Citizen Development for Dummies

Citizen Development Driving Nano-SaaS growth

I'm still learning the names of my low-coding AI-assisted hobby.

Personally, I love the "citizen development" term. It is so much about what I'm doing now as a hobby - creating nice little Power App solutions to automate daily office routines - with no programming background and only a generic understanding of coding principles.

I'm also trying to understand what's happening around, and it's exciting! I worked with ChatGPT to convert my gut feelings into a graphical format.

I assume the software stack is stretching in both directions.

On the ground floor, business users are shipping tiny tools faster than any traditional vendor can react.

At the top, the big platforms are pulling everything back together through orchestration, governance, and integration.

Diagram illustrating the interaction between Enterprise PaaS platforms and the NANO-SaaS ecosystem, highlighting the role of citizen development and low-code/no-code (LCNC) approaches in fostering innovation and integration across various software solutions.

By the Citizens and For the Citizens.

Power Apps, Salesforce Flow, AppSheet, Make, Zapier clones, n8n — the tooling isn’t important. What matters is that domain experts now build their own tools:

• Reporting widgets and dashboards

• Micro-workflows

• Smaller AI agent automating a niche activity nobody else cared about.

This is the nano-SaaS layer: thousands of tiny, hyper-specific solutions that live inside teams and solve their exact problem, right now.

This is also where vibe coding comes in — the iterative, visual, rapid experimentation model that gets the stuff done without ceremonies. It’s not software engineering. It’s not “shadow IT” either. It’s problem-solving - by the citizens and for the citizens.

The Nano-SaaS Layer: Fragmented, Local, and Bittersweet.

The mid-layer in the graphic shows exactly what’s happening now:

• Tiny apps

• Departmental tools

• Team utilities

• Vertical micro-SaaS

• AI agents that solve a single process gap

• Reporting apps, niche workflows, and “we just needed this one thing” automations.

That’s the long tail.

No vendor goes into this layer. It's not digestive, unless you like breadcrumbs.

But here’s the flipside to the citizen's creative powers: no one can run an enterprise on 100s disconnected micro-apps, each with its own logic, connectors, outputs, and data formats.

Something has to sit above it.

Enter Enterprise PaaS: The Orchestration Plane

This is where you find Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe - they’re building the layer that organises it.

Major vendors want to be here. They’ve realised the value isn’t in building every app themselves; it’s in providing the platform that runs all the apps everyone else builds.

Why This Matters for Procurement, Digital Strategy, and IT Governance.

This isn’t just a tech trend. It’s a structural industry change:

• SaaS continues growing, but its shape is changing

• LCNC and vibe coding are now primary innovation channels, not side projects

• PaaS becomes the new strategic layer that enterprises actually depend on

• IT’s role shifts toward governance, identity, integration, and data

• Procurement must evaluate platforms, not just apps

• Shadow IT becomes formalised instead of suppressed

The long tail isn’t going away — it’s expanding. The enterprise PaaS layer isn’t optional — it’s becoming the backbone.

The Real Story Behind the Graphic

The diagram above intends to summarise the new software economy:

Bottom-up: Citizen developers keep creating nano-SaaS — fast, agile, specific.

Middle: The organisation becomes a marketplace of micro-tools built everywhere.

Top-down: Enterprise PaaS brings order, coherence, identity, and integration.

Perhaps not the clearest explanation. Just my snapshot of exciting transformations going well beyond "10 ChatGPT Prompts that Can Make You Rich."