Evolving product development strategies: Doing more with less in this tight labor market with Low/no-code and AI
Organizations set aside budgets for development teams. When an all-out bidding war breaks out for talent, hiring for roles becomes extremely difficult. The FANG-M(+microsoft) companies and well-funded startups have massive hiring departments with huge budgets that can scale and “cluster-hire” people. This puts “Normal” companies are put at a massive disadvantage before the process even starts.
Since there are always tight budgets in place, this puts companies in a quandary when trying to balance out the Org, employees earning salaries and business goals.
From an Organizational perspective, hiring practices are completely in a bind, because a few practices are followed:
- Org surveys the market according to their rules
- There are budgets for every Sub organization
- Salaries are adjusted according to the market (maybe out of date)
- Tries to hire and place people so that they can experience a growth in their time at the organization they are joining, according to performance and incentives
- Tries to bring in people in a range that’s suitable with the rest of the organization they are going to work with
It looks like in today’s market, the above approach might be completely wrong, because just like the real estate market, there are bidding wars for talent that may either be scarce or over-priced or something else.
There are few things the organization can do.
Take care of your current folks
Keep current folks happy.
Reduce complexity and clutter
Most of the time, you need lots of people because of endless complexities in your product or software. Internal IT requirements can add additionally incredible complexity.
Low-code and AI based product development (end to end)
Its possible that in today’s world, outside of outsourcing for talent, companies might need to revert more and more to low-code tools and AI to build products that are easy to maintain, manage and evolve.
Product Development strategies might need to evolve significantly to enable this. The traditional CLI and IDE-based development strategies need to be changed to allow faster and easier ways to develop new products and get business ideas to market.
I think the world is moving towards this model, and this category might see a massive growth in the near future where even non-developers (but with better business intuition) and folks with an idea will be able to build, publish, scale a product that connects them to people more intuitively, securely and in a more timely manner.
With the advent of the public cloud, serverless computing, services like Airtable, Okta, AWS Cognito this day is surely approaching quickly. There will still be lots of gaps that will need to be plugged in.
AI models will be built to help plug those gaps and fill in the blanks for developing solutions and rush to market.
Whoever builds this overall end to end model that addresses even 30% of the market, monetizes it will start a revolution and reduce the pressure on hiring.
