Don’t Fall In Love With Your Prototype

Make it a one-night stand instead.

When it comes to prototyping, you have to know from the very beginning that you can’t become attached to it, treat it like a summer love or a one-night stand. Here’s how not to obsess over the perfect prototype and how to get the most out of it.

Define Your Business Goals

Don’t focus on brainstorming features, they are not the end-goal. Your MVP definitely does not need to have every possible feature right now.

Instead, establish what business impact you expect to result from investing time and money into a prototype.

Some common business impact goals:

• Get VC/Angel funding
• Validate product-market fit
• Land your first 10–100 customers
• Act on user feedback to increase customer retention
• Scale your product to support millions of customers

Depending on the goals you have for your business, you might have more/less restrictions.

Build It Just Good Enough To Learn

Prototype in 3 days, not in 3 months. Your prototype does not need to be perfect to show to customers. Perfection will kill your MVP. Don’t focus on details, focus on the core of your business instead. You want to be able to show something that appears real to your users. Experimentation is not about predicting, but exposing users to a mock-up of a real-life solution, with the absolute minimum features to get their attention and money.

Prototypes Are Disposable

You are not building the final product. Develop the experimenters mindset: try, try, and try again. You’re just designing pieces of your solution to test your assumptions. Things like getting too caught up in the details, making beautiful interfaces and shaping a brand identity are are very dangerous for experimentation as they indicate you are becoming too hooked on your solution.

Creating Your MVP Scope Draft

Imagine a user trying to achieve the goal your product provides. Draft out the flow and paths of each of these steps with a very high level of granularity.

Make a List of Assumptions and Iteratively Reduce Your Scope

Walk through each use-case and, for each action/step, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is this step absolutely necessary to proceed to the next step?
• Why is it necessary?
• Can I achieve the goal of this step in a simpler or more intuitive way?
• Can this step be split into smaller, more granular steps?
• What would the user expect to see during this step?

Whenever you spot a step that can be changed, go through each use-case again and see how this changes the whole path and if that change introduces more flexibility for further changes.

Translate The Scope Into Technology

When evaluating which technology to adopt, think about the critical dependencies they have. There are different constraints and trade-offs to adopting one technology over another. Discuss what are the limitations of those technology choices compared to alternatives. Get many opinions, obtain a high-level understanding of how these components could connect together, and decide what is the simplest functional solution to achieve your main goals.

Execute, Evaluate, Learn

Measure against the KPIs and goals you defined in the first step. As you acquire more feedback around progress to your goals, notice what surprised you and didn’t match expectations. Check what were the things you built that you didn’t need and what you might have missed.

It is important to continue to test, learn and measure, and then start over again!