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In March, much of the world went home. But there is important work to do. In the midst of mind-bending changes to our realities, we are all learning new skills, tools, and patterns of online work that are likely to permanently alter how we imagine, communicate, and collaborate with each other in the future.
Before 2020, visual problem-solving techniques such as experience mapping, business model design, program increment (PI) planning, and agile retrospectives had become standard for businesses. Collaborative meetings of all types have been essential for innovation and creativity. And for some time, teams and organizations have been learning to collaborate with people distributed around the world, remote from each other, but increasingly effective at communicating while not face to face. Those are trends that many have appreciated.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic made remote collaboration skills and practices absolutely necessary – at massive scale.
Record numbers of you have sought MURAL’s help as you refactor how you work during these challenging weeks and months. Not only are you designers, agile planners, and remote facilitation experts, you are also university professors, local government officials, non-profit leaders, and innovators guiding many kinds of teams adapting to a new reality – together. Since mid-March, the number of people using the MURAL platform on a daily basis has increased 15x. In April alone, over two million of you have interacted with MURAL, by participating in our online events, by learning from our content, or by getting extra help from our team.
Your team’s work is mission-critical. Your imagination and ability to execute on it is imperative to our collective ability to adapt to this environment. And we want you to know we are taking great strides to ensure your meetings, workshops, and customer engagements are in good hands.
At MURAL, we have been preparing for increased adoption of visual collaboration for some time. Since raising $23 million in funding earlier this year, we’ve been quickly growing our teams and evolving our infrastructure to meet significantly higher demand and continue creating the most dynamic experience in our product. The exponential increase in interactions in our product due to the COVID-19 pandemic has meant we needed to accelerate that. We've learned from the bumps in the road we've encountered as we scaled and implemented new systems. We haven’t been perfect, but open communication with and feedback from our members has helped focus our efforts as we scale and fortify our platform in this time of skyrocketing use.
To continue this open communication, here’s what we have been doing to allow your team, and millions of people like you, to imagine and create together, no matter where you are or how far apart you are from each other:
We’re expanding our team of world-class IT virtuosos, support heroes, and enterprise transformation experts to support you and the growing MURAL community. Since February 2020, we’ve grown the MURAL team overall by 66 percent and we’re continuing to hire the best and the brightest around the world.
In the last six months, we have nearly doubled the size of the support team alone, with the following results:
We want to make your experience in the product as sleek as possible. We’ll soon roll out a major boost in performance, which is currently live with beta customers. In early testing, we're seeing incredibly smooth navigation (100x faster zooming and panning) and significant decreases in loading times.
MURAL runs on a cloud-native architecture with capacity to serve 10 times our current demand without any problem. During the past weeks, we upgraded numerous internal systems and processes in order to better react to spikes in usage and to improve our performance, high availability and resilience in different ways.
We live by our "Make Others Successful" value that we adopted during our Start-up in Residence Program at IDEO. One key to how we operate is that we will always provide you with a high level of transparency on our status. In the event there is any disruption in our service, this information is available through numerous channels and a post-mortem is posted via our status page letting you know what happened. We care about you, and your work, and want you to be confident that our systems are at 100% before your next big meeting. Your voice is heard and your feedback is essential as we evolve our approach. For example:
There’s a reason why the world’s most extensive visual collaboration transformations are powered by the MURAL product and team. Global technology, financial services, and consulting enterprises — which have up to 60,000 monthly active members each in MURAL — conduct their mission-critical meetings, workshops, and client engagements with a trusted partner.
Every action you take in MURAL is critical, and we’re dedicated to ensuring that creating and collaborating in MURAL is a smooth experience. We walk in your footsteps too; MURAL is critical to our own people. We're a remote-first team that relies on visual collaboration and uses MURAL in every meeting.
We’re all deeply grateful that you’re turning to us during this time. Your trust in us is a privilege and the prime motivator for the global MURAL team. We’re cheering for you, we’re amazed by the work you do, and we’re always here to listen and help.
Cheers,
MURAL Co-Founders
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