travelers looking to unwind).
That same evening, I tried my hand at sushi-rolling at Ocean Hai, the Wyndham’s on-site Asian fusion restaurant, where each dish is thoughtfully curated and prepared by the Executive Chef Nana Darkwah. The “Sushi and Sips” experience offers an intimate class in the art of sushi-rolling and is only one of the many experiences offered by Wyndham.
Day Two: Welcome to Little Greece
The next morning, I traveled up the coast to Tarpon Springs, which felt as though I’d somehow transported myself to a mini Greece. Sponge divers called this charming town home in the 1900s, and it has since grown into the largest Greek community in the United States. If headed to Tarpon, don’t miss buying a sponge at one of the many adorable shops, and make sure to stay for lunch at Hellas. This third-generation Greek restaurant and bakery offers an authentic cultural experience shaped by generations of family recipes and delectable pastries.
After lunch, I walked off the meal at Dunedin, where I experienced a custom candle-making experience at Sea Love before taking in happy hour at Florida’s oldest microbrewery with a Scottish twist, Dunedin Brewery. The night was capped off with a fresh seafood spread at Bob Heilmans Beachcomber and the best key lime pie I had all trip.
Day Three: Doughnuts with a Side of Dolphins
On my last morning in St. Pete-Clearwater, I enjoyed an easy walk down the coast and found the most incredible donuts I’ve ever seen at Parlor Doughnuts, where flavors like Campfire and Maple Bacon await. Afterwards. I boarded a boat for an afternoon spent amongst dolphins swimming alongside us in the bay.
Lunch that day was at Crabby’s Dockside, and if you’re looking for fresh crab legs, this is the place to get them. Dinner took me to Book + Bottle, where coffee, wine, and books converge for the ideal hangout. A perfect dinner at The Crane soon followed with some evening shuffleboard that topped off a fun-filled day.
Too often, travelers think they need to venture abroad for an experience that feels unique and far from home. But down in Florida, in St. Pete-Clearwater, I found myself awed by this beautiful destination. Between the food, the history, and the wealth of experiences, this is the sort of place that feels further than it is, and well worth the trip to get there.
Omnam the gladiator developer
Founder David Zisser talks about the group’s approach to dealmaking, its partnership with Mohari, as well as their next moves.
https://www.hotelinvestmenttoday.com/Development/Owners/Omnam-the-gladiator-developer?
LONDON—David Zisser doesn’t have a degree from the Cornell hotel school or a background as an operator, but just as he calls his 50-strong Omnam Group team today, he is a gladiator hotel developer. The CEO is not afraid to question the status quo, retains humility knowing he is not always right, and will sleep on a development site floor in a sleeping bag to manage challenges because he unflinchingly believes failure is not an option. Now, with some initial successes, a pipeline of eight or more projects, a newly opened Edition on Lake Como in Italy and a pivotal partnership since 2022 with developer Mohari Hospitality, Zisser has the respect and attention of institutional capital as well as the firepower to grow and take the company to the next level.
Even as a child, Zisser thought about a career in hotels as he loved everything about the business and enjoyed being a host. How he got there was not planned, however, as his father died and left a debt that the son wanted to repay in his memory. He talked the creditor into bankrolling him for five corporate extended-stay properties in Brussels, relatively quickly turning a profit to repay the debt. That same creditor backed him again for the conversion of a 62,000 square meter empty office space outside Amsterdam that he said he bought for a steal at €12 million.
He brought in Radisson’s Park Inn brand, a local casino operator, a colorful designer, strong F&B, a spa – untypical for a brand that gets €100 ADR – and again within a relatively short period of time and a lot of hard work he was able to sell it to Westmont for a neat profit. That experience also opened doors to institutional capital and led to his next deal, the W Rome, which Omnam has since exited.
Founded in 2011, today’s Omnam portfolio with a project value of €2.6 billion. Open properties include The Lake Como Edition and a Radisson Blu in Florence. Under development are the Baccarat Florence, Rosewood Bauer Venice, Park Hyatt Taormina, Four Seasons Puglia, the Post Rotterdam, the Vergini in Rome as well as the Hôtel Saint-James & Albany, Paris, among others. In total, there are more than 280,000 sqm in development and a workflow that encompasses investment, finance, legal, engineering and design, development, commercial and marketing, innovation and technology, and asset management. Zisser told Hotel Investment Today that the group is even working on launching its own operating platform.
Over the years, Omnam has worked with institutional funds like Bain Capital at The Lake Como Edition and Radisson Blu in Florence, U.K. family officers on three projects, and Mohari so far on the Rosewood Bauer and Hôtel Saint-James & Albany. Omnam generally participates on the equity side from 10% to north of 30% in Puglia and with the Baccarat in Florence.
Zisser is often sourcing distressed assets, including office-to-hospitality, and more often than not turning the asset once it has solid cash flow. For trophy assets like the Bauer in Venice, acquired in 2024 and being completely refurbished, the hold will likely be much longer, especially because of the group’s now sizeable growth in assets under management.
Zisser said they are likely to stick to Europe for near-term growth and he wants to create strongholds similar to Italy in France, where they are about to close on a luxury asset in the south, as well as Spain and Greece. They also have a deal close to being announced in the Nordics. “Our focus is more on going to places where and the diversity of clientele is bigger – not just corporate, not just leisure,” he explained.
Omnam’s philosophy for development surrounds creating communities and experiences with their projects.
Zisser referenced the Radisson Blu in Florence where he learned that whether it’s a Four Seasons or a Radisson, guests want the same thing – fun. “When you create an experience and a community, then the level of thinking and how you get people happy and create moments for them is not that different. What we’ve done at the Radisson is create a ‘resort’ in the city – something that really doesn’t exist. It’s super value for money, and I’m quite sure people will have amazing moments.”
For the most part, Omnam has capitalized deals on a case-by-case basis, but Zisser said they are now at the point where they are thinking about a dedicated fund or doing a strategic joint venture with a hotel operator with a brand who needs a developer with a pipeline and execution capabilities.
“We never have issues raising capital,” Zisser said. “I just think that if we don’t have to do a raise on a case-by-case basis, we can do more because we spend less time doing that.”
Mohari connection
By far, the most important deal to date for Omnam was bringing in Mohari Hospitality, who took a 30% interest in Omnam in August 2022.
Zisser said the relationship started as a friendship with Mark Scheinberg, an Israeli-Canadian businessman who co-founded online gambling company PokerStars, which was sold in 2014 for $4.9 billion.
Mohari Hospitality was founded in 2017 and has included investments in the 2,200-acre Peninsula Papagayo in Costa Rica, which is anchored by a Four Seasons luxury resort; the 1 Hotel Toronto; a Four Seasons in Madrid; and the Riviera Dining Group, among others.
Zisser said the deal gives Omnam the strong backing from a financial perspective to get more deals one. It also helps to have access to the experience of former Four Seasons CEO J. Allen Smith, he added. In return, Mohari gets greater entrée into Europe, where Omnam is more established.
“With this partnership, we’ve secured some unique deals [like the Bauer in Venice],” Zisser said. “We work as a family. We like each other a lot.”
Both groups source deals, including the Bauer, which Zisser said is about 2.5 years or a little less from reopening. Construction is underway, there is a general contractor, and the new owners are very focused on how to present the Bauer 2.0 while respecting its past. He said it will have 118 keys, quite a few F&B outlets, a beautiful spa and second-to-none retail.
Considering the macros
Bigger picture and with their focus on Europe and Zisser’s background in Israel, he said the big question mark at the moment is Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the wake of the conflict in Iran. “How is it going to look the day after? If the regime [in Iran] is not going to change, our people going to come back to Dubai? Ultimately, one of the unique selling points was stability and safety. That’s been broken quite hard.”
From a business perspective for Omnam, Zisser said the conflict is likely going to be good for his business with more people coming back to Europe and fewer people going to the U.S. due to foreign policy decisions.
Also, when it comes to capital markets and investors, a similar situation exists, according to Zisser, especially in the luxury and ultra-luxury space.
“In any sales process that we are doing, clearly there are quite a few Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. And it has become a question about what and where they are going to spend their money in the next few years,” Zisser said. “Maybe they’ll adopt a strategy that now they need to put their money in their own countries to recover. So, we will maybe see less of them coming in. I don’t think it will create a mess because, ultimately, there are also quite a lot of others coming from Asia and so on.”
Longer-term for Europe, Zisser wonders about what the next five to 10 years will be like for hotel trading. “The elections in all the European countries in the next three years are going to really define how the continent is going to look,” he said.
One last thing Zisser said was worth mentioning about luxury hotelkeeping: he thinks it is at a juncture, referencing Four Seasons Founder Issy Sharp being among the first operators to put towels and shampoo in guestrooms. “The industry is now at the point where it needs to present the new towels and shampoos,” Zisser continued. “From my perspective, the headline is ‘generosity.’ What’s real generosity in hotels, and how do you really make guests feel you are being generous? It is not just a sales move. This is something I’m very curious about today.”
The Committed Innovator: Enabling and harnessing the innovation process
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-committed-innovator-enabling-and-harnessing-the-innovation-process?
Andrey Khusid is founder and CEO of Miro. Erik Roth is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Connecticut office.
Miro founder and CEO Andrey Khusid discusses the inspiration behind what started as a digital whiteboard and has evolved to become an AI innovation workspace.
Of the many challenges of innovation, a perennial struggle is enabling members of a team to share and capture their new ideas so they can build on them collaboratively, quickly, and easily. The need to do so remotely inspired Miro founder and CEO Andrey Khusid to conceive the idea of an online whiteboard platform used for brainstorming, planning, and team collaboration. Today the company has evolved into an AI innovation workspace. In this episode of The Committed Innovator, McKinsey senior partner and innovation leader Erik Roth speaks with Khusid about the problem Miro seeks to solve, the process of scaling the business, and how it is adapting in the face of generative and agentic AI. This is an edited transcript of their discussion. You can follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.
Erik Roth, McKinsey: For those who don’t know, what is Miro and why do people use it?
Andrey Khusid, Miro: Miro is an AI innovation workspace that helps teams progress from the discovery of the project to the solutioning and delivery in one end-to-end workspace. We started 14 years ago with an idea of bringing a digital whiteboard into a browser. We evolved to building the most known visual collaboration solution in the market, and now to building the AI-driven innovation workspace that helps teams build the next big thing. We just crossed 100 million users worldwide—a big milestone for us. We also serve more than 250,000 customers including the biggest enterprises in the world, nonprofits, educational institutions, start-ups, and small businesses.
Erik Roth: Take us back to the founding moment. What was the problem you were trying to solve, and what early design choices did you make?
Andrey Khusid: I was running a creative agency in the 2010s and had some customers who worked remotely. Figuring out how to serve them best was the start. Among the design choices, the number-one thing we tried to do was create a universal experience across different visual use cases. At that time there were many different tools—for making diagrams, for mind mapping, for brainstorming use cases. We wanted to create one universal canvas where you could do different jobs that were all connected.
Erik Roth: What were some non-obvious bets you made in those early days?
Andrey Khusid: A lot of those different tools were “single player” in nature—focused on serving individual users—and we wanted our tool to be collaborative. We didn’t sell individual licenses. The minimum number of licenses you could buy was five. You could use it alone, but you had to buy the package of five licenses. Our goal was to make people understand this was a collaboration tool.
Erik Roth: What trade-offs did you have to make? Do you look back on some of those decisions and think, “I’m so glad we didn’t do that, because it would have taken us in a totally different direction?”
Andrey Khusid: One of the big trade-offs we made early on was not to go into on-premises solutions. When we were still a $1 million business, there was a big customer who offered us $2 million to build them an on-prem solution. We said no because that was not the direction I saw the market going in. I was betting on early adopters of the cloud.
Erik Roth: So Miro was a bet on remote collaboration, prepandemic. What other bets were you making back then?
Andrey Khusid: The main bet was on a visual, multi-use-case tool that’s not limited to one workflow—a universal visual collaboration layer that can serve different lines of business and help all types of professionals do their jobs. Why would a user want to switch between tools and have to learn all these new interfaces every time? So we bet on a more horizontal platform in the visual collaboration category rather than try to go deep on a few use cases.
Erik Roth: That means you needed your customers to adopt the product enterprise-wide to get to scale. How did you do that?
Andrey Khusid: We realized there were a lot of individual users coming from bigger companies. Some were using the free version, and some were paying with a credit card. We had the head of sales start working to pick up those individual users and turn them into enterprise accounts. Then in early 2017, a big US financial services firm asked us to create an enterprise offering. They were undergoing an agile transformation and needed a lot of offices across the country to operate in the same way. That was the only time in the company’s history that I put the commitment on certain features into the contract—I wanted our company to understand that building an enterprise offering is a serious obligation. We delivered, this customer is still with us, and their whole company uses Miro now.
Erik Roth: As you think about Miro’s evolution from a visual collaboration workspace to an AI innovation workspace, what part of the innovation workflow are you trying to solve? Or is it meant to be an end-to-end solution?
Andrey Khusid: Our belief is that every team, regardless of the scope and type of innovation they’re engaged in, goes through the same process of discovering the problem, defining the solution, and delivering it. They can be in operations optimizing a supply chain, in marketing preparing for the next launch, in product management shipping a new digital or physical product, or in services optimizing the service in a bank or telecom company. All of them go through the same process of discover, define, deliver. That is why we believe building blueprints that enable that workflow for the organization is the best approach.
Erik Roth: How did you get people to see the value of it?
Andrey Khusid: We quickly realized that the blank-canvas problem is real for users. What’s the best setup for the type of innovation you’re trying to do? So we created templates people could use to discover which was the most relevant for them; then they can customize it or build their own. That was a big unlock for growth and for adoption of the product.
Erik Roth: Do you find that people get stuck at the concept phase? We often see that conceptualizing the innovation is the slow piece.
Andrey Khusid: A lot of companies are well optimized on the delivery side, with milestones and deadlines. But the majority are not well optimized on the discover and define side. That’s seen as more of a black box—spread across different tools and media—and they lack process around it with defined steps and measured outcomes. I think there is a big opportunity for companies to accelerate innovation and improve outcomes by approaching the discover and define phases similar to how they approach the deliver phase, with clear milestones and urgency.
Erik Roth: How does Miro help with that?
Andrey Khusid: The way every company innovates is unique, so we try to enable people to work in the way that works for them. If they like to brainstorm on physical sticky notes or do offline sketches, they can do it, and then bring it to the platform. If they prefer to do a write-up or a PowerPoint presentation, they can bring that to the platform. We are trying to create that universal workspace where all types of people can come together and make decisions, and progress from step to step. The speed of innovation depends on team dynamics, and we are supporting those.
Erik Roth: Can you give us an example of how Miro helps with innovation? A lot of research supports the idea that creative friction, or collisions of different concepts and ideas done in a psychologically safe context, yields the best outcomes.
Andrey Khusid: We try to create tools to support this aspect of the creative process. An example is the interactive widgets on the canvas. One of the most popular is a spinner wheel that helps encourage sharing. You will have team members who are extroverts or introverts, and especially in a digital-first setup, not everyone is comfortable speaking. Our spinner wheel picks up everyone who is on the board at the same time. You click a button to spin the wheel, and it decides whose turn it is to share their idea. It’s a small tool, but it can unlock major insights and help surface ideas that might not come out otherwise.
Erik Roth: Is there one leadership habit or practice you’ve learned over time that you wish you had known earlier?
Andrey Khusid: Yes, think of it as day-one thinking, a strategic capability that works like this: If I start building a product today, I have to ask myself, what should the project look like? And you try to always work toward that.
Erik Roth: What if that interferes with other thinking? How do you decide to kill a beloved feature or aspect of the product that has been there for a while if it conflicts with whatever the day-one thinking is?
Andrey Khusid: We just kill it. I’ll give you an example. We just introduced our AI Canvas. It’s a new toolbar, a new layout for the product. For now, we keep the previous toolbar and see what customers pick up and adopt. If they like the AI Canvas and it solves their problems better, we’ll immediately kill other modalities that are not relevant anymore.
Erik Roth: Are there any unique rituals or artifacts you use that help encourage and support the way you innovate, bring things to market, and interact with customers?
Andrey Khusid: Yes, one of my favorites is this concept of bringing forth a “bad version” of an idea. This encourages people to show their artifacts as early as possible, avoiding the desire to do something polished first, which can waste a lot of time. Three weeks or months later when you finally bring it to stakeholders, you might realize it’s not what was needed.
Erik Roth: Is there a story behind the name “Miro”? Is it a reference to the Spanish artist?
Andrey Khusid: When we started, we called the company RealtimeBoard because it was an available domain we could get for ten bucks. I promised if the company took off, we’d come back and rename and rebrand it. When we did so in 2019, the agency we worked with came up with Miro, which I loved because I want to provide a canvas to make everyone a little bit of an artist when they do their day-to-day work. If you look at the work Joan Miró created, you’ll see shapes with very special colors. If you zoom out on Miro boards, they also have that kind of look.
Erik Roth: Miro has gone through multiple growth phases. Given it’s a virtual collaboration tool, COVID-19 must have been one of the more interesting times for you.
Andrey Khusid: We were 200 people when COVID started, and we had around five million users on our platform. Eighteen months later, we were 50 million users with 1,800 people in the company. It’s been a massive scale-up. When the pandemic started, we were mostly an office culture and had to quickly adapt to remote-first processes that would allow us to scale effectively across multiple regions and locations. If I could do it again with what I know now, I would build our processes and culture from day one with the goal of sustaining any kind of setup—remote or in-office.
I would also think bigger on the product side. During the pandemic, we suddenly had competitors see the opportunity of visual collaboration spaces and start to offer their own tools, which pushed us to think bigger and innovate to the next horizon. That’s how we arrived at the AI innovation workspace. To do the whole innovation life cycle, we realized we would need to use not just visual tools, but move to structured data, documents, and other formats. We’ve built a whole suite that supports that end-to-end journey. Having competition enter our space has been good for us.
Erik Roth: What’s next for Miro?
Andrey Khusid: We announced our new AI innovation workspace recently because we believe that in the future we’ll need a platform where human intelligence and artificial intelligence are working together. We tend to use LLMs [large language models] now as an individual activity similar to what single-player online gaming used to be. We’re looking to enable the innovation workspace equivalent of multiplayer online gaming environments. We’re betting on team intelligence, where people work in groups and cross-functionally. Right now there is no one solution that supports that group, cross-functional work.
No matter how much you increase individual productivity, time to market and value can only accelerate if the whole team can work together, and faster. That’s what we are looking to bridge—individual productivity gains with the faster and better-quality outcomes at the team level.
Erik Roth: How can that kind of AI-driven innovation speed up time to value?
Andrey Khusid: Typically, you start the process of innovating a new product with a workshop that might take a couple of hours, and the output would be a bunch of sticky notes. Someone has to synthesize those notes, come up with insight, and then set in motion the next actions in the process. That can take days or weeks in some organizations. By then, the energy generated in the workshop has dissipated, and you have to get people restarted so they can identify their next steps based on that summary of the sticky notes. That takes another week or two. Finally, you create prototypes, which takes another few weeks.
With our AI innovation workspace, we’re trying to enable a process where you condense what can take days, weeks, or even months down to just two hours.
Erik Roth: I can’t help thinking that maybe this is the one place where AI hallucination is a benefit as opposed to a problem.
Andrey Khusid: Exactly. I get a lot of questions about hallucinations of the models, and I think that for the discovery and definition phase, it’s a benefit. It lets you explore the edges and come up with more creative ideas and solutions than you can in a more deterministic setting.
Erik Roth: What’s your model of innovation inside Miro? How do you balance top-down and bottom-up innovation?
Andrey Khusid: You need both. We have a product vision led by the product leadership org, and I’m part of that. But there are a lot of ideas that can emerge from the bottom up. We run hackathons every six months, and there are about 30 to 35 ideas in each. A lot of the ideas are so good they’re almost ready to ship immediately, but it takes a few months to build them into the platform.
Also what’s important is how people come up with those ideas to improve the platform. To build that culture, you need people who care about users and customers, who are curious about all that, and who are going the extra mile to serve them and bring their best ideas. Combining those two approaches—a strong conviction where the company and product should go, along with empowering people to bring their best ideas on a regular basis—makes the innovation velocity and quality work for us.
Our general approach is to be forward-thinking and reinvent ourselves before we get disrupted.
In the past, innovation was coming from observations and feedback on how users and customers use your software, but now technology is creating new opportunities. LLMs, gen AI, and agentic technology are offering new ways of doing things that haven’t been available before.
Innovation is a team sport that is broadly accessible. Every human can innovate.
Andrey Khusid, founder and CEO, Miro
Erik Roth: Before we wrap up, let’s do a lightning round. First, what is the most overhyped innovation myth you wish would die?
Andrey Khusid: There are only a few people out there who can innovate. Innovation is a team sport that is broadly accessible. Every human can innovate.
Erik Roth: What’s your favorite Miro board to use?
Andrey Khusid: The strategy board. I use it to map everything in my head—all the competitors, the market movements, the research, everything happening. It’s a massive board where all the pieces come together. It lets me make sense of those pieces, to set up the next horizon.
Erik Roth: What’s one constraint that constantly makes Miro’s product better?
Andrey Khusid: We move fast and with conviction. We like to learn fast and iterate. We are not trying to make something really excellent by spending a long time thinking about it.
Erik Roth: Finish this sentence: Innovation is hardest when...
Andrey Khusid: When you don’t have the same mindset across the organization.
Erik Roth: What’s one piece of advice for how people can make their innovation better tomorrow?
Andrey Khusid: Ensure you are in front of your customers and users all the time. It’s not just asking them what they need or what problems they have; it’s observing their behaviors. You need to understand how they do things and what problems they face. Without that, innovation is happening in isolation.
Erik Roth: Andrey, thank you so much for speaking with us.
Andrey Khusid: It’s been a pleasure.
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