I got a prototype working today and the question I couldn’t put down wasn’t “does it work”, it was “how far is this from being a real product, conceptually?” The demo looking right is the cheap part. Knowing the actual distance to production is the expensive part, and it’s the part I don’t have a feel for yet.
I also learned the word spike today, a quick build you do just to prove a path is viable before you commit to it. That reframed the whole thing for me. A prototype isn’t a smaller version of the product; it’s a probe. Its job is to surface what you’re not seeing, the edge cases, the parts that quietly need ten times the work, so the people who build the real thing aren’t guessing.
When something demos beautifully, how do you actually estimate the distance left to production instead of fooling yourself it’s almost done?