Delivery
The value of project prototypes
The first months of an enterprise project can produce a mountain of work that never becomes part of the product.
The first months of an enterprise project can produce a mountain of work that never becomes part of the product.
I’m often involved in the full lifecycle of projects: sales, discovery, strategy and UX. All that preparationoften months is done before anybody writes a single line of code.
Project documents pile up
It can be surprising what accumulates during a large project: pitch decks, sales documents, discovery documents, project plans, architectural diagrams, backlog tickets, UX wireframes, Figma designs.
There’s a good reason for all this. Every one of those artefacts exists to transfer ideas from one team to the next. For a fleeting moment these artefacts become the source of truth. But it is only fleeting - ultimately, their value is only what is transferred into the product itself.
Lost in knowledge transfer
Knowledge transfer is difficult and expensive. It can become like a giant game of telephoneResearch cited in Contagious showed around 70 percent of a story’s details were lost in the first five to six retellings: a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Some of the intent dilutes. Some of the detail and nuance disappears.
But this is starting to change. We might not need to translate the same understanding into so many separate documents. An AI-built interactive prototype can give the team something shared to examine and refine“The problem with abstractions (like reports and documents) is that they create illusions of agreement.” Fried and Heinemeier Hansson, ReWork. Strategy, UX, engineering and the client can work through their different questions against the same evolving model.
A project ledger
It could become a project ledger: a shared reference point for intent, decisions and open questions. Not every decision belongs inside the prototype, and each discipline must still own its decisions.
I can see the value of this already. Clients are turning up with their own AI-built prototypesI wrote about this in client-built apps are advanced prototypes. This does not eliminate discovery; but it gives us something tangible to discuss and to build our understanding.
Client prototypes are the beginning, not the end of a discussion. I don’t expect one to replace the thinking in strategy, architecture, UX or engineering. But perhaps they can spare us from repeatedly translating the same intent from one document to the next. The work still has to be done; we could do more of it togetherand ultimately spend more time on greater value initiatives - no longer working in isolated teams, producing disposable artefacts. Instead, we could all be collaborating on an evolving, working model of the project in front of us.