Meet Miro Engineering: messaging and meeting integrations with Michelle Au Yeung
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 senior product manager Michelle Au Yeung, based in Amsterdam, who collaborates with partners to build messaging and meeting integrations with Miro.
Tell me more about your role and your team at Miro.
First, as a product manager, I’m always listening to customer feedback to identify their needs and work cross functionally to deliver new features to address them.
Second, my specific product area (or team) is Messaging and Meeting integrations. The team includes engineers, designers, product marketers, and more! We all work together to ensure that Miro works seamlessly within our users’ messaging and meeting workflows.
How did you end up in the integrations space?
During my undergrad years, I had the opportunity to do several internships. It was a great way to try a lot of different things and figure out what I enjoyed. During this experience, I discovered that not only do I enjoy connecting different teams (a big part of product management), I also enjoy connecting cool products together.
The value of integrations really resonated with me because you get to take two things that are independently great and put them together to make something even better. As they say, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
What are some Messaging and Meeting integrations Miro users can use today?
We were the first partner to launch an integration with Google Meet and we have several integrations throughout the Google workspace. You can find more information about them here. I’m a bit biased because the Google Meet integration was also my first launch at Miro. For other Messaging and Meeting integrations, users can find them in our marketplace.
Why should knowledge workers care about integrations like this?
Because integrations make your life easier! It’s a bit of a blanket statement but I believe that there’s an integration out there for everyone.
For example: I’m personally not a big fan of email. There’s a lot of noise and it can be overwhelming. I try to limit the time I spend on email and I’ve set up a ton of Slack integrations (including our Miro Slack integration!) so I get my important notifications there instead.
By using integrations, knowledge workers can optimize their work environment to their preferences. We reached a point where we don’t need to ask individuals to conform to a single workflow. Instead, we can use integrations to customize our workflows and tools.
What projects are you working on at the moment?
One of the projects I’m working on is standardizing how Miro links unfurl across external platforms where we are integrated. For example, when you send a Miro link in Slack or add a Miro link to a Google doc, we “unfurl” the link so you and your collaborators have a bit more information about the board (e.g. board title, owners, recent activity, etc.). It’s a helpful way to give users more information at a glance.
One of the challenges when integrating externally is that you have to work within the framework and constraints of that particular ecosystem. Because of this, we unfurl Miro links a bit differently across our various integrations. From our research, we know that it’s quite common for users to use multiple integrations at once and standardizing our unfurls will create a more recognizable pattern. It’s an interesting project as we need to balance the unique aspects of each ecosystem with our drive towards a more unified design system within our integrations.
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.
