In this article, we discuss how the low-code movement is disrupting product development as know it. Over the last few years, low-code platforms have made it incredibly simple to build complex products and tools. Not only do they require lesser technical know-how, but also help ship products rapidly at scale.

Low-code platforms reduce the cost & effort of building tools. Making it possible to build them without sacrificing on ROI.

What is ROI and why is it important?

ROI (Return on Investment) is a key metric when doing business. It’s a ratio or a measure of the profitability/efficiency of an investment (for SaaS startups this usually means time and money).

During the early stages of a startup, it’s extremely important to continuously prioritise while moving swiftly. ROI becomes an important metric to make key business decisions that lead to maximum impact.

High Engineering effort often leads to low ROI.

When building an internal tool, or implementing a feature for user engagement, one of the largest contributors to effort and cost is engineering. To build using traditional methods, it often takes weeks and at least a couple of engineers to ship.

There is a worldwide developer shortage, especially in the post-covid era where businesses want to focus on automation and technology transformation. Businesses are bouncing back and want to focus on growth.

It has become impossible to take out the engineering bandwidth for anything but the most critical aspects of the business.

Low-code platforms tip the scales

What if you could lower the effort and time to build these marketing or internal tools? What if the marketing team could integrate and build these tools with minimal technical skills or engineering bandwidth? Low-code platforms lower this barrier and greatly decreases time & effort. With them, you can finally rapidly build and ship what would’ve seemed implausibly complex to engineer in-house a couple of years ago.

“84% of firms with highest enterprise requirements use low-code development and see return-on-investment.” — Forrester

There are plenty of benefits that lead to a higher ROI:

📉 Lower effort & cost

Low-code platforms are citizen-developer friendly. That means that even the most traditionally complex systems can be built and managed by users without engineering backgrounds. With the ongoing worldwide developer shortage, this is a boon. Since you can do more with a lot less, you also make considerable savings in cost.

🙌 Decrease dependencies on other teams

Marketing and other non-engineering teams following bottom-up marketing can usually benefit greatly from automation and technology. In order to achieve those, however, they have to constantly depend upon the engineering teams. Using low-code, they can build and maintain these tools with greater autonomy than ever before.

🔄 Rapidly iterate

With low-code tools, lesser dependencies & autonomy leads to rapid iteration. Teams can make changes, collaborate and test all without tapping into engineering bandwidth. They can also deploy and rollback almost instantly making it easier to push changes quickly.

The low code revolution is here to stay

Low code does have its own issues and kinks, but like any new technology, it’s evolving rapidly and adoption is rising across the board. If you want to increase the ROI by canceling out effort and time, low-code is the way to go.

The key metric is speed to value

With traditional software implementations, business leaders often focus on two things: how much is it going to cost, and how quickly can it be operational? While the speed with which low-code applications can be developed is one of the technology’s key selling points — as is the cost-efficiency of being able to deploy one technology for unlimited applications — the metric that’s most important with low-code is speed to value. Because of its simple building-block approach, low-code allows even complex projects to be accomplished quickly, sometimes in as little as a few weeks.

KPMG*

Plug: Canonic — a no-code full stack solution

Canonic is a low-code platform to build complex projects without any codes. You can use Canonic to build APIs for all your internal and other tertiary tools. With Canonic, you can significantly lower the effort and skill required leading to lower costs and faster development times.

We are celebrating #30DaysOfCanonic! Every day we will cover guides, how-tos, and blog posts on what you can build on Canonic. Learn More