The Future of Product Management is No-Code Development
Three months ago I decided to immerse myself in the rapidly growing world of no-code development. This is what I’ve learned.
I’ve been a product manager — either as part of a team, or setting whole new teams up or as a startup founder who also “did” product — for 10 years now. Back in 2009, it was a fairly new concept, in the UK at least and certainly in larger organisations. If product managers think they have a hard time today explaining to friends and colleagues what they do, back then it was much, much worse. For me, the big turning point came with the release of Eric Ries’ Lean Startup book in 2011. Finally, we had a method, a movement, to follow and champion, and it changed everything.
A core component of the Lean Startup methodology is the build-measure-learn feedback loop. The first step is figuring out the problem that needs to be solved and then developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible. Once the MVP is established, a startup can work on tuning the engine. This will involve measurement and learning and must include actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect question.
The problem is it’s meant to be a super quick process. In theory, it is. In practice - in my experience - that’s rarely the case.
