Drowning in Demos? Here’s a Better Way to Prototype

We’re kicking off a series on “unlearning” in partnership with Maven, the expert-led course platform. Over the next three weeks, you’ll hear three different takes from Maven instructors on what we need to let go of as AI changes how we work. First up is Hilary Gridley, who previously led product at Whoop. She explains why faster prototypes don’t make product decisions easier—and how teams can decide which ideas are worth building.—Kate Lee

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When AI tools started getting good, my team went on a prototyping binge.

I was leading the product team at Whoop, where every product manager had a backlog of ideas they’d been dying to explore but hadn’t gotten past a whiteboarding session or a passionately worded document. Then tools like Bolt and Replit came along, and suddenly, we could spin up prototypes of our ideas in an afternoon.

It felt like getting keys to the castle. Ideas that had been trapped in documents were finally showing up on screens. Except... were they any good?

We felt productive, unhindered, moving faster than ever. But people were making prototypes left and right, with no process for what happened next. Occasionally one would generate enough excitement that a team put aside their previous plans and built it. Mostly, though, there was no consistent way to decide which prototypes were good, which ones should die, and what we were supposed to learn from them.