Why do I love prototyping?
It’s allowed to try new and even weird things. If it fails, we can take our backup dish out of the freezer.
I love prototyping. For me prototyping is the most fun and enjoyable phase in product development after ideation. The reason for that is simply because in this stage everything seems possible.
Don’t be so serious
I often observe a strange heaviness appearing when moving from discovery and ideation to build. Suddenly ideas and solution approaches get questioned and there is a general tendency to rather go the safe road. You hear sentences like “ah, I’m not sure, this is new, we never done this before” or “we can’t do this to our customers” or “how do competitors do”. I’m not quite sure where this kind of fear is coming from. Stage fright. Why so serious now? The worst thing that can happen is, that we build something else, something more “safe” than we intended during the ideation phase. We are not solving a customer’s problem in a new creative way. Somewhat disappointing.
Build something super small
That is the point where I love to do prototyping. I’m not speaking of creating some designs, mock ups or wireframes (yes, that is also important). I’m speaking of actually building something. Something that is super small, smaller than MVP.
Let’s say you want to build a sophisticated and connected customer experience, but the system landscape is so fragmented that it’s almost impossible to connect the experience on all touchpoints. You want to solve this problem with a new webservice, not knowing if it will satisfy the customer and business needs. The investment and uncertainties are high. At that point, before even starting to build an MVP, build a fragment. Why not building a small functionality to proof the idea, to test it out?
It’s like trying a new recipe. I’m not sure how it will taste, if my guests are going to like it, but I will try it anyways. Just because I’m curious. Maybe I have a backup dish in the freezer, in case my new recipe is a disaster. So I’m keeping the risk of failure pretty low.
Same with prototyping. We are testing, we are experimenting and we are trying something new. It’s allowed to try new and even weird things. You are going to keep everything super simple, because you just want to proof the concept or test a specific functionality. And all at a very low risk, because it’s just a prototype and if it fails, we can start all over again or take our backup dish out of the freezer.
There’s no use crying over spilled milk
That is what makes prototyping so enjoyable to me. There is no stage fright, no sudden heaviness that overcomes you in the building phase. I’m trying to keep that light feeling and mindset also when we go into building, not forgetting — we can still start all over again.
