Hang with Spang February 2022

In our latest Hang with Spang webinar session, Ash and Spang discussed the much anticipated top technology trends and predictions for 2022. The conversation started with a joyous question from Ash on what are little things Spang does to make herself happy throughout the week. The answer is tending and caring for her plants and cultivating her own space. 

The duo then jumped into 2022 predictions and trends centered on these topics:

1. Tech trends in communication fragmentation 
2. Low-code/no-code
3. Automation

Diving into the first topic, solving channel fragmentation becomes a top priority. Spang’s prediction centers on the need for engineering teams to face channel-fragmentation head on to create a faster and more streamlined process for leveraging all the modern communication channels without having to dedicate countless time to build and maintain them. Breaking it down further, as an example, the challenge to connecting to communication platforms, like email, which looks like one channel but behind the scenes, there is quite a bit of fragmentation within that one channel. There are different email providers, data requirements, protocols to access data, reconcile different data models across different providers, etc. And this is just one channel – the number of communication channels are vast. From a business perspective, businesses want to reach people where they are and get instant data from wherever that channel is – making them truly channel-agnostic. The ease of writing an application once and having it connect to where the data is sourced is what businesses wants and where solutions like Nylas come into play giving businesses the time to focus their efforts on the performance of their application and not the backend time-consuming work associated with connecting with the different providers. 

As the year progresses, businesses will look to vendors and suppliers to bridge the gap of complexity. When you break it down, channel fragmentation is also software fragmentation. With the increase in tools to assist us comes the need for integration to ensure they work well in harmony. 

Prediction number two centers on the rise of low-code/no-code to meet the demands of the market with the ongoing engineering labor shortage. While it is true that there are more developers now than ever before, we are in the beginning stages of digitizing society at scale and the pie is still large and there is ample more we can do to harness the power of computing and make humans more productive. 

One of the core concepts of low-code/no-code is can we take the concept of using computers as leverage and allow people to have specialized training to be able to do it. As an example, customer success. The goal of customer success is to make their customers happy, successful with the product and to accomplish their goals with the product. The day-to-day of customer success looks a lot like a workflow with tasks, targeted communications, etc. A new trend is folks building visual workflow builders that take common tasks, and as if they were programming, extracts away the logic.

Low code/no-code bridges the gap between training and specialization to write software using software languages and the future where programming curriculum becomes part of the standard curriculum taught in schools. 

Ash and Spang then talk about the current limitations of low-code/no-code and their curiosity and excitement for where it will develop in the near future given the demand. 

The final topic centered on workflow automation going company-wide in 2022 and beyond. As an example, HR and People teams will be able to work faster and more efficiently in their day-to-day tasks like scheduling interviews, finance teams can update payment records and customer success teams can be better equipped to respond quickly and efficiently to customer needs. 

There is alignment with the previous topic of low code/no-code and workflow automation. Essentially workflow automation is computing tools to help take care of the behind-the-scenes tasks to make the workflows easier to complete. To better understand how the two topics intersect, Ash makes a great assessment of how there is a broad category of automation, and that low-code/no-code falls as a sub-category with the broader category. 

Spang dives into the complex manual nature of scheduling and how automation increases efficiency and productivity. Having software that streamlines the scheduling workflow through automation opens up valuable time for teams to do the work they need to get done. Automation is about saving time which is our most finite resource. Anytime that is saved by automation is time back to focus on different aspects of work, life and things that make you happy. 

Take a look at the full recording to hear more about Spang’s predictions for 2022 and beyond. To learn more about Nylas check out our free trial and see how we can save you time to do what makes you happy.