Leveraging Miro as My Ultimate Consulting Toolkit!

How to make your consulting simpler without effort.

Okay, yet another day, yet another type of post to my publishing schedule. On Wednesdays, I've been sharing my revisited RAPID-based Modernization series, which will continue for the next 17 weeks. For Mondays, I have a surprise in development that will arrive in 2–3 weeks from now.

But Fridays, Fridays are special, and this post is for this special day. Every Friday (or possibly every second Friday), you'll get my posts about how I work in consulting.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to prepare such content every week - let me try and see. This post was actually supposed to be here a week ago, but I didn't have enough time to finish it on time.

So what does this mean for you?

• I'll share the essential tools I can't live without

• I'll write about frameworks I use in my consulting work and their specific applications

For example, I plan to show you how I use the RACI+F matrix in sales engagements.

The post will be part free and part for paid audience. I think both groups will get something valuable.

Today I want to share specifically how Miro has become my indispensable companion for client work that I cannot live without - even sometime I'm forced to do it.

Let's look at topics for today's post:

"Conducting Discovery Sessions" - I leverage Miro's pre-built templates tailored to consulting methodologies. These provide immediate structure to my discovery sessions, eliminating the time-consuming process of creating frameworks from scratch. However, sometimes I have also been making my own templates.

"Generating Presentations and PDFs" - I transform workshop outputs into client-ready deliverables through Miro's export capabilities utilizing the power of Frames. This allows me to frame specific sections as presentation slides, maintaining visual continuity between the collaborative process and formal deliverables.

🔐"AI-Driven Diagram Creation" - I utilize Miro's integration of artificial intelligence to generate diagrams from simple text descriptions or previously generated notes. This dramatically reduces the time required to create professional visualizations of complex concepts. Even form is not ideal, minimally you don't need to put text and connections manually. You just need to organize it and style.

🔐"Integration with Tools" - I connect Miro with project management and knowledge management platforms like Jira and Confluence to create a continuous workflow, for some customers as I'm not a big fan of the Atlassian stack. This eliminates the fragmentation and duplication that often plague consulting projects. Especially useful for creating roadmap and turning it into a backlog.

🔐"Project Management" - I employ Miro's card synchronization capabilities to create visual representations of project elements that maintain synchronization with formal tracking systems. This combines the benefits of spatial thinking with structured project tracking. However, I'm still looking for integrations with other platforms, like Notion or Clickup that are my preferred task management tools.

Of course, I have also used Miro just for diagramming, like lastly I have created Technology Landscape or Process Definition Materials. But I think it's too obvious to write about it.

Okay, Now let's take a look at how I use Miro in my daily consulting work:

Conducting Discovery Sessions with Enhanced Engagement

Discovery sessions form the foundation of consulting engagements—in my case, they're a big part of them—requiring tools that facilitate deep exploration and effective information gathering. Recently, I had to lead workshops using materials my friend created in PowerPoint, and it was a painful experience.

There are two modes of working with Miro: choose an existing framework and adjust it for your needs, or create your own canvas for workshops. I have utilized both approaches.

Examples of good templates range from simple retrospective templates and SWOT analysis to problem discovery sessions and all types of business model canvas, extending into more complex forms like System-Stakeholders-Value Analysis or Value Ecosystem Mapping.

Of course, I don't use these templates exactly as they're created. Usually, I follow the Pareto principle—if a template covers around 80% of my needs, I take it, remove what's obsolete, and add what I'm missing. This saves me a lot of time.

Occasionally, there are cases where no ready-to-use boards exist, or they only fit your needs by about 40%. That's fine—this is when I start from the ground up. Miro offers many useful features to create stacks of sticky notes, organize them into shapes, or generate content from documents or AI to explain exercises.

I haven't used Miro Meetings yet, but I'm considering it because of its benefits. Let's talk about the sessions themselves now.

Miro Meetings can be beneficial because they connect better with meeting structure. For example, you can create breakout canvases, and when people are assigned to breakout rooms, they can work only in their designated part of the canvas—sounds wonderful. However, in consulting, you're often limited to tools like MS Teams or Zoom. For now, I've focused on using Miro only as a whiteboarding tool, as other meeting platforms currently offer more features.

Miro's interactive toolkit has revolutionized participant engagement in my sessions. I regularly employ:

• Customizable timers to maintain session pacing and ensure we cover all necessary topics

• Voting mechanisms that democratize decision-making and prevent dominant voices from controlling outcomes

• Sticky notes that capture ideas without interrupting the flow of conversation

• The new Activity feature to monitor participant engagement and identify when energy is flagging

Let's get back to the board and start from my last discovery: Activity Frames. These function is similar to other frames on your canvas. However, you can run a Focus mode on them to ensure participants only look at this particular exercise. That's a fantastic feature that will streamline your session by highlighting what's important.

As I mentioned, Activity Frames can be connected with Breakout Frames, where you divide people into groups. What's important to note is that you need to have these people visible on the board - I mean, you need to see the list of available participants to start using this feature correctly. From my perspective, it's worth encouraging people to join the board properly to enable this functionality.

The next Miro feature I've been using regularly is Timers. When I give participants 15 minutes to work in groups, I always place a Timer on the particular frame and start it alongside the task. This feature ensures that everyone in the workshop can see how much time is left (in the top-right corner) and hear an alert when time runs out. Really useful feature!

The next feature I cannot live without, coupled with a few extensions, relates to creating note piles. One option is to use the sticky stack new feature in Activity, which you can see in one of the screenshots above. Another option includes Stickies Packs and Sticky Art - tools that generate several sticky piles for you, with Sticky Art additionally arranging them into various shapes.

The last feature is voting, a simple yet powerful built-in element similar to the timer that enables you to collect votes for particular ideas directly on the board. It simplifies your decision-making process and helps streamline workshops further. You can decide what types of objects the voting applies to - sticky notes, objects, texts, images, or cards - which I'll explore in depth in later chapters.

Generating Professional Presentations and PDFs for Client Communication

Consultants often struggle with turning workshop sessions into final deliverables, typically requiring extensive document writing and information organization. Fortunately, Miro offers powerful features that transform your boards directly into polished deliverables.

Presentation Mode

The first option allows you to create presentations from organized components. What does this mean?

Simply place your prepared information (like the SWOT analysis shown in the screenshot) into frames, organize the frame order, and you're done! You can convert these frames directly into a Slide Share presentation or PDF slides directly from Miro.

I've used this feature multiple times to summarize workshops. All I needed to do was organize and clean up the information. The result is simple and readable.

Doc Feature

Another option for creating documents from your Miro board is the new Doc object type. One important feature I've been using is AI-generated Docs. You can simply mark your board's sticky cards (as I did for the SWOT analysis), click Miro AI, and ask it to summarize your SWOT analysis session using the SWOT-core framework. And voilà – a simple document is ready instantly!

But what's important about the doc format is its ability to interconnect with other objects on your whiteboard, such as frames. You can simply use the copy and sync functionality to map your frames, tables, and other objects into your Doc - just like you see here:

Any changes on the board automatically update the information displayed here. This doesn't affect generated content yet - hopefully Miro will add this capability in the future. Nevertheless, it's still very useful. Another helpful feature is that after you finish, you can click the three-dots menu and Export Doc as PDF.

Export Options for Different Needs

Beyond the presentation and document exporting, Miro offers several export options that I've found invaluable for different client situations.

Then there's the image export functionality. You can export your board or specific sections as PNG or JPEG files or even SVGs, which is perfect for including visualizations in other documents or presentations. I often use this when I need to incorporate Miro elements into PowerPoint decks for executive presentations.

For more data-focused outputs, the CSV export option is a game-changer. This allows you to export structured data from tables, cards, or sticky notes for further analysis. Recently, I used this to export prioritized feature requests from a product workshop directly into an Excel model for cost-benefit analysis.

What's particularly powerful is how these export options maintain the visual integrity of your work. The spatial relationships, color coding, and visual hierarchies that make information intuitive on the board translate well to these exported formats, preserving the cognitive benefits of visual thinking even in traditional document formats.

Leveraging AI-Driven Content and Diagrams

Let's switch to the next feature, show me the tool without AI integration. Miro isn't lacking in this area, as they've introduced several intelligent AI tools. Let's start with diagramming. Who doesn't struggle with creating diagrams? It takes time—sometimes a lot of time—and you need to have a clear concept. Let's be honest: it's boring and time-consuming.