Germany's Mittelstand firms have operated profitably for over a century without chasing unicorn metrics. The strategic logic behind their longevity is more transferable than most operators realise, and more relevant right now than it has been in years.

Most transformation programmes budget for migrating data. They rarely budget for migrating the people who understand why the data behaves the way it does. That gap is where expensive programmes go quiet.

The $26.9 billion low-code market measures adoption. The companies getting real returns measure deployment. Here is what the data says about where low-code citizen development programmes plateau, and what the successful outliers do differently.