Modern product teams often run on solid frameworks: OKRs, sprints, user stories, quarterly planning, and stakeholder alignment rituals. But when these systems are layered on top of an unclear problem, they don’t help. In fact, they make things worse.
You can have perfectly groomed tickets and a beautiful roadmap — all leading in the wrong direction.
This is the product management version of “cargo culting”: going through the motions of product thinking without truly understanding the problem you’re solving. The team looks productive, but the outcomes tell a different story. Features get launched without impact. Developers are frustrated. PMs lose credibility. Everyone feels busy but lost.
Vague input, vague output
One of the core causes behind this is a failure to move from intent to insight. A stakeholder might express a valid concern — like customers getting stuck in onboarding — but what gets communicated is an aspiration: “Make onboarding better.”
There’s no shared definition of “better.” No metric tied to success. No understanding of where the problem actually lies.
And yet, work starts anyway.
Enter the prototype
Instead of starting with tickets or meetings, what if you started with something tangible?
That’s where prototyping comes in. When a requirement is fuzzy, a prototype helps make it real. You don’t need to be a designer or engineer. A simple clickable mockup in Figma or a low-code demo is often enough.
The key is that it gives the team something to look at, click through, and react to. It shifts the conversation from abstract ideas to concrete experiences.
Prototypes force clarity
Let’s go back to the “better onboarding” example. Imagine showing stakeholders three different onboarding flows. One includes tooltips, another uses a guided checklist, and the third delays signup until after product exploration.
When people see these options, they suddenly have opinions. They point out issues, identify edge cases, and articulate what they like and don’t like. The conversation becomes grounded in reality.
You’re no longer interpreting vague intent. You’re co-creating a clear solution.
Faster feedback, fewer surprises
Prototyping also helps expose bad ideas early — before they become expensive mistakes. You can gather feedback from users with quick tests. You can check technical feasibility with engineers before investing too deeply.
A prototype might reveal that what sounded like a “quick UI improvement” actually involves major backend work. Or that users find a new flow more confusing than helpful. That kind of insight would normally come weeks into a sprint. With a prototype, you find out in hours.
Shared understanding across the team
Words are slippery. A ticket might describe a new feature in two sentences, but everyone reading it could walk away with a different picture in their mind.
Prototypes eliminate that ambiguity. They become a shared reference point. Designers, engineers, marketers, and stakeholders all see the same thing. They give feedback on the same experience. Alignment happens faster — and with fewer meetings.
Prototyping is product leadership
Some PMs worry that prototyping isn’t “their job.” But being hands-off doesn’t make you strategic. It just makes you dependent on others to interpret the problem for you.
The best PMs don’t wait for perfect inputs. They help shape the solution. Prototyping is how you lead the product forward — not by writing more specs, but by reducing ambiguity and increasing clarity.
It’s not about building the final version. It’s about helping the team see what might work — and why.
A simple playbook
Here’s a lightweight way to bring prototyping into your workflow:
- Start with the intent: What outcome are we trying to improve?
- Sketch a few possibilities: Use Figma, Whimsical, or even pen and paper.
- Show it early: Get reactions from stakeholders and users.
- Learn fast: Use feedback to sharpen your understanding of the problem.
- Build smarter: Only once the idea is grounded in reality should you start development.
Closing thoughts
In a world full of process, prototyping brings us back to the basics: solving real problems for real users.
It’s not about being fancy. It’s about being clear.
So the next time someone asks for “a better experience” or “more engagement,” don’t reach for a spreadsheet or a roadmap tool. Build something small and tangible. Let it start the conversation that everyone’s been trying to have — but didn’t know how to begin.
That’s where real product work starts.