If you want to pinpoint the start of modern technology you could look back to the invention of morse code in 1835 or the telegraph 3 years later. Maybe to Marconi and waves signals or even Turing’s first computer in 1937. But to chart the start of IT taking such a dominant position in businesses, this starts with a little invention by Sir Tim-Berners Lee - The Internet.
If you are told an idea will take 16 weeks to develop, who are you to disagree? If you don’t know how to code, how are you going to challenge this rationale? There always seems to be an extra amount of authority with the development team over any project in the business. How can we bring about a change to this?
If your inability to code is helping to create this silo, then I present NoCode, the technology revolution that has already begun to free businesses from the grasp of the developer and return it to the business owner.
Let us have a look at the many reasons why a business is currently struggling due to the current status quo and how NoCode can help.
Expensive development is slow development
This of course is the killer for most start-ups or growing businesses. Your development team is so expensive you cannot afford enough of them to work at the pace that you need to deliver the product you want. Due to the scarcity of skills in coding, those that you can find are incredibly expensive – often referred to as unicorns for a reason.
They seem to work on an island adrift from everyone else and thus these costs continue to grow. Where once the answer was to outsource development as the best way of getting resources faster and without long term contracts, these costs have also begun to spiral.
Even in these outsourced businesses, the skills have become so rare that the companies can afford to charge more than the average salary of a developer. Where once this option was about finding cheaper labour in other countries, it is now simply about finding any resource, regardless of cost.
The NoCode approach changes all of this, for a couple of reasons :
1. Less skilled developers can produce your product
Due to the nature of the NoCode applications, the skills required are not as hard to find and the training needed is much easier. This creates a lower barrier to entry for developers. As a result, the salaries or contracts of these people are considerably lower than traditional developers.
It is even possible to utilise resources already within a business, so you might be able to supplement the development team with people already on the payroll.
2. Development is faster - you can work with shorter contracts
If the solution to your problems is to outsource development, then the quicker it can be completed, the less you’ll pay. Because NoCode is proven to deliver in less time, up to 10 times faster, you’ll find you won’t need to pay a team for 6 months, when it can be done in 3 weeks.
WeLoveNoCode is a perfect example of a model where you can buy development time by the hour, get the job done fast and stop that invoice from growing too large.
Everything takes too long
The biggest danger whenever a silo development team is created inside a business, is that you lose control of delivering projects fast. You struggle to get concrete dates for anything and those you receive are missed with the explanation that we hit a problem we couldn’t possibly have anticipated.
And who are you to argue, realistically you don’t understand what they are doing, so you have to rely solely on what you are being told and deal with continual frustrations of a team failing to drive your product forward and leaving you exposed to others getting to market faster.
You need to move towards a philosophy that doesn’t put you in a vulnerable situation in the business, especially with the development team. Something that will allow more people access to create and speed up the overall performance of your development team.
And if you are struggling to find the resource or you want to produce something at breakneck speed, then outsourcing or finding additional short term talent becomes much easier, meaning you can develop at a far more rapid pace. This is what NoCode development gives you because talent is more available and outsourcing options are far more affordable.
Reaching MVP too slowly
The single biggest reason that AGILE has been embraced by so many businesses around the world, is that it allows development teams to work faster and produce initial versions of an application for the business to review. This was achieved through the concept of ‘continuous delivery’.
This was the first step towards breaking the grip of the siloed development team that would otherwise go off and spend months developing a product that you could only see once it was completely finished.
This was due to the methodology previously employed in development, known as Waterfall, where each step of development had to be completed before moving on, meaning it all came together at the very end.
No modern business would go back to this outdated development approach and we are rapidly entering a phase where people will realise that developing without using platforms like Bubble.io, Adalo and Tilda will also start to feel outdated too.
The speed of development with a NoCode platform means you can get to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) much faster, a big part of why AGILE was first embraced.
With NoCode, others in the business can access and play with the product being built because of how accessible it is to non-developers. It’s possible to spot required changes far sooner, allowing for a much more fluid development and creative process.
Poor collaboration hampers innovation
This fluid approach is simply not possible with a traditional development approach. It’s no surprise that the most successful businesses are led by highly technical individuals, because they can maintain control of the vision and ensure that the development team is working as planned and crucially, they involve others within the business.
When this doesn’t happen, innovation or research & development, all need to come from within the IT department, because no one else can proactively get involved in a creative way. When you have a founder that is not a coder themselves, they are relying on the capabilities and imagination of others.
To avoid this problem, you want your best people involved in the process, regardless of their ability to write code. Get your most inventive people in the business involved and as the founder, you also want to be engaging the process as much as possible, which is the benefit that NoCode brings.
More people can understand the development process and contribute, allowing innovative development by not being limited by one small team.
Losing Control Of Your Vision
One of the big complaints from business owners is that they have a great idea and then become solely reliant on the development team to turn that into a reality. Without the skills to truly get involved, they are not able to control the pace or direction of their vision. You are at the mercy of a team you cannot influence effectively and must trust feedback about what is and isn’t possible.
You have to believe them when you are told a particular element of your product or application cannot be achieved because you have no real way to dispute this fact.
You cannot be sure it’s because they haven’t worked it out yet, maybe that they lack the skills or they simply think it’s too hard to do and have proposed a simpler solution. You end up relying on elements of people's character that you cannot control.
This is a big dilemma that conflicts with all non-technical founders. For years they have looked in at the development team from outside, unable to influence what is happening with their baby. The goal with a NoCode approach is that they can genuinely have an influence, get involved in the process and ensure their vision is being fulfilled.
No one knows better what the output should look like than the person that created the idea, NoCode is the single best way of realising exactly what you had dreamed of and turning that into a reality.
You Cannot Scale a Silo
When you allow one area of your business to become a silo and the skills they possess are in demand or rare, you end up creating a unicorn effect and the final result will always be that scaling your business becomes either very difficult or impossible. There is no doubt that this has happened due to the nature of development teams and processes.
The skills needed within the team are bespoke to the applications and languages they have decided to work with, meaning the requirements on new candidates get more niche and the available talent pool becomes pretty small. By relying on traditional development, you have a team that is separate from the rest of the business and build on a codebase that few people will understand.
This is where NoCode is so important. It opens up the list of people that can get involved in the project, by using developers from many different backgrounds. They will be able to learn the NoCode platforms very quickly and you even have the chance to move people into development from other parts of the business.
It also makes bringing in more junior members to the team a possibility. You can have them grow through the business because lots of prior development skills and knowledge of multiple languages is not required.
The Future Is Integrated and Open
Since the internet exploded in 1995, the development team has become more and more important within a business, getting to the point that by 2010 they had become a silo within the business, a group that possessed skills that were hard to find and were blocking out other parts of the business from affecting what was the most fundamental part of the company strategy.
