How are you structuring low-code roles in your company?

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Hi all,
I’m a ‘non-tech’ executive at a mid-sized industrial company in Brazil, and currently overseeing our IT department.

I’m exploring how to expand beyond the traditional IT scope (SAP, infra, support) by bringing low-code capabilities into our internal tech team — aiming to build internal tools for various business areas, RAG for knowledge base etc.

Curious to hear from managers..

  • Are you hiring full-time low-code specialists, training internal talent, or working with freelancers?
  • Any tips on integrating low-code with traditional IT stuff (i.e. SAP, MS)?

…and from devs

  • What’s your experience working with ‘traditional’ companies using low code?

We’re leaning towards WeWeb + Supabase + AI APIs, which from my XP offers more flexibility than Microsoft’s stack. Would love to learn from your experience — what worked, what didn’t? Any advice is welcome

Thanks

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Hi, Marc

A few personal thoughts on the topic..
Context: I am ex-marketing, consultant, designer turned into low-code product developer in enterprise.

Building the right thing
No matter the tech, I think it is important to spend enough time in the scoping, planning and architecture of the application you are building. With the speed of low-code, you can move really fast, so choosing the right direction before running is very important. This is not unique to low-code, but in some cases accelerated due to the development velocity you can acheive. Spend time with UX. Learn design. Create the right processes.

A benefit of low-code tools is that some choices are already made for you with abstractions and limitations. The result of this is speed in both learning and development.

The people
Having worked with both traditional developers and “low-code” developers, I think a mix is possible and preferred. You want someone who has technical knowledge to proof the databases, architecture, security. Make sure the foundation is tight. Once the foundation is set you can either retrain developers in low-code tools, or upskill other workers to create things with low-code, or even use externals.

Observation is that developers tend to choose less abstractions and more code, and sometimes these choices can create complications. If you’re low-code, try to be low-code and get benefits of low-code. Funnily enough, low-code people (retrained) also become more efficient with code (like myself).

You want people working full stack (front-end and backend), but specialize them. (ie. you want a designer)

Create a win
When setting up a team like this, i think starting with a “product” that can more or less live on its own, without being too tied down by either bearucracy or dependancies (other tools), will give the team confidence and experience. This also gives room for learning “how to work” with scoping and building products.

Integrations
Just to touch on your integration question. Low-code is development – and integrating to ie. SAP or MS platforms will be the “same”, given that the data is available.

My experience
You can build things really fast. You can teach non developers people to become developers. Good tech practice is universal. Something bad built with low-code is still bad. The organization does not understand the difference between low-code and traditional code. Scale quality fast, scale people slow - make sure people are aligned and have experience in the tools. You can do a lot with few.

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Interesting take and insights!

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Beware - my opinions are very unpopular, also please, don’t let this discourage you from doing this, low-code has a lot of potential.

I personally think if you want to be future proof in a corporate enviroment - in the current fast paced ecosystem, you should hire developers (ex-devs or dev people with an open mind towards no-code).

In my experience of teaching/consulting and working with people wanting to learn no-code for the past 2+ years, there are very few people who came from not knowing to code at all to actually being able to develop really production grade stuff - without talking about hobby projects or startup MVPs which don’t require that much precision, as long as they do the job.

There obviously are exceptions like @Micah and other regulars here who made it to a very high level of proficiency and beyond. The reality though is, that out of 10 people maybe 1 or 2 make it to a level I’d imagine would be enough to be a part of an internal team of developers in a larger company.

Hiring people with development experience is harder - yes, but it will come back ten fold - both in money saved and peace of mind. Especially with a stack containing Supabase, you simply need someone who knows how the databases work, otherwise I’d suggest switching to Xano.

Also, in case all of this takes a weird AI turn, it’s always easier to pivot from hiring devs to do no-code rather than hiring someone who only knows no-code in a case you need to switch to something like AI assisted coding - which is also happening a lot with people and agencies I know. In Finance we have this saying - “It’s easier to teach a physics graduate finance, than teaching a finance one physics.” and I think it applies to no-code in the same way.

Can you train someone with experience unrelated to development and make them a good developer? Yes, absolutely. But it takes a lot of effort. I seen many experiments like this in a corporate settings (10+ M AR tech companies), where the people from helpdesks etc. just lose interest or get lost in the various aspects of how it all works under the hood. I think that at least some experience with code should be mandatory, otherwise it’s very difficult to train someone who can make it. Or at least it takes non trivial, above average effort from both the trainer and the trainee.

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Very interesting topic.

Training takes time,
But you can probably reskill someone of your tech team who is interested into discovering low-code.
He’ll already know your company and will probably ramp up quickly on weweb, if he knows software development already.

For hire, most nocode freelancers have only worked on mvp , but never on bigger projects.
And most traditional developers don’t want to go no-code/ low-code.
So you’ll have to find your way in between :sweat_smile:

if one of your senior backend dev can also be included in your low-project, he will be able to infuse and share his expertise in the low code team.

Other than that, I think weweb supabase is a very robust stack, it’s the stack I use and I love it.
You’ll be surprise the quality of the projects you can release, and how fast you can ship compared to a traditional dev team.

And my advice would be to start small, and then grow as your confidence grow

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Really appreaciate you guys taking the time to elaborate on this!
I am leaning towards hiring someone full time with dev experience and start with small projects.
Thank you

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Marc, já que você disse que é Brasileiro então vou responder em português.

Apesar da minha empresa prestar os serviços que vou descrever abaixo, isso não é uma venda.

É muito interessante contratar uma terceira para dar uma imersão no seu próprio time de T.I e ficar no ongoing durante um tempo até o time estar maduro com as ferramentas.

Mas mais interessante que isso é o conceito chamado “citizen dev” que é trazer para dentro o pessoal de negócios, então ao invés da T.I entender o negócio e ai sim criar uma ferramenta, a própria área de negócios desenvolve as ferramentas/painéis/automações, pois é ela que sabe realmente a dor do negócio, isso traz um engajamento enorme para as áreas de negócios, são construídas ferramentas muito mais rápido, desafoga o T.I e traz uma sinergia/empatia maior entre as áreas, claro que toda a homologação do sistema tem que ser pela T.I.

Caso quiser saber mais sobre isso, me mande uma mensagem.