Meet Miro Engineering: How Chris Parker ensures app quality on Miro Marketplace
The Miro Developer Platform complements Miro — the visual workspace for innovation — by empowering developers and partners to build their own apps and integrations on Miro. In this blog series, we spotlight the people of Miro Engineering, so you can get to know the faces behind the platform. Our distributed team spans the globe across 12 regional hubs and 8 time zones, including offices in Amsterdam, Austin, Tokyo, and Berlin.
In this post, we’re featuring Product Manager Chris Parker, based in Amsterdam, who helps ensure developers’ apps make it onto the Miro Marketplace.
Tell me more about your role and your team at Miro.
I work as a Product Manager at Miro and one of my responsibilities is to review the apps that have been developed using the Miro Developer Platform. The main bulk of this is screening apps that are submitted for publication on the Miro Marketplace, guiding developers through the process and helping them to improve their apps so they’re ready for customer consumption. The great part about this process is that apps come in all shapes and sizes, so there’s always variety and intrigue seeing what our community of developers can build.
What is the Developer Platform?
The Developer Platform is an extension of Miro itself. It allows third-party developers to build custom functionality and introduce new use cases. Developers are able to utilize our rich public Web SDK and REST API in order to create their solutions, and we’re constantly expanding the available extension points based on feedback from our community. In addition, we provide a public roadmap for them to share their requests.
Why should developers build apps that integrate with Miro?
Despite having well established use cases, Miro is such a malleable tool that can be adapted to fit countless ways of working. This freedom of possibilities creates an environment where developers can innovate and carve out their own niches, introducing novel and creative ways for customers to use the product.
Our Platform team is also very developer-focused: We are very active in engaging with our developer community, taking onboard their feedback for improving, and creating the things they need to thrive in our ecosystem.
What does the app review process look like?
The review process is broken down into three parts: the design review, the security review, and then the Marketplace listing review.
The design review covers the functionality, usability, and aesthetics of the app. This is a collaborative initiative where we generate a Miro board and work directly with the developer to highlight any issues and recommend improvements.
The security review is performed by our Application Security team which ensures that submitted apps meet the necessary requirements to be ready for customer use.
Finally, we help the developer create an app listing page to go on the Miro Marketplace. Here we get input from our marketing team to make sure that the listing is compelling and engaging.
What do you look for when determining which apps meet the quality standards of the Miro Marketplace?
We have a big focus on design here at Miro, always putting the customer experience at the heart of what we do and build. It’s no different for apps — we try to instill this approach in our third-party developers, as well. We spend the most amount of time in the collaborative design review, in which we work with the developers on a custom Miro board guiding them on improvements so their app aligns with our public design guidelines.
If an app doesn’t get approved the first time, how do you help them improve their app?
It’s rare that we straight up reject an app that’s submitted, as we prefer to work with our developers to get them to the point where their app is ready. We find that this approach works much better in building the trusting relationships we want to foster within our developer community.
That being said, there are cases where an app will fail the Security review due to some missing requirements. But instead of rejecting the app outright, we send out a report of the issues and then help guide the developer to the needed fixes.
What is one thing that has surprised you about working at Miro?
How well we use our own product — it’s the backbone of how the company operates, and it is super effective. The fact we use it so extensively means that we are effectively all product experts and are always dogfooding new features and functionality long before they reach the public domain. That means we always deliver high quality, as there’s an army of Mironeers scrutinizing and iterating on new features.
Do you have any interesting stories to share about your experience on the team or a project you worked on?
As well as reviewing apps, I’m also helping to actively improve the third-party developer experience when they submit their apps. I’ve built out automation tooling that helps setup and facilitate the review process, having a logical and free-flowing internal process that connects all the respective teams together.
I used our very own REST API to facilitate the automation of this, putting myself in our developer’s shoes and providing my own feedback and improvement requests on our platform.
What’s next for the Developer Platform or Miro Marketplace?
The next step is to scale and mature. We have the foundation in place, so we are now helping to grow and support our developer community, actively engaging with them and building out more tooling. The goal is to empower them to self-serve and grow their presence and business on the Developer Platform and in the Miro Marketplace.
We’ll continue to feature Miro Engineering employees on our blog, so you can get a glimpse into their roles and the impact they have on the Developer Platform. Be sure to follow us to get reminders in your inbox when we post about engineering culture, technology issues, and product developments.
