Innovators
Initially, the appeal focused on its speed of development and training, which helped low-code gain traction during the pandemic. There is growing recognition, however, that low-code can address complex enterprise-scale needs as well.
The stories of the following four citizen developers exemplify the benefits of low-code and how it makes software creation available to all.
“It was leading-edge technology, it was pretty cool,” she says. But she was drawn to project development: “There was a need, and I said, ‘sure, why not.’ It changed part of my life.”
The bigger change came when she joined Amtrak early in 2022 as a senior project manager, including overseeing COVID-19 response. At Amtrak, she discovered a new way of managing projects using low-code and no-code platforms, such as creating a dashboard tool for tracking COVID-19 test results among employees to replace manual processes.
“My first realization was, ‘hey, these are very powerful tools that you can really do a lot with,’” she says. It was another moment that changed her life.
Seeing how a low-code dashboard made such a difference, she began to use low-code and no-code tools to improve other processes she managed, such as surveys and project schedules. She also enrolled in self-paced online courses on low-code development and supplemented her learning with YouTube videos.
Project managers like Ewachiw need strong problem-solving skills, making them natural candidates to become citizen developers. By enabling her to automate processes, low-code development has also increased efficiency in her project-management work.
It has also saved a lot of time, she says.
“Once you start creating your own stuff and seeing how you can get engaged with the data, other than sourcing it externally or having your own IT department do it, there’s just significant savings,” she says. “How many times do we find ourselves contracting out or outsourcing an effort that I know I can do and it does not take that long. Obviously, for complicated stuff, [outsourcing] makes sense. But for simple things such as creating surveys and managing the survey output—really, we can do this better,” she says.
“I was about to pull my hair out,” Holzmann says. “I needed to do something with my brain before it fully atrophied and I just died a death of diapers and teaching people how to read.” A chance meeting between her husband and a local business owner led to an opportunity. At a networking event, the owner shared that he was looking for help building low-code apps for his company’s clients. Holzmann’s husband, Nathaniel, recommended his wife, who had a college degree in mathematics and had done some light coding. Days later, Holzmann had her first project.
The job was to build a tool for a relocation company that would make it easy to find information about its contractors—rates, distance from job, and customer reviews—data that was stored on spreadsheets and was too cumbersome to be useful.
“In those early days, there was a lot of trial and error,” Holzmann recalls.
Holzmann eventually turned to low-code development full-time and launched her own company, Low Code Road. Today, low code remains the center of the company’s business, although it offers more extensive development as well. The company expanded from four people in 2021 to 12 people this year. The first client is now a key sales partner. And it’s become a family business: Her husband quit his job to join as CEO.
But his career trajectory began to change when he was asked to re-engineer and standardize a new development process across 13 Honda locations in three different countries.
The existing process consisted of a complex workflow of spreadsheets, emails, share drives, training, and audits that were time-consuming, difficult to keep current, and always at risk for inaccuracies. “We were always chasing people around,” says Hubbard. He hoped IT would build a new system to make it run smoother. But he was disillusioned when the estimate came back for a project that far exceeded his budget and would take a long time to build. Hubbard was particularly disheartened when he discovered that the application would be “static, which I didn’t understand,” he says. “Basically, you had one shot to get things right before the developers had to move on to the next project. So we just stuck to our spreadsheets.”
Then, at the very end of his tenure at Honda, he learned about low-code software that would allow him to build more efficient workflows, just as he had imagined. It seemed as though he’d learned of it too late. But when at his next job at Navistar he discovered similar inefficiencies in workflows, he put this knowledge to use. “I’m back in the game,” he said he thought. “They have the same problems that could use the software solution I’ve been dreaming about.”
Low-code software tools let him develop apps using a pre-built dashboard with that week’s newest tracking of parts. He set it up so that it would automatically send out reminders and reports. The app took eight hours to create and, by automating a previously manual task, saved him about 200 hours of work annually, Hubbard estimates.
Hubbard began holding regular meetings with colleagues at Navistar to teach them how to build apps to solve their work problems and to swap tips and tricks. The effort ultimately resulted in the development of 30 apps used by 700 employees at Navistar.
Eventually, he saw a business opportunity helping companies improve processes using low-code and no-code software development tools, and set up an agency with a colleague from Navistar to do just that. In 2021, he went to work directly for a low-code company to help end-user businesses improve their processes and to train would-be citizen developers in partnership with the Project Management Institute, a trade organization with almost 700,000 members worldwide.
“Being able to develop my own apps, effectively controlling and improving my processes, feels like a superpower to me,” says Hubbard. “It feels like something I shouldn’t be able to do because I’m not a coder. I’m just an average citizen.”
But over time, he felt that traditional IT processes impeded the objectives of line managers—they were too cookie-cutter, or development took too long to deliver the software in time to be useful to the business teams. “When I built [the applications] in IT, these other corporate teams would need to follow IT conventions and IT standards,” Raj said. What he really wanted was to give business teams “their own unique experience, unique workflow, completely tailored to their needs.”
Then, at the data cloud company Snowflake, Raj and his team began working with ServiceNow and discovered off-the-shelf low-code software that was easy and fast to customize and implement.
“We loved it so much that we were able to build multiple apps,” he says. “Right after that, we had more use cases. Simple to build, easy to configure, and most importantly, easy to maintain.”
“The biggest value I see is that before we built these apps, these teams were typically using emails or spreadsheets to gather that information, but that’s very difficult to track,” he says.
What’s more, the applications allow business owners to handle most user issues themselves, while the IT team focuses on major functional changes to applications that only they can address. And, the lean team of 11 low-code developers, split between the U.S. and India, also saves time training young new team members thanks to the relative simplicity of learning low-coding.
Ultimately, Raj is focused on building apps that shift control to business owners without a loss of governance over corporate systems and data. “They don’t have to come to the central IT team for most of the things, but if they need major functional changes, they come to us and we make those, but in low code itself. A part of the control we have kept with us and a small part of control we have kept in the hands of actual business owners,” he says.
Low-code app development creates simplicity while still being secure, he says. “It is as good as building an app on your own laptop. Because if you’re building an app on your laptop, you’re not buying hardware, you’re not procuring anything new, and basic security is already taken care of for the platform. You have everything you need.” Low code reduces go-to-market time from quarters to weeks, he adds. “With the right governance in place, low-code apps can help business owners build or enhance applications with more agility and minimal maintenance.”
