Pancake/French Toast/Prototyping

Why Prototypes?

Established products succeed when they are carefully managed and steadily improved. In contrast, innovative products aiming for a new market are always created through an iterative process of experimentation and learning. Given this, a successful strategy for designing something for a new market looks different from successful strategy in an established market.

You don't know what you don't know

Because you're entering a new market, you don't have the benefit of prior market experience. If you want to gain some, it means you'll have to test your design and business assumptions against reality.

Wasting effort and resources is never a good thing. This leads some teams to avoid testing their assumptions until all the pieces are in place. Using the playbook from an established product, they reason that their chances of success will be improved if the product is flawless.

But what if your assumptions are wrong? It doesn't matter how polished or pretty an app is if it doesn't serve user's needs. Placing all your chips on one bet can be catastrophic.

How do you check your design/business hypothesis against reality without wasting effort and resources?

Enter prototypes

The answer is to make the experiment smaller. If you plan on wading in a stream, you dip your toes in first to test the water temperature. This minimizes the risk and gives you the same information a freezing cold full-body plunge would.

That's what a prototype's job is. It lets you test design assumptions with real users before expending engineering and financial capital on a potentially wrong assumption.