Show notes
No and low code tools continue their explosion of growth. They are becoming more specialized and capable. I believe this to be because software engineering has been the bottleneck on development teams for some time. While custom engineering isn't going anywhere, the future of the role is likely to change. Let's talk about the opportunities that might create for product teams.If you want to find product-market fit faster, sign up for my free 5 day email course here - https://nxtstep.io/fitEpisode TranscriptHey folks, Sean here and today what I want totalk to you about is why I think software engineeringas a skill set is becoming slightly more commoditized andwhat that might mean for product teams everywhere.So I'm sure my product teams arefairly familiar with this, but for thelongest time now, the biggest bottleneck productdevelopment has typically been the engineering component.As in it takes the longest amount oftime in order to go from our designsand our required experiments to actually getting thosefeatures and functionality into the application itself.As such, over time, a significant amount ofresources have been placed here trying to figureout how to do so faster.And there's been all kinds of invented models andnew tools that have come to market, enabling usto be able to speed this process up.Here everything from the Lean Startup kind of revolutionall the way to and through what is commonlyreferred to as no code or low code platforms,which I've dived into and pretty significantly as well.Also I've leveraged them for a numberof my client projects and we've builtsome pretty comprehensive and impressive products usingsome of these platforms like Bubble. Bubble.IO is kind of an ecosystem, if you will, ofbeing able to build almost an entire application, if notan entire application, that has the look and feel ofbeing able to be pretty significantly customized, but is largelya no code or low code platform, meaning that youdon't really need to write significant amount or really anycode at all in order to create the kind ofexperience that you're looking for.Which again, if you are heavy with tuning intosome of my content, you'll understand how important Ifeel that that is for us and our roleas product leaders to make sure that the experiencethat our product ultimately delivers is optimal and matchesessentially solving the customer's top problems and pain points.So because that's the area of focus, it's reallyimportant if we have an opportunity to place mostof our resources and focus there because that's ultimatelywhat we're doing on the back end in termsof how the technology works.And self admittedly, I'm an engineer myself and I havea lot of respect for the work that engineers do.However, having said that, recognizing the fact thatit has been the bottleneck, these applications havegrown significantly in that their popularity has grownpretty aggressively because this has continued to bea challenge for product teams, especially when lookingto do something new or create new featuresand functionality and want to speed up theproduct development production process.These tools have enabled us to be ableto do that and that pattern continues.Very recently, I've read about a productcalled cumul.io, which has raised Series Aover $10 million very recently.And that is a tool that enablesyou to incorporate some essentially more advancedanalytics and bi type tools for businessintelligence capabilities into SaaS platforms.But to do so yet again as a low code platform,which is pretty advanced capabilities as it pertains to low codeor no code platforms, but an all important one because stillyet a bottleneck on the demand side is how do weprocess and get the best type of information out of allof the data that we have now?Because there's an overwhelming amount of data inthe world and not enough processing power orcapabilities to really better understand and extract informationfrom it, which is typically the desire.So products like Familio which are specialized,and bubble which are more generic, areproviding us with essentially an ecosystem worthof options when it comes to building.Now, there's still a placeobviously for custom engineering, right?If you need a product to scale as aggressively assomething heavy like a salesforce or a HubSpot or somethinglike that, your NoCode platform is not typically going tobe able to handle that type of volume, at leastnot yet, and may be able to do so eventuallyif this pattern and trend continues.But for now, your custom engineering will enableyou to benefit from operational efficiency at scale.However, before you get there, when you're tryingto experiment and you're trying to test newproducts and things like that, if you wantto speed up the product development process.So far the trend has been no code andlow code platforms seem to be here to stay.They continue to be able to raise money,they continue to be adopted by product developmentteams and they continue to enable teams tomove faster in the development cycles.So what I'm trying to explain for you here isthat how I see this pattern developing over the pastfew years and where I think that it's going andthen I want to talk more about what I thinkthat means for developing product teams and the changes thatmight become so if this trend continues.What it will mean for product teams, in my opinion,is that as I've thought about how it gets brokendown before in terms of responsibilities on a product team,I usually do so in three different ways.I would put the what we are intending to build andwhy we are intending to build it into the product category.So product managers and product peoplewho are interacting with customers andusers to do research and discovery.It's our responsibility to figure out what the priorityis, to build what the problems we're solving are,where the obvious unmet needs are those types ofthings, and then work with our engineering or developmentteams in order to prioritize those for development, whichI would consider to be the how.As in how are we going to capitalize on thatopportunity, how are we actually going to build that, howare we going to bring that experience to market?So that's where I draw the line most of thetimes, the what and the why lives on the productside, the how lives on the engineering side.What I'm continuing to see more of, especiallyin the early stages of this work, isthat the how is becoming more commoditized.And I think that is happening because it's, forquite a while now, continue to be the bottleneck,as in folks have wanted to move faster.Everything else is accelerating, yet that'swhat's taking the most time.So much of the innovation has gone into that spacein terms of figuring out how to speed it up.And I think that's where we're seeing alot of this development come fro...