Disclaimer: I love no-code tools, I have been using them for about 7 years, and I believe that no-code solutions can really help you build new products and test out new ideas quicker and cheaper.

For a very long time, I’ve been planning to write an opus magnum on using no-code solutions to build new products, but all the drafts I’ve had were becoming so lengthy, they’d be considered a novel by most.

So let me give you a short intro to no-code tools for Product Managers instead.

What is no-code?

‘No-code’ is a term that’s commonly used for building software without actually, you know, coding. This means that the no-code tools (at least in theory) can be used without any knowledge of programming languages, software architecture, etc, and you’ll still get a decent result.

I’ve seen the term being used in many different contexts, from the horrific (people online saying that Salesforce is the most powerful no-code ecosystem) to pretty shady (online schools promising you a wild career and lucrative wages if you complete their no-code programme).

No-code tools are just tools. Same as with AI tools like ChatGPT: you can use them to make your work less stressful and more impactful, but they won’t do your job for you and just knowing how to create a database with a working API in Airtable will not land you a job at FAANG.

My favorite use case for no-code solutions is quickly mocking up working solutions for new ideas me or my team may have, closely followed by building internal tools. Most of these ideas and tasks don’t really require anything special.

Of course, not all ideas can be tested with off-the-shelf technology. For example, it’s highly unlikely that some existing no-code solutions would have been able to help me test the efficiency of eye-tracking-based reading analytics.

But even advanced projects that need a lot of research and development would benefit greatly from the dev teams not having to create all the boring databases and admin panels for every single test. And it looks like the more high-tech your project is nowadays, the more data you’ll need to collect and manage.

Airtable

Almost all the projects I have worked on in my life involve Airtable in some way. You can do almost anything with Airtable because in its essence it is an incredibly user-friendly database with auto-generated API, built-in integrations (including Gmail) and a great ecosystem of projects that work well with it.

Example use cases

Airtable is pushing itself as more of a project-managing solution, with most popular templates focused on PM and Marketing tasks, but that would be underselling itself.

My favourite uses for Airtable would be these two:

Crowdsourcing

Imagine you’re collecting thousands of reading sessions from hundreds of participants for, say, a reading study. What would you normally use? An Excel table? Google Sheets? Google Drive with folders that are impossible to navigate?

Since Airtable’s tables explicitly are composed of entities, it’s the best solution for keeping data with simple or complex relations and then actually working with it.

In this example we have a simple structure:

• Respondents, who have

  • Name
  • (Relation) Personality survey they have completed
  • (Relation) List of their reading sessions
  • (Lookup field) List of reading materials mentioned in their reading sessions

• Personality surveys, consisting of:

  • (Relation) Link to the Respondent that has completed them
  • As many questions as you’d like to ask them

• Reading materials

  • Name
  • (Attachment) An EPUB file with this reading material
  • (Relation) List of all reading sessions involving this Reading material
  • (Lookup field) List of all Respondents that have read this Reading material (via Reading sessions)

• Reading sessions

  • (Relation) The respondent that read it
  • (Relation) Reading material that was read
  • Date and time it was started
  • Duration in minutes

  
  

Try building something like this in Google Sheets, it won’t be easy.

Building and maintaining the initial structure would take mere minutes, and you’ll be able to build all the extras on top, like:

• Easy-to-use data entry forms (less powerful than Google Forms, but built-in)
• Millions of views and filters for all sorts of purposes
• Airtable Interfaces (see below)
• Gmail integration that allows you to send confirmation emails and communicate in other ways

One caveat: Airtable is not a data storage solution, so collecting stuff like videos or other larger files won’t really work: even with the premium plans you only get 20 Gb of storage per database. If you want to do that, you’ll either need to ask your dev team to build a custom submission form and some tiny backend that will upload files to S3, or use an Airtable clone like Baserow. However, they have their own limitations and integrations won’t be as no-code as I prefer them to be.

Backend for MVP projects

What if you have a new product idea but your backend team is super busy?

Airtable lets you build your own perfectly functional backend!

See, one of Airtable’s features (and in my view, its greatest) is the built-in API generation. This means that for all the tables, fields and records you create in Airtable, there is an API that allows a developer (this part is definitely not no-code) to access them.

You can build a fully functional MVP backend in the same amount of time it would take to write a Jira task.

Let’s take the same database from the Crowdsourcing scenario and see if we can build an app that would display a list of these Reading materials, download them and let its users read them.

Airtable’s API (counterintuitively located away from the databases at api.airtable.com) lets you access this:

Like this:

It provides a really well-documented API that uses actual data as examples and is super intuitive to use. This makes trying out new ideas that require storing some data on the backend much easier.

You still will need to create a proper backend later on, but that will only have to happen once you’ve proven your idea actually works.

Airtable Interfaces

While I’m a big fan of the way Airtable looks and functions, I’ve encountered quite a few people that were absolutely overwhelmed by Airtable’s “it’s-a-table-but-not-quite-a-table” look. I guess this is why they’ve introduced Interfaces in 2022.

It’s an absolutely fantastic feature that allows you to build great-looking views for your data.

Unfortunately, they cannot be shared publicly and can only be used for internal tools. However, there are ways to match some of their functionality (and some more) with miniExtensions. I’ll probably write a separate article on that later.

Connecting tools and services

At some point in your no-code journey, you’ll want to connect the new stuff to your old stuff. You may want to send new Airtable entries to Mailchimp, or transform new files in a Google Drive folder into Airtable entities.

There is one tool to do this that I like and one that I absolutely hate.

The one I like: Make (formerly Integromat)

Make lets you build all your connections visually, move them around, change the order of the steps and generally has a pretty good UI. This is probably the best tool to automate all the weird Google Drive to Airtable to Mailchimp dances if you have to make them.

The one I hate: Zapier

Until recently, once you created a flow in Zapier, that was it. Need to make changes? Want to reorder the actions? Tough luck, you have to go back to the last step before the action that’s not quite there and redo everything. They changed this at some point, but I’m still not touching Zapier with a 10-foot pole.

Building websites

There are so many web-building tools out there that claim to be the no-code solution to all life’s problems, I’ve lost count. But out of all the tools, only one can be easily used by a Product Manager with no design experience.

Super: transform Notion pages into a website

Super lets you transform a Notion page and all its child pages into an auto-updating website. It’s perfect for anything public-facing that doesn’t need to look very good, like developer documentation, support portals, terms and conditions and many other applications I can’t even think of.

There are some competitors, including Simple.ink, but I liked Super the most.

Creating internal tools

Warning: this is going to be slightly less no-code than the rest of the sections, but will give you great powers.

If you have an API or an existing database, but not a good UI to go with it, you can use no-code tools to access these APIs and provide ways to send or receive stuff over them with a pretty nice UX.

The only no-code tool for this that I truly liked is Retool. It allows you to build dashboards and CRUD (create, read, update, delete) apps with a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop interface. You need to know how APIs or SQL requests work, but it’s still much less time-consuming than having to develop stuff.

Further reading

If you want to learn more, I’m a big fan of Vas3k’s article on No-code. It’s a lot more visual and fun than this overview, and while some time has passed since it was first published in 2020, most of the core tools remain the same.

I hope this overview has inspired you to try no-code tools if you’ve never used them, taught you about a couple new approaches if you have, or simple hasn’t annoyed you if you consider yourself an expert in no-code solutions.

If you are annoyed that your tool hasn’t been listed here, join the conversation in the comments below!