scratch for PMs
Recently at work I spend a lot of time working on something that had frequently changing requirements. At one point I was found myself wishing for an "executable whimsical", where PMs (or ops, or some non technical stakeholder) can just move around blocks to change program behavior. Which led me to think, well kids can code with something like scratch, why can't we have something like that for PMs which they could use to program basic behaviors?
Spending a few days thinking about it, the problems with that seems to be :
- While PMs can build high level flows, at ground level that still needs to be somehow converted to lower level code. Then the idea was "okay what if the devs provide building blocks or legos and then PMs assemble those legos". Sounds tempting in the beginning but then you realize
- all programming is essentially assembling legos,
- what if the code behind those legos changes?
- okay if PMs are writing workflows, how do they test it?
The problem essentially turns into inventing a new kind of programming environment that
- is intuitive enough for 15 year olds (a typical PM)
- is as reliable as code
There are tools that allow you to do some node based programming but they essentially are a different representation of AST, which could be valuable. Some folks probably just find text based programming intimidating but being presented with a UI may be easier?
The only alternative I have found so far is make things that change often as config that your PMs can change themselves.