Case Study: Upwork achieves scalable remote Design Thinking with Miro

Upwork’s Lessons in Creative Collaboration at a Distance

Upwork, a platform championing remote freelance work, faced the challenge of scaling Design Thinking across a globally distributed product organization where engineers were traditionally execution-focused and not used to ideating. To teach execution-focused teams how to empathize, ideate, prototype, and test remotely, Upwork ran condensed remote Design Thinking trainings with mixed-discipline, geographically dispersed teams and selected Miro as their virtual whiteboard and collaboration platform.

Using Miro for clustering, prioritization, and live ideation, Upwork’s facilitators ran four-hour sessions that took teams through the full Design Thinking lifecycle—producing dozens of ideas, wireframe prototypes (built in Google Slides), and rapid user feedback. The Miro-enabled workshops left participants energized, produced tangible prototypes and testable concepts in one session, and generated clear interest from engineers to apply the process to real Upwork problems, demonstrating improved remote creative collaboration and faster, more engaged ideation.

Upwork

Shipra Kayan

Director, Product Design Research