Why I don’t believe in no-code platforms
Back in the day, I used to work as a project manager in typical financial corporations. There were two of them throughout that period of my career. In both companies, there were large projects that I was unfortunately not a part of that were aimed at the integration of some kind of another business process management tool that was built to decrease the complexity of launching automation for a business process. And each of such projects had the same set of characteristics: a large team, huge budget, and unpredictably long roadmap.
Initially, such systems are advertised as a platform where a business-minded team creates a mock-up of a process, outlining for example basic steps of a client applying for an insurance product. Then this process develops as it goes through the cycles of reviews. And only in the end, it is integrated into the company infrastructure possibly with some code customization.
What happened, in reality, was coders worked on the process from the start, based on communication with marketing and commercial teams. Why? Because outlining a business process requires asking questions on all possible forks in the process, breaking it down into smaller subprocesses, coming out with a list of controls at different process points, etc. — the skills that are natural for software developers.
Now, I’m not here to judge the implementation and decisions taken in those projects. But it always made me think about this weird difference between expectations and reality of a tool initially sold as a system to ease the implementation of a new process and involve all kinds of workers in it.
What it all has to do with the no-code systems?
No-code systems allow automating something without the need to learn a code syntax, often without the need to handle infrastructure and dealing with other things usual to software development.
But does it solve the problem though? Will a guy who is not a coder and chose a different career create an automation solution for his need? Will he break down his idea into smaller and smaller chunks? Will he set necessary controls to make to process more reliable? This whole process will require the same structural thinking and problem-solving skills that any developer has except instead of writing actual code for all this he would use a fancy UI of some no-code automation software.
For those who already know how to code such a system will be limiting. From time to time he will encounter situations when he knows that he could implement some particular action in code but the platform lacks this feature.
A guy from the commercial field has excellent selling and communication skills. A guy from the design field has impressive creativity and can come with ideas that anyone else can only dream of. They think differently and that is why a “no-code” platform probably won’t help them.
Turns out, such a tool can only be useful for the ones who just made a mistake and chose the wrong career path even though they were meant to be coders from the start. Or a narrow audience of people who come from a very close field and have similar structural thinking skills but can’t write the actual code. Yet.
