Getting started inside a blank Miro board
The first time I opened up a Miro board for brainstorming, I basically just stared at a white infinite canvas and thought wait now what. There are no guardrails. It feels like Photoshop mixed with Google Docs but without any kind of welcome mat. The trick that worked for me was to immediately drag in sticky notes. Sticky notes are the comfort food inside Miro. Once you place a couple, you feel less like you are standing in empty space. You can click and drag them around, change their colors, and double click to type whatever random thought hits your brain. I usually start with a messy cluster before I even try to create order.
At this stage, if you are running a workshop, people freeze up because they do not know where to start typing. A silly trick I use is to create six or seven precolored stickies before anyone joins the board and label them Question 1 or Idea here. That way participants immediately see that typing is allowed. Watching the little cursors move around is half the fun because it feels lively. Without it, the silence can be awkward and you are left wondering if everyone is just lost in another tab 😛
Using frames to give chaos some structure
If you have ever done a real world sticky note exercise on a wall, you know how quickly it turns into a rainbow mess. Miro is even worse because the notes can literally spread infinitely. Frames are the savior. A frame is basically a container box you drop on the canvas. Anything inside it can be exported together, and it gives a sense of sections. For a workshop I ran last month, I created three frames called Ideas Problems and Next Steps. People naturally dragged their notes into those sections without me having to yell directions.
One issue though is that frames are not locked by default. Someone accidentally grabbed the entire frame once and dragged it halfway across the board. I had to click undo three times while narrating what was happening, otherwise everyone thought their notes disappeared. Pro tip is to lock your frames after you place them so no one rearranges the workshop on accident. Locking is hidden in a tiny right click menu, which is exactly where you would not think to look ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Timers and voting tools that actually help
Workshops online can easily spiral into rambling. Miro has a built in timer and I cannot explain how much calmer it makes things. You click the little clock icon in the top right, set your time for five minutes or whatever, and it counts down visible to everyone. People suddenly get purposeful. I ran a brainstorming round where folks had five minutes to write one idea per sticky. The timer beeped, and instantly people stopped. No awkward transition speech needed.
The voting tool is equally powerful but hidden under a menu called More Tools. The first time I used it, half the group had never clicked it before. Once they discovered they had a limited number of votes, everyone got oddly strategic. One person put all their votes on their own sticky if we are being honest. Still, it narrowed 50 ideas down to the 5 we actually discussed. Without voting, you will waste an hour debating random thoughts that should have been filtered out fast.
Importing templates instead of starting from scratch
I resisted using templates at first because I thought they were gimmicky. Then I realized they save a ton of prep time. Miro offers stuff like customer journey maps, mind maps, and even icebreaker games. For one workshop I grabbed a premade template called Mad Sad Glad which is a reflection framework. Instead of me drawing boxes and typing labels, it was done already. The participants jumped in quicker because everything looked purposeful out of the gate.
Templates can feel a little bloated though. Some come with lots of premade notes and decorations that you will probably want to delete. I usually strip them down to barebones before the attendees join otherwise people get distracted trying to figure out what the clipart is for. It is sort of like serving dinner on a plate covered in garnish no one eats.
Collaboration quirks when too many people join
Miro claims it handles big groups, and technically it does, but the experience gets messy when too many cursors fly across the screen. In one 20 person workshop, the board lagged behind just enough that a sticky note appeared two seconds after someone typed. That might not sound like a lot, but in a live brainstorm, two seconds feels like forever. People kept clicking twice thinking nothing happened, so we ended up with duplicates of the same note. I had to go around deleting clones while the discussion flowed on, which distracted me from actually hosting.
Screen sharing helps here. If you as the host share your screen for a portion of the meeting, it reduces chaos. Instead of everyone moving wildly, they just watch you place the notes, and then you can hand control back for smaller group exercises. It is almost like passing the marker around in a physical workshop except digitally.
Exporting boards and turning ideas into action
When the session ends, the big question is what happens to all the stickies. Miro lets you export entire boards as PDF or image files. The first time I tried this, I could not find the option because it is tucked under a button labeled Share which did not make sense to me. Once you get there, exporting a frame or the whole board is easy. Having that PDF matters because no one wants to log back into the tool just to remember what the group decided.
Another trick is to take screenshots of specific clusters of notes. If you were working in a breakout group within a larger session, a cropped image is quicker to paste into follow up documents. I honestly rarely look at the giant PDF afterward, but the cropped images end up in slides or emails the same day. That is how ideas travel forward instead of dying quietly on a Miro canvas.
Comparing Miro with real walls and whiteboards
I used to do all this with sticky notes in person. The difference online is both better and worse. In person, you run out of wall space and the tape loses stickiness. In Miro, you never run out of space but you absolutely lose orientation once the board gets huge. I have to constantly zoom in and out with my mouse wheel, which sometimes makes me dizzy after a two hour session. There is a map view in the bottom corner that theoretically helps, but it is so small that I rarely look at it.
One oddly satisfying thing is the search function. You can type a word and instantly see every sticky note containing it. Try that on a physical wall covered in 200 yellow notes. So even though the digital board can feel overwhelming, at least you can find that one note where someone mentioned coffee as a metaphor for collaboration 🙂
When Miro actually fails and how I patched it
Of course, there are days when Miro simply refuses to cooperate. Once, right as a workshop started, half the attendees saw a loading spinner instead of the board. Panic. The improvised fix was to create a brand new board, copy paste as much as I could from the original, and drop the fresh link in chat. It wasted ten minutes, but at least people could participate. Since then I always create a backup board in advance just in case. It feels paranoid until the day you need it.
Another bug I ran into was stickies duplicating every time someone pressed Enter. The board ended up with ghost copies of everything. Clearing browser cache oddly resolved it for most participants. When that failed, we told people to switch browsers entirely. Not elegant but it worked. There is always some little quirk right when you think the session is important, and then you spend the first half hour pretending to be an IT support desk while trying not to lose momentum.