Low Code for Product Managers

I recently attended?product-con?(a conference for product folks) & I had an opportunity to chat with product managers across length and breadth of tech companies across the world. Sure KPIs of product managers have nothing to do with delivering features or engineering them. However there is a business case for product managers for using low code tools. Lets dig in –

1. NPS or CSAT is one of the commonly found KPIs of product managers. As a PM your controllables are better quality product for a better outcome. However there are things beyond product usage. For instance - your customer wants his subscription plan paused or upgraded/downgraded by raising a support ticket. Such tickets attribute to ops overheads and need engineers time to resolve such tickets. To make it scalable - you need engineers to build tools to either make things self serve or enable support to resolve queries. Such ops features seldom have high priority on them.
2. Custom features for specific customers?- as your customer base grows you would see incremental demand for features. While you have luxury to prioritize them however demand for features from strategic accounts can’t be ignored as your sales/account team wants them not to be a show stopper.

Allocating resources for features for NPS/CSAT is often met with resistance as their priority gets debated and this leads to deprioritization. Low code tools are now becoming powerful to build these features for self serve completely outside the product and embed it right inside the product and there by cutting the dependency on the traditional engineering line and yet enable such features to improve their CSAT/NPS.

In case of high value customer demanding a specific feature is often met with counter arguments from engineering. However bright chances are sales will push for this and they would win. Now this is a problematic space for two reasons:

a) you may or may not have a soft commitment from prospect

b) your investment to bring the feature alive and opportunity cost of not really building the feature you were looking at building

These two cases is where I have seen product managers really open to the possibility of building them with low code. While 90% of 1st case are possible to build with Low code, probability for 2nd case might be 50%. There is an obvious benefit here of using low code

i. build things faster

ii. build with lesser resources

It would be interesting to learn perspective of product managers out here. Looking forward to your comments/feedback.