How to Improve Your Product Management Processes With LCNC Tools

For many years, organizations had only two options either to build products/systems on their own or buy the same from external vendors. But in recent years, Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) tools have become a staple for the industry and are a great fit for many businesses.

The State of the Developer Nation survey for Q3 2021 by SlashData and Developer Nation estimates there are 26.3 million active software developers in the world. To put that into perspective, a little over 0.3% of the world population knows how to code and over 99.5% don’t.

For product managers and many small to large-scale businesses with no coding expertise or specialized teams, LCNC tools are a lucrative alternative. Moreover, LCNC tools are estimated to be faster, more affordable, and easier to use than traditional programming as shown below.

(Source: No-Code Census)

Such estimates among others make LCNC tools a favorable choice to improve product management processes. ZenTao is one such LCNC Scrum tool for project and product management which we’ll also talk about in this article. First, let’s glance over why adopting LCNC tools is important:

Adopting LCNC Tools to Improve Product Management Processes

1.Prioritizing Product Objectives

The first and foremost step is prioritizing product items of importance. Setting up the agile product vision and objective ensures everything is in clear order with no possible backlog. Each team involved in the product has different priorities, thus, it’s vital for the organization to prioritize product objectives that align with internal teams.

While doing so, organizations may identify certain areas and hierarchies that need a complete makeover. They may have to go through a change management process to handle modifications, adjunct organizational hierarchy, and change product priorities. This change in management and product priorities could result in the adoption of LCNC tools to make product building effortless.

Further, prioritizing product objectives and change management helps find hotspots where LCNC tools are favorable to use.

2.Identifying Areas To Apply LCNC Tools

Identifying areas to apply LCNC tools for improving the product management process is often the most critical aspect. Once you have defined the product vision, it’s time to narrow down the key product hotspots where LCNC development is possible. Areas such as manual functions that need automation, digitization of paper-based processes, complex workflows automation, etc. are some examples.

Applying LCNC tools to these identified product areas becomes an overall deployment strategy for your enterprise. Another thing to consider is these areas should be sufficiently concentrated and at the same time not too narrowed down. This could hinder the LCNC tool adoption and won’t provide the needed momentum for improvement.

In essence, you don’t want them to be too wide or too narrow, both of which could dilute the improvement of product management processes. Moreover, it helps reduce the dependency on third parties.

3.Selection of Right LCNC Tools that Suit Your Needs

Selecting the best-suited LCNC tools for the needs of your enterprise can be the most tricky and challenging part. Here, the onus lies on the product managers to lead the overall product development and management. And using the right tools for managing the right activities can improve product management exponentially.

A few considerations would be to find LCNC tools that offer improved agility, reduce complexity behind product development, meet modern needs, decrease costs, and live up to customer expectations.

ZenTao is one such LCNC open-source and professional Scrum tool for project and product management. It’s practical, pragmatic, and well structured with powerful features, statistical reports, and APIs. ZenTao promotes precision and flexible extension mechanisms that accelerate Agile development.

4.Reducing Dependency on Third-Parties

What makes LCNC tools more lucrative is BIY — Build It Yourself ability suitable for organizations that prefer and adopt this approach. Another biggest advantage of LCNC is it reduces dependency on third parties. The less we are dependent on third parties, the product is less likely to be error-prone.

Often external consultants or tech-savvy & skilled resources are brought in to fill the void. This may, however, result in short-term gains, but ultimately diminish the product management process. Since the knowledge to continue the product development remains contained in silos, past learnings and best practices get ignored.

Instead, enterprises should focus on establishing an internal team of competent LCNC experts that can accelerate and improve product management processes.

5.Creating Product Roadmaps

Typically, product roadmaps are used as planning tools, which combined with the right processes can rally support for product development and management. Creating product roadmaps allow product teams to scrutinize the essential product management processes that need improvement. A product management survey finds roadmapping is at the center for product managers.

(Source: Roadmap.com)

Creating roadmaps further the team collaboration effort, clarify uncertainties, and act as a powerful tool for communication. Moreover, a roadmap is an excellent tracking tool to determine which key areas identified before have gone through the LCNC development to focus on the remaining ones.

Doing so strengthens and streamlines the product management process and helps achieve your enterprise objectives.

6.Implementing Automation Where Needed

Each phase of the product cycle is vital and many activities in each phase may impact the daily tasks of the product team or managers. It’s not exactly a cut-and-dry process. There needs a certain degree of automation through LCNC tools that narrow down the activities of each product cycle phase.

First up is Task Automation. There are a great many LCNC tools out there that enable product teams with real-time collaboration for priority product tasks. Tools like Trello, Rally, Asana, etc. do a good job of task automation. Such tools allow product teams with greater flexibility to evaluate what creates a backlog and automate recurring workflows to speed up and improve product management processes.

We have already discussed the importance of Roadmapping and how it plays a key role to meet your enterprise objectives. Also, it’s a key to unlocking workflow automation to make things easier for product teams to implement data-driven product planning and management processes. Many LCNC tools offer custom work boards, visual collaborative layouts, and other features to strategize the sequence of work for teams to achieve and improve product management 10x.

The last thing that needs automation is design and wireframing. Instead of using traditional tools, LCNC tools simplify the user interface creation through drag & drop, fast wireframe assembly, and realistic layouts.

In essence, atomizing these activities with LCNC not only save time and help create products with ease but ultimately enhance product management processes too.

Final Thoughts

It’s important for product management teams to realize the importance of LCNC tools. It's true, development through programming languages and frameworks isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, it’s also important to note low-code/no-code tools are equally on the rise and could become an integral part of product development and management.

With that said, LCNC tools are impressive and offer a new way for enterprises to handle the exponentially growing user demands. While it’s a need of the hour for small to medium-sized businesses, large enterprises should also utilize them for improving their product management processes.