Organising the agile Nocode agency of the future

Christelle Curcio, CMO (Chief Makers Officer) was interviewed by Alexis Kovalenko of >Contournement> to talk about the agile organization of Nocode within theNocode agency Alegria.tech. Discover in the interview his three favorite topics of the moment:

• Building a community of Nocode Makers 🧑🎨
• Alegria methodology applied to Nocode 🧮
• The place of women in Tech 👩💻

Building a community of Nocode Makers 

The construction of Makers is in full swing at Alegria.tech. The long-term objective is to work with Makers from all over the world and to increase their skills in professional use cases. The ambition is to build a community of exchange and sharing for Makers, around client projects, and with strong human values, such as benevolence, sharing knowledge and know-how.

Each Maker has his own expertise; some are experts in a particular tool(Bubble for example) or experts in data, front-end, UX or UI. The community will embody a real melting pot of all backgrounds and skills to create an emulation never seen elsewhere.

The basis for its success is the internal implementation of :

• a number of documentary resources 📚
• communication about expertise 🕵️
• a network of exchange between Makers around their missions 🙋🏽♀️
• tutorials or guides 🎥

What is the process for recruiting Makers?

The process is not so complex, it consists of 3 steps:

1. First, you must fill out a form about your basic specialty and your motivation.
2. Then a 30-minute interview is organized by videoconference.
3. Finally, the candidate must complete a case study based on his/her specialty (to be returned within 7 days). The case study is used to evaluate the candidate's comfort level with one tool rather than another, and his or her way of thinking about a problem.
   

Once the 3 steps have been completed, the Alegria.tech teams decide whether or not to integrate a new Maker into the community. If he or she is not recruited, it is because it is felt that the candidate has not yet acquired sufficient skills in Nocode. Let's not forget that we have demanding customers behind us, we can't train our Makers from scratch, so they must already have some mastery of the tools.

What do we call a Nocode expert today?

Let's take the concrete case of the Bubble tool; the Bubble Maker must understand the workflow system, have already developed his own methodology, an organisation in the interface (naming, colours). He must be able to organise himself in the tools and know how to document the technical solution he provides.

💬 A lot of people underestimate documentation, you don't just have to get to the end of the technical project, you have to be able to tell the story.

From the outset, the co-founders of Alegria.tech were convinced that Nocode can enable greater diversity and inclusion in the tech world of tomorrow. The motivation of the Maker is the main pillar to allow him/her to develop a Nocode expertise; the background, the diplomas, the professional sector become secondary.

💬 The only criterion to remember to become a good Nocoder, motivation!

Today, Alegria Makers are freelancers, but tomorrow the community will be made up of 50% freelancers and 50% permanent employees. 

➡️ If you want to become a Nocode Maker, go here

Alegria.tech's project methodology

Our clients' projects are varied, and may involve building a website, a mobile application, a marketplace, a business tool, etc.

For all these projects, there is the Nocode Project Leader, who is the equivalent of the Agile project manager in traditional development. It is he who details and specifies the project for his team and the tools to be used. His job is to issue the product specifications with the client. He must then set up the project's design thinking phase, segment the scope, etc. At Alegria.tech, the project management is done by Airtable and the visual specifications by Miro.

Once the project is well defined, it is a question of respecting "continuous development" (cf. the original Agile manifesto), i.e. the client is involved in all the project's progress. As soon as a new feature is ready, it is the client who decides if he wants to put it online, and in what order. The contact with the customer should never be interrupted, it is the customer who takes over and decides what the next features to implement in his solution are.

The end user must also be integrated into the product. So we get their feedback at every stage of the project. 

The place of women in the Nocode

The Nocode technological revolution makes the technique more accessible in 2021. Nocode experts are no longer necessarily people from the web industry. A graphic designer, a designer, a marketer can now join the Nocode community, but not only. Those who have the desire to do so can do so because Nocode allows for a simpler, more intuitive creation of digital solutions thanks to a good spirit of abstraction. And abstraction, as we know, is easier to master than learning code!

💬 Nocode is a gateway for women in Tech, they don't have to censor themselves anymore. Let's create diversity to make this new technological revolution a breeding ground for innovation and creativity!

Thus, Nocode may seem like child's play because of the accessibility of the technology, but beware of being trapped by its enchanting side. The success of a Nocode project requires rigorous project management and a good dose of abstraction to build an effective App and user experience. This is the basis on which Alegria.tech was born, because agencies must have an even more important role than before in supporting their clients in their digitalisation.