Delving Into the Mendix Ecosystem

Last modified: July 4, 2025

Introduction

This section offers an overview of the Mendix platform, and outlines the 5 P’s of Digital Transformation and their importance to your Mendix success.

By the end of this section, you will:

  • Assign your Mendix Admin.
  • List the different components of the Mendix platform and explain their role.
  • Identify the three major stages of the Digital Execution Practice and what each stage entails.
  • Describe the 5 P’s of the Digital Execution Practice and their importance to your long-term success.
  • Create your portfolio in Mendix Portfolio Management to manage your initiatives.
  • Recognize the different roles and skills required to build your first Mendix team.
  • Choose the right people for your Mendix team.
  • Explain how to build repeatable practices and long-term outcomes.
  • Describe the benefits that the Mendix Platform brings to an organization.
  • Identify best practices to promote the value of low-code within your organization.

Assigning a Mendix Admin

Your company needs at least one Admin. This is normally someone from the company’s IT department, who has full access to the Control Center. The Control Center provides insights into the company activities carried out by developers. You can find out more about it from this learning path](https://academy.mendix.com/link/paths/116/Govern-and-Scale-your-App-Landscape-with-Mendix-Control-Center).

If you already have at least one Admin, you can see them in the list when you open Control Center.

If you do not have an Admin, you can assign one through Mendix Support, by selecting Standard Change: Assign Mendix Admin from the drop-down list. This first admin can then add other admins.

Digital Execution Practice (DEP)

The Mendix Digital Execution Practice is a method for executing on your digital transformation initiatives, designed to ensure that your organization effectively navigates through the stages of digital transformation using the Mendix platform. It embodies a phased approach – Start, Structure, and Scale – each with distinct milestones and activities that correspond to the 5Ps — People, Portfolio, Process, Platform, and Promotion.

For more information, see Digital Execution Practice.

The 3 S’s of Digital Execution Practice

Your journey to innovation goes through three major stages:

  • Start
  • Structure
  • Scale
Start

You are now in the Start stage, where the goal is to lay the foundations for your innovation factory. Now is the time to develop apps that achieve value quickly. The reason for this is two-fold:

  • You’ll be spending a lot of time building a team and putting the necessary prerequisites in place in terms of infrastructure and process.
  • You want quick wins. Quick wins are important because you will use these to prove the value of your new approach. Celebrating your first success will help you gain broader support around the company.
Structure

If the Start stage is about establishing and proving the benefits of rapid app development, the Structure stage is about building out predictability and continuity. Structure is about growing from your first set of apps to a portfolio with a diverse array of apps addressing multiple use cases, expanding your first team into multiple teams, and expanding your developer center.

Structure is about taking the process of your first agile experience established during the Start stage and turning it into to a process that institutes shorter release cycles under strict governance. You begin to formalize your rapid app development process — establishing an architecture, enabling continuous delivery, and creating governance. By establishing predictability and stability, you’re building the scaffolding for future successes.

Scale

During the Scale stage, you use Mendix to speed up and scale out app development, and start delivering real value for your business. You are applying greater automation to your processes to efficiently and rapidly deliver and manage hundreds of apps with strategic impact. This includes automating deployment and maintenance to support a large portfolio, automating quality assurance to proactively monitor the maintainability of your projects, and enabling greater reusability by establishing a private app store. With these capabilities in place, you maximize value and productivity by creating distributed innovation capabilities throughout the enterprise.

The Scale stage is where you achieve continuous productivity and efficiency.

The 5 P’s of Digital Transformation

There are five major areas that you need to focus on in your Digital Execution Practice, namely the 5 P’s of digital transformation:

  • Portfolio
  • People
  • Process
  • Platform
  • Promotion
Portfolio

Getting your digital transformation program off the ground starts with identifying the right projects and creating an app portfolio of quick wins in high-value initiatives.

Proving the value of a program, whether it’s through software that allows your business to create a new channel of revenue or an app that saves employees time on an internal process, allows you to achieve immediate success and justify a broader organizational change. It is important to include a diversity of use cases, to show that your app portfolio can reach many different departments, and address a variety of needs.

Mendix Portfolio Management gives you a way to identify, track, and plan out your initiatives. Create your Portfolio board here.

People

The people you choose for your teams are crucial to the success of your digital execution program. They need to have the right skills, be excited about the program, and be able to commit time and energy to it, no matter their job title. They also need to care about solving business problems rather than building solutions based on detailed requirements.

Traditional developers, those with experience in programming languages such as C#, Python, Java, are usually very quick to grasp Mendix. Other people who have been successful in Mendix-related roles come from business analysis, UX, front-end web design, and business intelligence backgrounds.

Your first Mendix team should include a core comprised of a professional developer—someone with technical expertise—and a business developer—someone familiar with the platform that can act as a power user if needed. The key is to have developers who can collaborate closely with end-users, bridging the gap between business needs and technical possibilities.

The following leadership roles are essential to the success of any new platform or paradigm:

  • Executive sponsors – these are the top-level executives, ideally representing both Business/Operations and IT. They are willing to be engaged periodically to provide oversight and steering-committee level guidance. These people won’t necessarily be involved day-to-day, but they understand the big picture vision of how Mendix will help the enterprise achieve its digital transformation and low-code goals, how it fits in with other technology stacks and tools like Microsoft’s ADO or Power Apps, and what the transformational value is expected. Your Mendix team can work with these individuals to help understand, define, and refine their role, as well as the value proposition for high return on investment.

  • Program owner – a person who leads the program and mandates or enables change. They generate excitement about the importance of this transformation and can inspire people to want to participate. This person is directly responsible for the overall success of the platform’s implementation, bringing impactful apps to fruition, ensuring value targets are defined and tracked, and that the teams are properly assigned and allocated for success.

    Program owners work closely with their Mendix CSMs to define and implement success plans, and to evolve those plans over time. For smaller organizations, this person may also be part of the core team. For larger organizations, it is common for this person to be a part of the Center of Excellence leadership team, or to be a dedicated senior resource overseeing global success. Areas of responsibility include assurance of proper architectural and governance guidelines and adherence, successful regional and global rollouts, successful team growth, training, and enablement plans, KPI definition and tracking.

  • Center of Excellence (COE) lead – larger organizations appoint a Mendix COE to help define and enforce good governance, development, and enablement practices that can evolve with the business and technological changes over time. The COE lead ensures the Mendix COE is properly staffed to support, oversee, and enable development teams, and ensures the products are of high-quality, and follow best practices for high re-usability, maintainability, and return on investment. This person generally has sufficient senior-level technical and managerial skills to oversee the COE’s Enterprise and Solution Architects, DevOps technical leads, trainers, mentors, and other experienced staff.

  • Product owner – they have in-depth knowledge of the business, the product, and its users, as well as insight into the value that it will create. If possible, make sure that your first product owner comes from your own organization, and is familiar with the problem you are setting out to solve with your first app. The product owner does not hold a leadership role, but they are crucial for the success of your first app. They are also part of the agile scrum team, so will come up again in the Identify Your First Mendix Project Team section.

  • Architect – they help establish a target architecture, infrastructure, and governance.

  • App development manager – they need to spearhead the initiative, and drive the program and the cross-functional teams who will deliver on those projects.

At first, it is likely that not all these people will come from your own organization—the Review Options for Development Resources section offers information about this.

It is important to keep your team small as you build your Mendix COE, which is your central repository of development expertise, reusable components, and governance guidance that business teams can access as they build their specialized solutions. With a small team, you can deliver new app quickly, avoiding much of the miscommunication and delays that often come with larger development teams. Smaller teams encourage productivity and creativity. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ “two pizza rule” states that you should never have a meeting where two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group. The smaller the team, the more room for brainstorming and peer review.

Mendix recommends that you start thinking about who you need to kick off building your first app, and that you start talking to them about it. More information about who you need is available in the Identifying Your First Mendix Project Team section.

Process

Successful digital execution means changing the way you work and establishing rapid app development processes. Agile methodologies like Scrum are a good starting point, splitting the work into sprints and basing them off user stories. However, you also need to change from a traditional way of development and operations into a BizDevOps approach, which promotes close collaboration and shared knowledge between the business team, developers, and operational team. It ditches the division between those departments to get rid of unnecessary knowledge silos that only disrupt the information flow.

One important concept to embrace for your process, if you haven’t already, is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). MVP is a version of an app with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future development.

Minimum viable products are meant to be incomplete by nature. Their goal is to deliver value quickly, then identify the next requirements and iterate on them based on input from actual users. Getting user input early on will save you many costly changes down the road. Once the MVP is delivered, you can start adding new features and improvements.

One other important concept to adopt is governance. You need to define and implement processes and rules around app development that help you coordinate and control your app portfolio. This means creating a centralized hub where you establish best practices around agile and scrum, UI/UX, and guidelines around build, deployment, and architecture, as well as security/compliance. You’re assigning the people on your team responsibilities around these best practices.

Platform

Mendix is specifically built to improve operational efficiency, reduce time-to-market, and foster collaboration between Business and IT. It enables enterprises to get things done quickly, and allows your teams and technology ecosystem to evolve.

Use the Start stage to experience the benefits of instant provisioning, not just of the app environment, but all the software needed to support the entire lifecycle, from project management to repositories. Learning more about how easy it should be to deploy and operate apps shows how developers can do this themselves, and helps your innovation factory achieve continuous productivity and efficiency.

The Start stage is also a good time to start exploring your cloud options, and use this knowledge as input for strategic choices in the future. Mendix Cloud is fully optimized to run Mendix-built app. Built on top of Cloud Foundry and AWS, Mendix Cloud is the deployment solution in which Mendix provides hosting environments for you. It is available globally, and includes deep insights, alerting capabilities, high availability options, and backups.

As you expand your portfolio and move from Start to Structure, you will need to consider other deployment options, and moving to a multi-cloud environment. Understanding the cloud environments to which you’ll deploy—for example, the security features and how they fit into your existing security framework—will help inform how you move to Structure.

Promotion

You can promote your company even without a marketing team. Here are five ways you can do that:

  • Shaping and communicating your low-code vision – communicate your vision in cross-functional meetings, and ask for support in getting organizational leadership to embed the vision into their message as well.

  • Stakeholder management – involve stakeholders early and often to build enthusiasm for digital transformation success. Start by bringing on board cross-functional partners who you already have strong relationships with, and work together to identify the problems you want to solve. By building a plan together, you can help ensure your initiatives will get support.

  • Internal PR – build a plan for how you will raise awareness and involvement in your low-code implementation, and ensure your executive sponsor helps your PR efforts. You can leverage existing communication channels such as company meetings, newsletters, or shared collaboration sites to spread your message. Start by sharing your plan and vision, then use these channels to celebrate success after your first go-live.

  • Community building – start with a portfolio workshop to brainstorm ideas for your first app, then identify teams who will collaborate through implementation and launch. Identify a core group of champions who can raise awareness on your behalf.

  • Celebrating success – acknowledge your achievements, whether it’s getting the team to complete Academy certifications, building the first reusable component, finishing the first development sprint or launching your first app. Celebrations are a powerful way to boost team morale and drive future momentum.

Staying up to Date With Mendix

It is important to know what’s happening with the Mendix Platform to be sure that you are getting the most out of every capability. Use these resources to do so:

  • The DEP Space on the Forum provides a unique opportunity to interact with other Mendix leaders. Ask questions and get answers from experienced Mendix team members or other customers about anything related to digital transformation.

  • Subscribe to Platform Updates to keep up with all the changes happening with the Mendix platform and how it could affect your apps.

  • Join the Mendix Community to connect with over 290,000 community members. The Mendix Community is a great place for developers to ask questions and post ideas for our product managers.

  • Subscribe to our blog and deep dive into our diverse library of articles and blog posts, where we discuss everything from Mendix best practices to industry trends.