Daaf Serné on Real Estate as a Product, Living Labs and Building the Office People Actually Want

If you want to understand what it actually takes to build a workplace people choose to show up for, you want to talk to someone who has done it at scale, with data, inside some of the fastest-growing tech companies on the planet. That person is Daaf Serné.

Daaf Serné is the Founder of Placeworks Advisory, based in Amsterdam. His career spans nearly two decades in corporate real estate and workplace strategy, including a decade at ServiceNow as Director, Global Real Estate and Workplace Services, overseeing a global portfolio across three continents, and more than four years as Global Head of Workplace at Miro, where he built the company's entire real estate function from scratch and launched what became one of the most talked-about workplace experiments in the industry: the Living Lab. Ram sat down with Daaf for a conversation that covered baristas, Alaska glaciers, sustainable design and why real estate is a product and should be treated like one.

What stood out

The barista beats the machine. Every time.

At Miro's Amsterdam HQ, Daaf's team added a barista to a space that already had coffee machines throughout. The barista became the most popular option almost immediately, with most employees skipping the machines entirely. The lesson was not really about coffee.

The Living Lab was a hypothesis.

‍When Daaf joined Miro in 2022, the company had grown from a few hundred to 1,700 people entirely through the pandemic, with 13 office locations built during a period when nobody was going into them. His pitch to leadership was simple: if we work closer with employees, we can drive better workplace outcomes. Higher experience scores. Better occupancy. Lower attrition. He ran work style studies, workshops and experiments across six locations before feeding all the data into the new HQ project. When the results came in, occupancy was up, experience scores were above four on a five-point scale, and attrition had dropped in locations with active workplace communities.

Sustainability came from watching glaciers melt.

One of the more unexpected origin stories on this show. Daaf was on parental leave with his family in Alaska when he stood in front of retreating glacier fields and decided he needed to do something about it from within his industry. He came back, kept his global real estate role at ServiceNow, and added corporate sustainability on top of it. That work eventually led to ServiceNow's commitment to net zero by 2030.

Footprints are shrinking but building quality needs to rise.

On the future of the office, Daaf was measured. Companies are not walking away from real estate, but they now have the post-COVID data to make meaningful decisions about how much they actually need. Smaller footprints, better buildings. The challenge, he noted, is that there are simply not enough high-quality, sustainable buildings to meet that demand yet.

Ask for help.

His advice to young professionals starting out in facilities management and workplace was direct: stop trying to figure everything out with AI tools alone. The industry is still a people business. Relationships, mentorship and human judgment are things no model can replicate. Ask around. Let people help.

One thing I'll keep thinking about

Daaf described a shift he kept running into at ServiceNow: whenever the business added headcount, the reflex was to add square meters. He started questioning that reflex out loud. His core belief, backed by four years of Living Lab data at Miro, is that the answer is rarely more space. It is almost always better use of the space you already have.

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