Making collaboration easier and interactive: Integrating Storylane with Miro

In June 2023 at an all-hands meeting, our CS team lead, Maria, brought up a very interesting observation. She highlighted how one of our customers was using Storylane product tours in their Miro boards for their product brainstorming sessions.

Because Storylane primarily caters to sales and marketing use cases, and isn’t so much centered on activities like brainstorming or project planning, this was completely unheard of for us.

At this point, we set out to do what any good product team would: understand more such out-of-the-box use cases of our product with Miro. As expected, a few more interesting scenarios surfaced:

• Conducting internal product trainings for upcoming products/ features
• Building low-fidelity but much more functional product prototypes
• Seeking customer feedback on functionalities and ease of use for upcoming products/ features

That’s when we decided that we should build the Storylane integration with Miro, so that users could expand the effectiveness of Miro by using Storylane.

In addition to having a direct impact on sales and marketing, what makes Storylane the talk of the town is how easy it makes for teams to collaborate seamlessly. Similar to Miro. So we reasoned that by adding interactive content alongside static assets on Miro, we could help cross-functional teams collaborate much more effectively and increase their productivity tenfold.

We targeted a July release for the integration, which was when the Miro Apps Marathon took place. As part of this, any new apps submitted to the Miro Marketplace in July would be entitled to receive some extra benefits, mainly around app promotion.

Using Storylane inside Miro

It’s extremely easy to use Storylane’s interactive product tours inside Miro. You can find the Storylane listing on the Miro Marketplace to read about the key features, and then click Learn More to visit the Storylane website and sign up for free.

Here’s an interactive tour of the entire process:

Step 1: Once you’ve created your interactive product tour in Storylane, open the Share menu of the tour and copy the tour URL.

Step 2: In Miro, click Embed iFrame code in the toolbar on the left.

Step 3: Paste the tour URL and click Embed. Once embedded, you’ll need to click Open to start the product tour.

The development of the Storylane integration

What made the integration process really easy was that Miro already supported embedding iframe codes. This meant there was no need to create a full-fledged app. As a result, we went with the informational integration app submission option rather than building a direct Developer Platform app.

As part of the informational integration process, we were required to complete simple app submission form that included the following:,

• Integration type
• App visuals and description
• Recording of the app integration process
• Privacy policy and terms of service
• Supporting documentation
• App category
• Tags
• Installation link

Once the form was submitted, the Miro team created a Jira ticket to manage the process and the communication during the setup phase.

The review process

Miro’s review process was arguably the most user-friendly and structured review process we experienced, as we continued to receive timely updates on the progress.

There were three stages in the review process:

• Design — To check the design elements of the app’s menus and components for consistency, and ensure that the app functions as advertised.
• Security — Tested against a set of requirements and recommendations focusing on data privacy, performance impact, and vulnerabilities.
• Marketing — Reviewed the app listing that would be available on the Miro Marketplace once the app was approved.

In the meantime, we were also asked to complete another form containing details about the app landing page for the marketing review stage. The information needed included:

• Target users and specific use case
• Logo and app description
• App visuals
• Key app features
• Setup instructions

Conclusion

The integration and the possible outcomes it could lead to were purely a result of user research not just for Storylane but also Miro users. It was great that the Miro team saw the integration and its potential benefits from the same lens. The Miro POCs were extremely helpful throughout the integration process. They even went one step further to notify us of the promotion dates for the app so that we could double down on our own promotion accordingly.