3 ways businesses are building a culture of collaboration with no-code

When companies get serious about using no-code, something important happens.

By now, you’ve probably heard about how non-technical people are using no-code platforms to automate key processes in their businesses. You might even have heard how much faster they can build solutions when they don’t have to wait in line for engineering resources. 

But perhaps the most important impact of working this way is still somewhat underrated – it’s actually helping these folks get better at collaborating with their more technical counterparts.  

In our latest guide to scaling with no-code, we interviewed six senior experts who are deep in their journeys with this style of automation to better understand some of their strategies and methodologies. 

What emerged from these conversations is how much more frequently and effectively the people using no-code are able to interface with the engineers tasked with building solutions. 

Ops and dev: Learning to speak each other’s languages

Before Pierre-Yves Garcia co-founded 9x, an agency that trains business teams to better leverage AI and automation, he worked in the ops team at a food delivery startup. He learned there that no-code tools were an ideal arena in which to test and sharpen his capacity for systems thinking. 

Pierre-Yves explains: 

“When the operations team isn’t building the logic themselves, their input to the developer will often be blurry and not properly thought through.” 

Rather than no-code being a way for non-technical ops personnel to circumvent their colleagues in engineering, it turned out to be a critical step in developing a deeper understanding between them. 

“When the operations team actually builds, tests, and iterates the logic themselves, they put themselves in a great position to pass on the project to the engineer with the right instructions,” he noted. “And they won’t waste their engineer’s time on things which are either trivial or not thought through and gamed out.”

As a result, the ops people who understand the business problem go through a process that makes their thinking less abstract. And the engineers who understand how to build solutions get a clearer idea of what’s really needed. 

No-code and pro-code: Collaboration as a super power 

Similarly, in highly regulated industries, the ability to deploy novel solutions rapidly is a rare advantage. For Philipp Weidenbach, Chief Customer Officer at TeleClinic, a fast-growing telemedicine pioneer, this speed of collaboration is exactly where no-code shines. 

“We often create the logic of an automation in no-code then actually build using our own APIs and our own product. This allows us to move super quickly.”

By prototyping, testing and iterating in a no-code environment, Philipp’s team can speedrun the early stages of product development on their own and then pass the baton to their more technical peers when they’re certain they’ve got an idea worth executing on. 

“Around 50% of TeleClinic’s employees are engineers. I would say the combination of pro-code and no-code is our super power.” 

In fact, placing no-code development and software engineering in the same sequence of value creation also helps teams like Philipp’s turn the potential for internal conflict into an opportunity for true competitive advantage. 

“IT should understand this is not shadow IT, it’s just something that is taking away unnecessary workload from people,” he explains.

AI and no-code: Stronger together

Even among businesses experimenting with AI, there appear to be important ways in which the combination with no-code automation is proving fruitful. Yuval Keshtcher has used automation to grow his UX writing course and launch AI Makers Lab. 

“Learning no-code helped me scale my business from one mentor (me) to around 15 mentors and hundreds of students.”

By combining what he’s accomplishing in no-code with AI, he’s been able to ensure the things he’s building are more easily digestible to everyone else he works with. 

“Using AI, I built an automation that documents automations! I grabbed the JSON file of a Make automation via an API, then I asked one of my favorite LLMs, Claude, to break it down into text, then I exported it to my note-taking app, Notion. This is an easy way to build a library of documentation with zero effort.”

With clear documentation to support the solutions he’s building, Yuval can more easily scale the number of people he’s collaborating with. And they can more easily benefit from all the hard work he’s done. 

It’s just another way in which the people and companies using no-code the most are improving the way they deliver value. For all the speed and ingenuity it’s enabled, that might just be the most important impact no-code has made possible. 

Learn practical advice from six no-code automation experts. Read our guide, Scale without code: The path to rapid automation and growth.