Why prototyping your work is so important
Showing your work early gets rid of faulty assumptions
Earlier in my career, our company's CEO was to fly out to meet with one of our major customers to protect and secure additional business. It was high-profile and high-stakes.
I was one of four people on the ad hoc team that created the presentation for the CEO. Our team lead divided the work among us, and we dutifully went out and created our slides. We spent many hours over a few days building the slides, figuring out what to say, and building a beautiful deck.
Early in the morning, before the day of departure, we proudly presented our work to the CEO. He went through a few slides in the deck and then baldly stated that this wasn’t what he was looking for. We needed to redo the deck so that it presented his ideas in a particular way. It was not a good feeling to blow this deliverable to the CEO. Not a good feeling. Not at all.
We took lots of notes. Then, we stayed up most of the day and night rebuilding the deck before the CEO headed out the next morning.
And this is how I discovered the beauty of prototyping.
This newsletter focuses on helping knowledge workers navigate corporate America. From searching for jobs, working in the role, having employment security, and helping you become a Cubicle Warrior.
Navigating Corporate is a reader-supported publication. There are no investors. No sugar daddies. Just me. And the cats.
To receive new posts, become a free or paid subscriber.
What is prototyping?
Prototyping, in a product sense, is an iterative process of quickly building a simplified version of a product or system to test ideas, gather feedback, and refine the final solution.
In my case, though, prototyping is providing a portion of the deliverable you have been asked to do to the person receiving the information to ensure that what you are building is what the deliverable actually is.
Take that slide deck we were to build. Instead of presenting our big beautiful deck to our CEO, what we should have done is present 2-3 slides early in the process and also present the table of contents for the rest of the slides
Since it was early in the process, all of the items that the CEO really wanted to see in the slide deck would have come out. Suddenly, it would have been a collaborative process instead of a confrontation with no time to spare. Then, we could have revised the few slides and returned them for a quick review to see if we got them right.
What to look for when you prototype
When you are prototyping my way, you’re looking for some specific information:
Is this the right tool to be used for the deliverable? Is it PowerPoint? Word? Excel? Something else or a combination?
Is this the right level of detail needed for the deliverable or audience? Different audiences need different levels of detail to understand what you are presenting.
Is this the right balance of words and pictures for the deliverables? Do we need just words or just graphs? What proportion of words to graphs are needed to present the information?
When you can ferret this information early on, you get a clearer picture of what you need to do to nail the deliverable.
People have a hard time defining what they want
People (managers) think they are communicating clearly. And employees think they are hearing what is needed clearly. But that is not usually how it works.
That’s why you prototype. Until the person needing the information or deck or whatever sees an example of what you heard that person needed, everything just sits as a perfect deliverable in their heads. When they see what you’ve created, that perfect deliverable blows up.
Because they can now see what you are creating, they have something tangible to analyze, reconfigure, critique, and modify so that you can create what they really want in the first place.
Advantages of prototyping
There are some terrific advantages to prototyping:
You have less work to do. Because you prototype early in the process, you get great feedback. The saying “we don’t have time to do it once, but we always have time to do it over” doesn’t apply.
You discover what is really needed for the deliverable. Fuzzy objectives and poor communication are diminished when you prototype
You are collaborative. When you prototype, you seek feedback early on the task/project. This makes the end result more of a partnership than a ‘grading of a paper’ scenario.
You end up producing a far better deliverable. Because you prototype, you are more likely to get the deliverable just right.
Imagine how much better the work for my CEO would have been if we had given him three slides and the table of contents after the first day. Once he saw the slides that he would use, we got all of the feedback on the level of detail, an understanding of the audience, and clearer directions.
Imagine taking all that feedback on the second day, seeing the refined slides, quickly showing the rest based on his first-day feedback, and then taking the second-day feedback and completing the work.
No all-nighter. Collaborative work. Far better opinion of our little team and the work we did. Much less stress through the process.
Prototyping is a Cubicle Warrior skill that significantly helps you in your work.
Be a Cubicle Warrior,
Scot