Sitemate Blog
On How Sitemate Ships Now, In The Era of AI
Table of Contents
Preface
As at the time of writing this blog - in June 2025, we are now at the precipice of crossing the tipping point into the next major technological shift - AI.
Similar to the previous shifts; Cloud and Mobile - user and customer expectations are changing already, and they will continue to change rapidly over the coming 1-3 years.
There will be big winners, and there will be big losers.
Sitemate’s foundational product philosophies around no-code, ease of use and mobile first - means we are well placed to respond with our solutions for the built world.
But first, we need to change ourselves, internally - and that’s what this blog post is about.
The Risk - The Floor Has Been Lowered
As leaders, product thinkers, designers, researchers and software engineers - the reality is that you are no longer just competing with your counterparts in other technology companies that operate in the same space - we are now competing with anyone who has a laptop.
Our number of competitors has just increased by a once unimaginable multiple - 1,000X, 10,000X, more?
This new competitor has a name, and that is a “Citizen Developer”.
The Citizen Developer
A citizen developer is a non-IT / non-technical professional - they could be a business analyst, a software power user, or a no-code developer.
They build applications or automations using low-code/no-code platforms and AI services rather than writing traditional hand-crafted code.
Their key traits:
- They rely on visual builders, drag-and-drop components, prompt to code UIs, and easy-to-configure connectors instead of an IDE and command line.
- Domain expertise, not syntax expertise: They deeply understand the business problem (e.g. safety checklists, site-report workflows) and use that knowledge to assemble their own solutions.
- Rapid prototyping: What once took weeks of spec gathering and sprint planning can now be spun up in hours or days.
The consequences?
Carefully prioritized roadmaps may suddenly feel sluggish next to a department’s weekend hackathon.
What used to require whiteboard sessions and code reviews now ships with a few clicks, and worse, our users may adopt it before you even know it exists.
The Opportunity - The Ceiling Is Now Higher
Whilst the risk is very real - at the same time, and on the flip side - we’ve been handed a rocket engine to use.
Combining AI with no-code tools is a match made in heaven - like peanut butter and jam; AI gets you 80-90% of the way, and the no-code foundation allows you to customize the remaining 10-20% of the finer details.
[Insert chef’s kiss emoji]
I believe Sitemate’s best move isn’t to fight the citizen developers - it’s to unlock them, just like we’ve been doing to date with our no-code functionality.
But now, we make it easier, we take them to a much greater scale, and we allow them to move at much greater speed.
This is how the ceiling gets raised - as a technology company, we use our expertise to take citizen developers to heights of product capability, complexity and performance that they cannot reach on their own.
Risk vs Opportunity Matrix - How We Prioritize Now
The below sketch summarizes the two prior sections;
- On the y axis we have Market appeal; starting with niche requirements and increasing to mass market applicability.
- On the x axis we have Software complexity; starting with simple requirements and increasing to complex requirements
From there, four quadrants are created;
- Bottom left - Dead zone for SaaS; Low appeal meets low complexity; only a few users care and there’s no technical moat, so it’s not going to be worth building anything here.
- Top left - Some SaaS opportunity; High appeal but low complexity; great for quick wins and user acquisition, but heavy competition means slim margins and rapid commoditization of these categories.
- Bottom right - Some SaaS opportunity; Low appeal but high complexity, viable only through bespoke partnerships or premium consulting, not broad-market products.
- Top right - SaaS wins here; High appeal and high complexity; features that address common pain points with deep engineering investment create defensible value and drive scalable growth.
User Expectations on Delivery - How We Deliver Now
The below sketch shows three eras, and each era has an associated “t” time measure on the x axis - measured from the point that user feedback is given / insight received;
- On-Prem Era (Years): Large releases shipped infrequently, feedback surfaced in pilot programs and often arrived too late to shape the next cycle.
- Cloud Era (Months): Rapid provisioning and SaaS upgrades shrank release cadences to quarterly or monthly, feedback loops tightened accordingly
- AI-First Era (Weeks): It’s simple - during this Era, users will now expect new capabilities on a weekly basis.
I anticipate that any remaining user patience for long development cycles will evaporate in the AI era, due to bottoms up pressure from Citizen Developers.
The second sketch lays out how expectations have compressed, and how Sitemate must match, or exceed, the new standard.
Continuous Listening
We won’t be waiting for account review meetings, research calls, GTM team feedback, or complaints, before we listen to users.
We will commence building new, or improving current systems, that allow us to listen continuously across every channel, so that feedback flows directly into our delivery pipeline;
- In-App Feedback & Voting: Built-in widgets let users up-vote feature ideas or report issues in real time.
- Emails & Support Tickets: Every support email is tagged by theme and sentiment; urgent pain points bubble to the top of our backlog within hours.
- Aircall & Fathom Transcripts: Customer calls are automatically transcribed and analyzed for keyword trends, like “slow upload” or “inaccurate report”, so that we spot emerging issues before they escalate.
- Product Analytics & Telemetry: Usage events and error logs feed dashboards that trigger alerts or spike-based workflows, ensuring our teams know about regressions immediately.
- User Interviews & Research Calls: Continue meeting with power users and customers to uncover deeper needs and validate prototype assumptions before code hits production
By weaving these streams into a unified “listening layer”, we close the loop in days, not quarters, turning raw insights into prioritized tickets, design sketches, and release checklists on an ongoing basis.
Every Engineer Must Now Be An AI-Powered Engineer
Traditional coding alone won’t cut it moving forward - every member of Sitemate’s engineering team is now expected to wield AI as a force multiplier and focuses squarely on customer value:
All:
- AI Literacy as a Core Competency: Our engineering levelling framework has been updated. Proficiency with models and agentic flows directly impacts promotions and internal career growth - either as an accelerator, or impediment, pending the person.
Engineering Team:
- Elevate Beyond Admin: Don’t get bogged down in low-level administrative tasks. Leverage AI to automate routine work so you can spend your time accelerating feature delivery and solving high-impact problems.
- AI-Augmented Development: Most people are already here - from auto-generated code scaffolds to in-line suggestions in pull requests, our IDEs leverage models that understand our domain and speed up feature delivery.
- QA Automation: We must leverage AI to assist with test writing, and as tools evolve - move towards automated regression test runs in place of manual - at which point our QA team will manage the systems that execute regressions.
- Continuous Documentation: We must be clever with automating documentation as code evolves - leverage AI to maintain up-to-date API docs, design specs, and runbooks, ensuring every release ships with accurate support materials.
Staff Engineers and Tech Leads:
- Agentic Tech-Debt Cleanup: Staff engineers and tech leads must harness autonomous agentic workflows to aggressively refactor code, clean up tech debt, and unblock large initiatives, preparing the codebase for our next wave of innovation.
Whether you’re an Associate Engineer at the start of your career, or Sitemate’s CTO - everyone must be hands on during this era, everyone must be shipping value to users.
If you have written code, and that code has not been shipped to users in the 1-3 weeks immediately after it was written, then you should be sweating, pushing and driving to get it onto production as soon as possible - as if you’re not moving at this pace, we are moving too slow.
Conclusion: Ship Value Faster, Or Fall Behind
We are at a unique inflection point - the floor has dropped beneath us, as citizen developers will be able to ship simple solutions in hours/days using AI.
At the same time - we’ve got an opportunity to raise the ceiling, we can power innovation that was once out of reach.
Sitemate’s strengths; no-code ease, mobile-first, and a relentless focus on built-world problems has given us the launchpad we need.
Now it’s on us to accelerate; clearing debt and unlocking the roadmap with agentic/synchronous tooling, closing feedback loops with continuous listening, and shipping value at ultra-fast-tracked speed.
English (United States) 
English (Australia) 
English (UK) 
English (New Zealand) 
English (South Africa) 
German