Let’s be honest: the way most teams build prototypes hasn’t changed much in decades. Sketch something, hand it to design, wait for mockups, hand those to engineering, build a clickable prototype, schedule user testing, gather feedback, and repeat. The whole process takes weeks—sometimes months.

By the time you’ve validated (or invalidated) your idea, you’ve burned through a significant chunk of your runway. And that’s assuming you picked the right direction to explore in the first place.

The Sequential Trap

Here’s the fundamental problem: traditional prototyping is sequential. You can only explore one design direction at a time. Even with the best tools available, teams are forced into a single-threaded workflow that looks something like this:

1. Have an idea
2. Design it
3. Build a prototype
4. Test it
5. Learn from it
6. Go back to step 1 with a new idea

This means that exploring five different approaches takes five times as long as exploring one. In a world where speed matters, that’s a massive competitive disadvantage.

Feedback Comes Too Late

The other painful reality is that user feedback usually arrives too late to matter. By the time you’ve invested in building something testable, you’re already emotionally (and often financially) committed to that direction. Pivoting hurts.

What if you could get real user feedback before you were locked into a particular path? What if the cost of exploring a new direction was so low that you could test ten ideas in the time it used to take to test one?

A Better Way Forward

The tools we use shape how we work. If prototyping is slow and expensive, we’ll do less of it. If it’s fast and cheap, we’ll explore more possibilities and make better decisions.

That’s the future we’re building toward at Protopilot: a world where product teams can iterate at the speed of thought, backed by real user data from day one.

The prototype bottleneck has held us back long enough. It’s time for something better.