Citizen Developer

Yep.

So it's taking citizen developers to work in teams as citizen developer teams.

Yep.

And then do they still hand it over? Is this part of the problem with the bottleneck going from pilot to scale? They still need to hand it over to the development team or what's sort of happening there in the market?

So a lot of the startups in this AI-native services sort of world is talking about forward-deployed engineers.

Are you – what is a forward-deployed engineer in terms of that sort of picture about citizen development and the classic professional developers? Yeah.

Is it taking the developers and moving them more into business or is it an end? Is it an end taking the citizen developers and turning them into more skilled engineers and understanding what they need to do?

I think it's an end and I think there's going to be a need... for both models.

So let's start with the basics.

What is citizen development? What does it include today? And how is it different from traditional software development?

Citizen development is when non-technical employees create tools or apps using low-code or no-code platforms.

Today, it often includes things like automating workflows or building simple apps without needing to code traditionally.

Contrast, traditional development relies on professional developers writing custom code.

Citizen development's faster and democratizes innovation, but without the same depth or complexity as traditional code.

And why would you say that...

You know, what are the differences from a citizen development perspective, uh, when the tooling is a frontier model like Claude rather than I- I'll, I'll refer to as old school citizen development? You know, I guess you could say we began with Lotus one, two, three, and we progressed through MS Power Automate and Power Apps and Airtable and Zapier and tools like that.

If you're listening and you're trying to figure out, "Should I do this to my place in Toronto? I either own something or I have enough money and wanna buy something, and I believe that Toronto's gonna keep growing and become, you know, more and more of a world-class city that it, that it's destined to be," you know, come, come and check it out.

Noam, I wanna kind of start to wrap things up here with, with your kind of take on the market, take on the citizen developer, and for those people out there maybe getting started, considering doing them- this themselves.

Like, you know, who are you working with right now? What, what advice are you giving? Where do you see things going?

Yeah, so we, we have quite a few citiz- like, citizen developers in our, like, list of clients.

I'm finding that there's, you know, people...

It s- it seems to be people in our industry, but I actually had a discussion this morning with someone who's like, has nothing to do with real estate, who has a, a lot that's 65 wide and he wants to maybe separate, put two multiplexes.

You know, do a, do an eight, do a fourplex plus a garden suite or a sixplex.

It's like, it's still not an easy project, but it's definitely an easier way in if you wanna start doing these, these multiplexes.

Oh my gosh.

Citizen Developers.

Citizen developers.

So I know you've been, you've been talking about this a lot longer than I am.

So I'm going to, I'm going to make you lead into it.

Is it essentially somebody in marketing can now use cloud code or cloud in general to build a web app and deploy it and run it and do all that stuff.

Cause cloud can do it all for you.

So, uh, citizen developers are