No Code Trends #1 - Product

✨TL;DR

Product Maker: Multidisciplinary product profiles, with the ability to execute their ideas thanks to the use of No-code tools.

📖 Context:

When starting a project - whether it is simply a side-project, or the germ of a new startup, it is really important to find the product validation and its market fit - what is known as Product Market Fit.

It is especially important at this stage that startups seek to attract generalist profiles that can offer great adaptability to constantly evolving business needs.

Precisely this phenomenon is described in Range - a book that talks about the rise of generalists, and which Samuel Gil summarizes magnificently in his newsletter: [1]

In a world that is becoming increasingly complex, generalists, or rather specialists who before specializing have achieved extensive knowledge in other domains, are best positioned to solve the most important problems, thanks to their ability to "connect the dots" between seemingly disparate disciplines.

With the rise of the digital world, different labels have been appearing that identify the positions or functions to be performed. You can opt for the world of user experience (UX), or you can move closer to the world of visuals (UI) or even specialize in interaction design.

Of course this is just the design branch - in the tech world the range is definitely wider. From Front-ends, Back-ends, Full-stack developers, not forgetting the whole Data, Growth... leg...

And we usually preconceive the mantra that hyper-specialization is what will make you employable - offering you greater possibilities the deeper your knowledge in an area.

The result of this specialization can, in many cases, lead to the opposite effect - narrowing the breadth of vision and approaching problems from a perspective that always pulls towards the familiar.

However, the problems we face are becoming more complex every day, and the need to approach them from multiple perspectives in order to offer optimal - sometimes even innovative - solutions is becoming increasingly apparent.

Precisely one of the greatest riches of Design Thinking in its essence is the combination of different multidisciplinary profiles to address the same problem. The solutions that a person who comes from the world of linguistics can provide, probably differ from someone who is dedicated to development.

And it is precisely in this diversity of opinions and backgrounds that innovative ideas emerge that could not have come out any other way.

🧠 Product mentality

We mentioned earlier that the generalist profile is increasingly in demand. And precisely one of the reasons for this is the increase in the number of profiles dedicated to product. People with the objective of satisfying consumer needs better than the competition. [2]

Product resides at the intersection between the human, the technological and the business.

And this is where figures such as Product Managers, Product Designers and other product positions appear. People who have the necessary sensitivity to understand the needs of users, propose improvements and prioritize them in order to provide the greatest possible value to all users - both internal and external.

Hybrid profiles with some knowledge of design, business and technology. However, it is difficult to find those people who have, in addition to the vision, the capacity to propose experiments - to execute them and build the product itself.

And that's where no-code and Product Makers come in.

💪 The empowerment of no-code.

No-code breaks down barriers.

It empowers non-technical people to turn their ideas into reality. Thanks to a further abstraction of code and with visual interfaces, they bring complex concepts closer to people who do not have the necessary technical knowledge.

In short, they allow more people to have access to create software, and not just consume it.

And when we add the person with product sensibility and give him/her the necessary tools to be able to build, we find a very interesting profile: The Product Maker.

And although there is no official definition - precisely to arrive at one that is more robust we started this conversation, we propose one:

A person with a certain business vision to be able to prioritize, with empathy to put him/herself in the place of his/her users and with enough execution capacity to be able to build his/her own artifacts or experiments - without having to depend on a technological team to develop it.

The figure of the Product Maker is something that already exists, generally people who come from the world of technology and evolve towards business, or from the world of design with a certain technical background.

No-code allows you to understand when you can take advantage of these tools and not reinvent the wheel when you don't need to.

It enables you to create small artifacts - such as a form with some conditional logic using Arengu, to be saved in your database, as a landing page to validate your hypothesis or as a small app to be more efficient in your day-to-day life - autonomously.

Understanding also how the tools and products are built, allows you to make better decisions on the business and technological needs, being able to make better decisions - and understanding when it is useful and when it is not.

The main difference we are seeing is not so much what you are able to do, but who is able to do it. Finding profiles that combine all these characteristics is particularly difficult. However, no-code democratizes and brings people who do not have this technical knowledge closer. Giving them wings to create.

⚠️ Knowing the limitations.

One of the main responsibilities as a Product Maker, especially understanding it from the perspective of the No-code Product Maker is to know the limits you will encounter.

It is possible that certain no-code tools are not the best solution to the problem you are facing. That's where it makes sense to allocate resources from the technical team - or ask for help if you're on your own.

No-code allows you to navigate scenarios where uncertainty is high and you are looking to reduce risk. In scenarios where this uncertainty is lower and you don't run as much product risk, it may make sense to go straight to development.

And the best way to learn with these tools is precisely to use them in projects that promise to offer a solution to a problem you are facing. You will probably come to crossroads and dead ends, but you will learn along the way.

Knowing these limits helps, also, to think about how we can design our product to make it achievable with the tools and resources we have at our disposal. Maybe this functionality that you consider essential can be done in a simpler way.

No-code often forces simplification, working on the essence of the product to convey the value proposition.

How is the ecosystem?

Little by little we are seeing more and more companies betting on this figure. As I write these lines in minimum.run the whole team is defined as Product Maker, and in Factorial's jobs page - where we first saw the term - they currently have 11 people with the position of Product Maker and 5 offers currently open. [3]

In the rest of the ecosystem this position has other names: Product Creator or Product Development - and sometimes it's difficult to draw the line between Product Designer, Product Manager, Product Builder...

However, we believe that it is a very interesting profile for those people who want to create, multipotential people who have touches of different areas of knowledge and do not find the direction in which to specialize.

🚀 Vision for the future

Our vision is that this profile will be increasingly in demand, especially in the startup ecosystem, where it can bring incredible value, but also increasingly within a large corporation, where it can streamline operations, test new ideas through experimentation or even work on product.

That is precisely why our vision at Nocodehackers and minimum.run is to train these people. To give them the resources, tools and support necessary to make this vision a reality. And our first approach has been the Product Marketing Camp, from which 30 excellent professionals have emerged who could (some of them already do!) work as Product Makers.

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