Prototyping at home and at work
How do you test a new idea to see if it works? You prototype it. Whether you’re a designer creating a new product, a chef testing a new recipe, or an entrepreneur starting a new business, a prototype is a tool that helps you uncover what your idea might be missing and provides hints about what to do next.
As part of a research prototype for writing my book This Is a Prototype, I asked several of the same questions about prototyping to people I know, admire, wondered about, or otherwise respect. The intent of the experiment was to better understand what prototyping means to a wide orbit of professionals. From the responses, I heard a funny echo of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” The diversity of responses helped me see that there’s value in taking a bigger view of prototyping, because even practitioners coming from the same training or intent are almost always translating the concepts to different audiences and applications.
Jennifer López, vice president of product development at Capital One, provided some unexpected examples of how prototyping shows up in equal measure in her professional and personal life:
I feel quite fortunate to have a mindset which allows for prototyping in my entire life. And as a product manager, I know how hard it is to deliver a final production-ready product. I only do that when I absolutely need to; almost everything else I undertake ends its life as some version of a prototype. At work, this might mean building a process to try something new and if it works well enough, we keep it as such. Other times, I may prototype something related to how my team operates, such as whether a particular process works for us, and then have someone on my team “operationalize it” or “productize it”.
In my home life, I prototype a lot of home renovations, and very often, these are very, very rough prototypes so that I can experience a thing that I want built or a test-run of a new layout of some sort. Because I can prototype almost anything physical, I feel more comfortable with changing things in my home without it feeling like if I make a mistake, it’s the end of the world. With home renovations, there are always a thousand issues to resolve, so prototyping helps reduce the number of unresolved issues and helps me feel like a greater part of the process when I am not actively making/crafting the final product. For home renovation projects, Pinterest is my greatest tool since it helps me easily envision a variety of ideas.
Jennifer really lands a point that is not at all obvious, which is that prototyping can serve your success on virtually any new project or idea, from mundane daily tasks to world-changing wonders. As familiar as I am with prototyping tools in my own work and in the examples I’ve seen from others, I’m always surprised and delighted to see a fully resolved product, or a platform in the case of Pinterest, getting reframed as a tool for getting started.
Jennifer’s philosophy of prototyping also shows how important the prototyper’s mindset is to the entire process. Developing a few mindsets to put all your prototyping decisions into action can be as important as what you are prototyping. Being comfortable with how you do your work and think about the process is a significant benchmark in navigating the challenges you’ll face when you investigate ideas or topics you’ve never explored or instances where you never considered prototyping as an option.
As Jennifer points out, this can apply to your personal life in ways beyond home renovations:
Having come back from a small vacation with my boyfriend, who isn’t a planner, I can report another small prototyping experiment. He went along with my quick day-planning (done on the train to our destination). But he was reticent to write everything out, or change it after it was written. I was nervous not to plan. We changed the plan many times, but even having a small daily list of activities helped us discuss how much downtime we wanted, how we would get between neighborhoods, and which activities required reservations. The plan helped us quickly get the big blocks/goals out of the way and then made daily decision-making on the trip much easier. We stopped referring to the plan very early on, but the plan (prototype) grounded us.
Prototyping is really just a conduit between thinking and learning. I had a similar experience when I recently moved back to Austin and tried to figure out exactly where I wanted to live. I had lots of locations in mind, but only a short time for exploring each spot. So in real-time, I asked myself a few questions, including, “What are the key factors of why you want to live in a particular area?” A big one was living close enough to bike to work. That helped me formulate an experience to try (what it felt like to bike to work from different neighborhoods), before needing to pick a perfect place: I rented a not-so-great bike on what turned out to be a very hot day and pedaled from three different neighborhoods into work. I learned a ton! And the experience ultimately helped me make a better decision more quickly. I never would have seen my options in the same way.
However, in other circumstances, prototyping isn’t so clarifying. In fact, as Jennifer asserts, it can be downright confusing, especially when you don’t know when we’re done with a prototype:
I used to think a prototype that didn’t lead you somewhere formally was a shame, like I hadn’t stuck with it enough or there was money still left on the table in some way. Now, I really recognize that most things are good enough as a prototype, and a prototype can be complete without needing to get too comprehensive. Half the way is still half the way, and it really is impossible to get to 100% learning on most things, as prototypes aren’t meant to be perfect. Knowing when you’ve extracted most of the value from it is the greatest gift.
In a surprising way, the concept of role is not bound to either personal or professional life as it applies to intentionally trying new things through prototyping. Creating prototype experiences requires you to relate to your results and reflect on yourself and your role in it. Only then can you determine what you will take from it and what your next steps will be with the learnings you’ve discovered.
This is modified content from my LinkedIn newsletter, Prototyped: Exploring new ideas through prototyping & design, originally published Sept. 8, 2022.
Explore Jennifer’s detailed thoughts on prototyping with expanded Q&A content here on Medium.
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