Case Study: Upwork achieves seamless remote collaboration and unified design workflows with Miro

How Does Upwork Avoid the Pitfalls Commonly Associated With Distributed Work

Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing marketplace, faced the common challenge of coordinating a geographically distributed product and design team (roughly 300 full‑time employees plus hundreds of freelancers) while doing highly visual UX work. After stretching G Suite and Google Hangouts beyond their limits for visual tasks like journey maps, Upwork discovered Miro in 2016 — a cloud‑enabled internet whiteboard from vendor Miro — that better matched the team’s need for real‑time, visual collaboration.

Miro was adopted company‑wide within months and became a formal part of Upwork’s workflow: “pretty much every project touches Miro,” teams often have a dozen people editing the same board in real time, and cross‑functional work (designers, engineers, data scientists) is consolidated into single boards so projects reach higher‑quality outcomes faster. By replacing webcam‑pointed whiteboards and siloed documents, Miro increased engagement, saved time in decision making, and enabled fuller participation from distributed team members.

Upwork

Shipra Kayan

Director, Product Design Research