You can’t open LinkedIn or join a Mendix Meetup without hearing about the big trends and buzzwords surrounding low-code today, like AI, Big Data, or the latest Gartner review. These are all important of course, but what about those quiet trends happening in the background – the ones really changing the course of digitalization?

In this article, I’m going to highlight what I believe are the most significant trends in the low-code space today.

These trends might not be grabbing the headlines they deserve, but they will fundamentally change how we develop applications and enhance the trajectory of organizational transformation.

Trend #1 IT ambassadorship and promotion

You might already be familiar with the 4P’s and 3S’s of The Digital Transformation Cookbook by Maulik Shah.

These are the essential ingredients of any digital execution strategy:

• Start, Structure, and Scale, and
• Portfolio, People, Process, and Platform.

Well, lately another P has entered the arena: Promotion. And according to Mendix, and I can only support that, it is here to stay. This latest ingredient in our digital execution cookbook means that digital innovators are taking on the role of IT ambassadors.

IT ambassadors are critical for successful digital change. Promotion and ambassadorship are becoming indispensable for digitalization because they can overcome resistance to change. Resistance is something that holds back a lot of projects and undermines innovation. In fact, 70% of digitalization projects fail. Change is inherently uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to be a struggle. Research has proven that digital change is more successful when people are involved and invested in the process.

So, IT ambassadors can achieve this ‘internal PR’ that connects people from the organization with the development process by keeping them informed about progress and creating opportunities to share perspectives. After all, digitalization is about people - and not just the tools.

At Blue Green Solutions, we facilitate this ‘internal PR’ with things like Mendix Mingles, internal newsletters, sharing use cases, learning from each other’s mistakes, celebrating milestones, and taking inspiration from the successes of others.

To make IT ambassadorship successful, it’s important to pay attention to the following:

• Make the whole team a part of this process so that everyone can contribute to the success of each project.
• Start with a clear outline of the goals and key milestones in the journey.
• Continuously mentor team members to keep everyone involved and up-to-date.
• Give people context by highlighting how their work relates to the product.
• Create opportunities for input, so users can actively steer the development of the tools they’ll use.

And of course, you should celebrate successes with each milestone you pass, as a team.

It’s not just about crossing the ‘finish line’; each small success demonstrates and confirms that their involvement is meaningful and worthwhile.

This positive sentiment reduces resistance to future projects as well- so IT ambassadorship is an investment that builds momentum and keeps paying dividends throughout the transformation process.

Trend #2 Self-service & low-effort deployment products

The growth of self-service and low-effort deployment tools is a massive benefit for developers, who gain greater productivity and a reduced cognitive load.Self-service tools are becoming more popular generally, because they mean people can solve problems or execute specialized tasks themselves without requiring external expertise or waiting around for help. 

This improves the developer experience and increases productivity, thanks to self-service capabilities and automated infrastructure operations. However, what makes these tools especially valuable is the ability to accelerate a product team’s ability to deliver value to the customer.

The growth of self-service tools is driven by the same forces that led to the development of low-code: the need to do more, in less time.

We’re now seeing a growing trend of self-service tooling that can be used to simplify and streamline the deployment process. As skilled developers are increasingly scarce, this trend is very welcome indeed.

It means that in-house developers can now confidently manage every step of the process themselves with an automated pipeline that covers everything: automated build, testing, deployment, releases, bundles, configuration, hosting - practically everything. 

Self-service deployment tools aren’t just about optimizing the product team’s experiences, or accelerating delivery; they also increase the quality of your applications. By reducing the cognitive load, developers are less prone to make errors, and best practices are used automatically.

A self-service platform for application development is the foundation for continued innovation, enhanced productivity, improved quality, and increased scalability.

This trend means that developers can focus on where they can really add value, while the tedious details of every stage of DevOps are handled with the click of a button. Updates, troubleshooting, and monitoring are all taken care of, within a streamlined and collaborative work environment.

For developers and consultants, the impact is a more streamlined and collaborative work environment, which ultimately contributes to the success of software development projects.

The big takeaway: your time-to-market is dramatically shortened, and overheads are reduced. 

Trend #3 Citizen Product Owners

‘Citizen Development’ was a promising vision, supported by low-code technology but has struggled to meet expectations. The reason is simple: not everyone is a developer.

You can compare Citizen Development to household DIY. It means that people can perform basic maintenance jobs themselves – or even build something of modest proportions. But you can’t build a house with only basic DIY skills and tools. You need a deep understanding of architecture, structural integrity, and how the whole process works.

And this is why Citizen Development never really took off. What it did do, was to create the ideal ground for our third trend, which is Citizen Product Ownership. 

Citizen Product Owners (POs) are redefining traditional roles in application development. This might sound like a much worse version of Citizen Development, but it has some advantages – and we’re certainly seeing Citizen POs more often in organizations.

Increasingly, non-technical people are stepping into the role of end-to-end Product Owner. The term ‘Citizen’ is used to emphasize that individuals in this role may not have a deep technical background or formal training as a Product Owner. Nonetheless, these people are actively involved in making decisions related to the product, and very often these ‘Citizen P.O.s’ are also the key users attached to a specific domain or problem. 

The reason is clear: Citizen POs have a deep knowledge of their domains and the specific problems they need to solve. And, as someone from within the organization, they have insight into how to manage stakeholder relationships. 

Citizen POs also help to ensure a ‘buy-in’ from the involved business unit. This greatly improves the likelihood of a delivered product actually meeting the needs of both the business and users. This is why they’re the best people to guide product development.

Think of it as a shortcut that eliminates several connections in the chain of communication. The result: less time is spent on collecting input (or inserting ‘missing’ functionalities later on), the finished product is more suitable, and timelines can be kept much tighter.

Learning from the preceding ‘Citizen Development’ trend, it’s clear that Citizen POs need support and coaching to safeguard project success.

It’s wise then, to include a proxy PO that can clear up initial backlogs and monitor the overall project trajectory. This ensures that the product is delivered on time, fully validated, and with planned stages for review and refinement.

In other words, you need to have a mature development team for Citizen POs to succeed, because the team must already know what they’re doing.

It might present fresh challenges, but the benefits of this trend are significant. Because stakeholders are directly involved in the team, overheads are lower. And, because developers have clearer goals from the start, the finished product is better.

While Citizen Developers bring worries like insecure shadow IT and a proliferation of badly-conceived applications, Citizen POs are a genuine short-cut because they can immediately deliver the right information to where it can have the greatest positive impact.

Trend #4 Industry-specific templating

Industry-specific templating might be the next big accelerator for the low-code industry, by greatly shortening the time-to-value of your low-code applications.

The fact is, that business challenges are becoming more and more of a digital issue. For instance, data collection and aggregation across the value chain is a huge bottleneck. It’s highly complex, and everyone is dependent on each other’s data. However, it all still lives in Excel or legacy systems, which massively constrains collaborative processes.

Typically, these core challenges can be traced back to a lack of flexible solutions, which then results in the need for numerous off-the-shelf solutions that fill the gap. Unfortunately, these still only somewhat address the real needs of the organization. 

These IT solutions cannot truly deliver the value needed. Off-the-shelf solutions are just not flexible enough to adjust to changing requirements from different stakeholders. 

So, while companies in every sector want the convenience of a one-stop solution, they most often find that off-the-shelf products fail to meet their unique needs.

For many organizations, the only alternative seems to be building a solution from scratch – but this is daunting. Most of them don’t have the required skill base inhouse, and they don’t want it either. They just want to get on with business, without slowing down.

Industry-specific templates offer a fantastic solution to this problem, because they mean you can start building a unique solution from something that’s already largely complete. It gives the precision of a custom-built solution, but it has some advantages of the ‘off-the-shelf package-tools’.

Most of the issues faced within any industry are the same. So it doesn’t make sense to spend time solving each issue with a unique solution. Instead, industry-specific templates mean that companies only need to customize the last 20% (or so) with unique functionalities that fit their business.

As well as accelerating delivery and time-to-value, industry-specific templates reduce your risk. Every time, you start with a tried-and-tested foundation of reusable components, instead of wasting resources on building the basics. Want to know more about reusable components? Watch this 5 minute video with Jethro Borsje, Chief Ecosystem Solutions Officer at Mendix. 

This approach also lowers the barrier for collaboration and involvement, because organizations don’t need to spend precious time defining basic functionalities. Instead, you can immediately start with a rapid pace of development.

Developers can instantly focus on tackling their most complex processes – ones that deliver high business value and show results in very short timescales. 

Stakeholders and business users will be impressed by how fast your first proof-of-concept is built, and this can build their confidence about the trajectory of their digital transformation. They’ll start to see results with a minimum of input, and this helps to support your IT ambassadorship too.  

Shifting roles, improved outcomes

All these trends have a substantial effect on how we’ll all be using low-code in the coming years. Some, like the rise of Citizen Product Owners may make developers wary, especially given the mixed successes of Citizen Development – but it’s important to see the larger picture.

The role of developers is changing. No longer occupied by coding grunt-work, they’re becoming a vital player in organizational change, by curating and guiding the entire digitalization process.  And this means that the potential value you can bring with low-code (and your expertise) continues to grow.

It is hard to know how these trends will continue to evolve over the coming year, or which ones will have the greatest impact on application development. Only time will tell. 

I’ll certainly review these again next year, and share my thoughts and experiences at our next Mendix Meetup. 

Want a deeper dive in these low-code trends? Watch the replay of our Mendix Meetup where I discuss these trends thoroughly.