The more I read about human centred design, design thinking and transformation – the more I see the importance of “first or early form” stage .

And the more I wonder if any medium or large scale business committing to an investment in a prototype is investing it in the right way and getting the most from the investment.

We are in an era where models, ideas and concepts can be tested and sense checked from an early stage – wireframes, story boards and skeleton processes can be mashed together and trialled with research to evolve and develop something that will make a difference.

However too often the prototype stage is actually a development stage and not an evolution phase – going on for far too long – costing far too much money – standing up far too much tech and assuming far too much about what the customer really wants.

It’s often a stage fuelled too much by internal assumptions at best engaging with internal subject matter experts many experts in the internal workings of the area of focus and technical experts who know the tech but rarely the expert who spends the most time with the customer.

“Prototypes are prepared and used to explore, evaluate and communicate service ideas during different activities within the service design process. By engaging with prototypes the design team can quickly identify important aspects of a new concept and then explore different alternative solutions” This is Service Design Doing

If you dissect this quote and ask yourself if you are really in the prototype stage of the project you are working on …

“To explore, evaluate and communicate..” how much exploration, evaluation and communication activity is in your project plan? Are researchers supporting you with early feedback and providing insight about the implications of this in the real world?

“Identifying important aspects of a new concept..” is your mentality and mindset one of everything we think of will be important and needs to be delivered at go live or is the mentality and mindset one of finding the golden thread of lowest cost biggest impact?

Is your project team room full of status reports, requirements documents and technical diagrams probably – does it have articulation of “personas”, known “pain points”, “customer journeys” and “moments of truth articulated” probably not.

Over the last 10 years – Visio diagrams, spreadsheets and static PowerPoint documents have been supplemented with “canvases”, “mural/miro boards”, “story boards” and “user stories” these tools and well documented methods help visualize and demonstrate the concept without having to spend 100ks on significant tech.

Product owners, designers and researchers have become common place roles on the projects that are progressing from a human centered perspective – and as a result they are focused on uncovering what will really matter and avoiding significant costs in developing code and functionality that will never get exploited.

So take a look at your prototype project – is it months of standing up tech, is the team consisting of technical and internal subject matter experts with business analysts focusing on the logic of the technical processes …. Or is it weeks of standing up concepts, with canvases and mural boards, with highly engaging approaches to testing and trialing the concept with the aim of evolving it into a pilot of an MVP.

Let’s get prototyping and evolving the ideas rather than developing just the tech in the 2020s – come on we can all play our part to change the stance and approach to how we evolve the systems landscape and deliver code that matters!