Prototype Pyramid

When interviewing customers you are trying to dig down to the emotional, social and functional value and contexts in which they make decisions so that you can seek to provide more value.

The problem is asking questions only goes so far as people find difficulty in explaining every aspect of what they do. This is where prototypes come in.

What is a prototype?

A prototype is a physical manifestation of a question. A customer does not respond verbally to this question, but instead responds with their actions.

Prototypes are important because people find it very difficult to answer questions such as: will you use X or do you think you will use Y. These questions are poorly answered verbally and so need another tool.

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.” — Linus Pauling

Prototype versioning

Just as with verbal questions, you start at a high level and drill down when you find an interesting piece of information. The ideation space is large at the beginning of a project as the cause of a user behaviour is not well understood and therefore there are hundreds of different variables that need to be uncovered.

As all these early prototypes will be discarded you do not need to spend a lot of time on them. Instead your aim initially is to remove as many bad ideas as possible as quickly as possible.

These early prototypes will point in the direction of customer value, and refinement of them will further lead you in the right direction. It is important that these early prototypes are very different from one another to make sure you have covered as much of the idea space as possible.

Minimum Viable Product?

An MVP is a well refined prototype and serves to answer a single question:

“Will this exact product provide value in the marketplace?”

If you start a conversation with an MVP without prior prototypes it is pure luck whether you provide value or not, and worse you have sunk time into a product and will be less willing to throw it away if it doesn't work — which might lead you to try to force it to work.