OutSystems offers a wide range of ready-made components, integrations, and tools that facilitate the building and maintenance of applications. The platform’s visual development environment and agile development methods enable fast iterations and flexible application development.
Experiences in leveraging low-code for product development
We’ve experience utilising Microsoft Power Platform and OutSystems in service design projects. We talk about design-driven development, though it is more of our slang than an official term. The idea is that service designers, business designers, and business representatives lead the software creation process from start to finish. This is increasingly feasible because the tools are visual and easy for all parties to understand, and the software development is so fast that it keeps up with the pace of service design, allowing for immediate experimentation and piloting.
Regarding this approach to product development, we have experiences from startups, the public sector, and global billion-dollar companies. Common to all these experiences is the initial scepticism about the approach. However, the outcome has been very successful, and hearing a client say:
“This is an exceptional experience in my career in terms of collaboration depth and operational efficiency.”
This also reflects our experience with these projects.
Unfortunately, these product development projects are inherently such that they cannot be publicly discussed in detail. However, I will try to explain the reasons for the successes and why they are worth pursuing.
Reasons
In product development, rapid development time is beneficial. When the feedback cycle is a day or days compared to weeks or months, it is much easier to guide product development. It is an undeniable fact that developing with OutSystems is faster in most cases than traditional software development. Infrastructure setup takes no time, the entire platform is designed for efficient change management, and the platform offers many semi-finished products and automation to support developers.
In product and pilot projects, the number of integrations is often minimal, which further emphasises speed: we primarily stay within the strengths of the OutSystems platform. Development is so fast and the tools are so easy to use that separate paper prototypes and Figma designs aren’t needed, but solutions can be directly built on the technical platform (although Figma design is often done because designers are accustomed to the tool).
OutSystems supports methods in which applications can be quickly iterated and updated based on feedback received. The platform also has built-in feedback collection tools. This is useful especially when new products or services need to be brought to market or tested quickly. OutSystems is designed for developing mobile and web services. It bears a large part of the developers’ workload when it comes to authentication, security, graphic components, accessibility, publishing capabilities, and monitoring. It not only helps get started but also allows pilots to go into production use with relatively little further development and traditional rewriting isn’t required.
The reason is that OutSystems takes care of aspects such as security, accessibility, and scalability, so they are always included in development, even if the team might not primarily focus on them. This shouldn’t be read as saying that a pilot or prototype can go directly into production, but rather that the amount of work required to achieve production readiness is minimal.
Broad use of the platform
At Solita, OutSystems is used in various customer engagements, from large public administration actors to Finnish startups. OutSystems is used to create customised enterprise resource planning systems, digital services for customers, and mobile applications. Once the platform is acquired by an organisation, it is best utilised by being applied as diversely as possible. For this reason, using a low-code platform for experiments, product development, and similar purposes is a very interesting expansion to its use cases, to which it is also very well suited.
We offer comprehensive service design solutions that help our clients innovate and develop digital services user-centrically. Service design combines a deep understanding of business, technology, and user needs to create desirable and impactful solutions.
Our strong technology expertise enables the efficient implementation and integration of services into various systems. Solita’s service design offers clients the opportunity to stand out from competitors by providing innovative and customer-centric solutions that effectively respond to changing market needs.