BongoHive is Zambia’s first innovation and tech hub, that provides incubation and accelerator programmes to startups at all stages of their businesses. We have conducted different programmes with various partners to help grow the Zambian startup ecosystem.

It is our goal to leave a long-lasting social-economic impact by building more partnerships to help build a solid pipeline for startups; making it easier for them to start and grow their businesses.

One such partnership is collaborating with Miro to help startups innovate quicker by gaining access to the platform. Miro is an online collaborating whiteboarding platform where you can work with your team and share feedback in real-time.  Internally, we have been using Miro during team brainstorms on innovation and design, as well as projects where we have collaborated with clients and cross-collaboration is required. We are excited to present such an opportunity to the startups within our ecosystem, with the help of Miro.

Let’s dive into what Miro is and how startups can use Miro to collaborate, brainstorm, research and plan.

We had a chance to talk to Jair Halevi, Managing Partner of the Miro Startup programme, who explained Miro in simpler terms- “I like to describe Miro as a way to share what’s inside your brain with other people who are not necessarily in the same place as you and get real-time feedback.”

Startups can choose to work from an empty board or choose from the pre-made templates. Miro has over a thousand templates that range from all types of use cases for businesses like making a business model canvas, conducting persona research, making sketches for website designs or product roadmaps, and so on.

You don’t have to worry about working on different documents or tools because you can integrate Miro with other tools such as Google Docs, Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Notion and Airtable.

Fun fact: Miro is named after the famous Spanish painter who makes colourful paintings. The Miro platform was given this name because what users create on the whiteboards tend to look like the Miro paintings. 

How Can Your Startup Use Miro?

Miro has several use cases for startups, but there are 5 main use cases that we have outlined below:

Ideation and Brainstorming

Miro is a good place for a brain dump. You can easily share your ideas and thoughts with your team members in real-time.

Research and Design

Miro has templates that can help you conduct user research by asking the right questions, thereby understanding your users. You can also the whiteboards to illustrate product designs. For example, you can draw a sketch of an App or website on the whiteboards.

Mapping and Diagramming 

You can use templates in Miro to explain complex processes. For example, you can use flow charts to simplify the product development process. Additionally, you can easily illustrate the customer journey map to show how you are connecting with customers at which moment in time. 

Agile Workflow

For your standups or retrospectives, you can use Miro to help you maintain an agile workflow. You can use the workflow templates to assign tasks, tag people and ultimately plan your day-to-day workflow.

Strategy and Planning

Your startup can benefit from in-depth strategy and planning. Whether you want to plan for the quarter or carry out a product roadmap from scratch, Miro provides you with the opportunity to do it seamlessly. 

Overall, Miro helps your startup to engage with team members no matter where they are. If you have a team distributed in different locations, Miro gives you an opportunity to connect with your team as if you are in the same place. You can advance team connections further by using some of the templates that help you understand how your team members are feeling, thereby creating some empathy for each other.

Some final words from Jair: Our goal is to invest in startups to make sure that they can innovate quickly and that’s why we have partnered with BongoHive. We are happy to support all the promising startups in the Zambian startup ecosystem and we look forward to seeing how we can get startups to the next level.

We Joined the Miro Startup Programme; Get Your $1000 

Star tup faster with Miro, the collaborative online whiteboard. Miro gives your startup everything it needs to scale and succeed at speed. Discover and validate your ideas, design products, and apply product frameworks. Try the startup tool that’s built for teams by joining  Miro’s Startup Program. 

All our Startups new to Miro will get $1,000 in credits to grow their business.

Apply here