{"id":6867,"date":"2022-06-12T12:54:38","date_gmt":"2022-06-12T12:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uxdesigninstitute.com\/blog\/?p=6867"},"modified":"2024-01-16T15:10:25","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T15:10:25","slug":"miro-srecko-dimitrijevic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uxdesigninstitute.com\/blog\/miro-srecko-dimitrijevic\/","title":{"rendered":"Design thinking with Miro’s Srecko Dimitrijevic"},"content":{"rendered":"

We recently had the privilege of chatting to Srecko Dimitrijevic, a Product Designer with Miro<\/a>, as part of our Day in the Life live event, which you can watch <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Formed in 2011, Miro is the virtual whiteboard that allows teams to brainstorm and collaborate as they work in-office, remotely or take the hybrid approach. Over 35 million people use Miro across the globe and in one of our recent LinkedIn surveys, 44% of our poll takers voted Miro as the best documentation tool in UX.<\/span><\/p>\n

With over 14 years behind him in design, Srecko\u2019s design thinking helps users to adapt to the new normal ways of working and allows them to get things done at their own pace. He shares his insights on how he has adapted to new design roles and how leaving his comfort zone wasn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Could you talk us through your professional journey ?<\/b><\/h3>\n

When I graduated as a baby designer around 2008, I worked as a graphic designer all the way to art director in a marketing agency. After that, I moved towards visual design and UI design<\/a>, where I was working freelance for a New York-based company with various industry clients. The next stepping stone was actually having my own studio from 2015 to 2017, where I was working mostly with US-based healthcare startups.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2017, I made a big change and decided to live abroad outside of Serbia to become more focused on product development and work with an actual product development, cross-functional team. This is when I moved to Germany. I had a couple of things here. The first step here was Zattoo<\/a>, which was like Netflix for TV content. I moved from the entertainment industry into Ada<\/a>, which is a diagnostic app for the healthcare industry, in 2020. After that, I worked with Softgarden<\/a>\u00a0 for a year on an applicant tracking system for recruitment. And here we are today Miro. As you can see, I made a lot of switches.<\/p>\n

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Tell us a little bit about your responsibilities as a product designer with Miro.<\/b><\/h3>\n

First of all, my team and I were working on asynchronous collaboration. In simple human language, what that means is it’s two or more people working on the same project at a different time or place. Time is\u00a0 the most important factor. Within the team, as a product designer, my main responsibility is advocating for great UX and the great experience as much as we can achieve.<\/span><\/p>\n

We’d love to hear a little bit about the many different roles within Miro and how you actually handle working with a cross-functional team.<\/b><\/h3>\n

When it comes to my cross-functional team, it\u2019s not that hard because I have a really awesome, awesome team of developers, Product Manager and development lead. In general, especially in a company of this kind of size, you need to constantly align with the people and step back to understand how what you’re doing fits in with the overall strategy. So you can imagine that if I want to do something, I really need to align with a <\/span>Canvas<\/span><\/a> team, I need to talk to core product<\/span>. <\/span><\/p>\n

So with everything, you need to talk to people. And I think overcommunication is the way to go. It’s the best recipe. Something that has worked for me is that you need to constantly praise what you’re doing and how you want to do it. You need to have a rationale of what you’re doing and, of course, talk to a lot of people.\u00a0 I think the more senior you get, the more you talk.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Who would be the main people you communicate with on a daily basis?<\/b><\/h3>\n

On a daily basis, that’s mighty. There\u2019s the holy trinity of design, product and development. My day would start preferably around 10, where I can go through our <\/span>JIRA<\/span><\/a> backlog, do tasks or just talk directly to my Product Manager and development lead \u2013 taking a look at what’s at hand, what we want to tackle first. These are the people that I talk to a lot \u2013\u00a0 it’s like my family here.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Another layer is that Miro is huge and as a design team, we need to have a lot of meetings to align and to make sure that what you do is in compliance with your whole chapter and with the rest of the product.<\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/span>How do you make design an accessible and approachable conversation topic?<\/b><\/h3>\n

There are, in my opinion, two ways. So first of all, it’s a very simple one and that can be realising that you are speaking to people in a different language. If I talk to you designer to designer, then we will probably discuss flows, interactions, how something should work. It\u2019s all about user experience.\u00a0 If I talk about the very same thing but to the Product Manager, then I’m going to talk more about the timeline about how it fits into strategic needs, how we’re going to present it to the top level management. If you talk to developers<\/a>, imagine the very same screen that you’re presenting. You’re not going to come to them and say \u201cHey, this is the colour purple\u201d.\u00a0 You will talk in technical terms about how that colour can be implemented in CSS, etc.<\/span><\/p>\n

Secondly, I actually think that the primary role of a designer is to continuously facilitate the environment for people so they can participate in design. It\u2019s very important to enable people\u00a0 to participate in design decisions and to be designers as well.<\/span><\/p>\n