Hello, and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike pass and zone the CEO call the tents, and we are here at the final destination of our rapid prototyping series. And I thought, you know, we've been insanely practical for the last 10 plus episodes of this series. Let's step back a second and ask ourselves, why does rapid prototyping matter?

What on earth is this all about? Let's just remind it. When we're talking to our colleagues, to our friends, to our bosses, let's just remind them why this is such a great tool and why it's so relevant. If you're out there building a new product or service. So where do we begin? Well, [00:01:00] I think the elevator pitch here is when we think about why does it matter?

What is the value it creates? What is its purpose in the world? What, what, what is rapid prototype been doing for a soul? I think it's about the shift. It's from the shift of guessing what a great product might be to knowing what a great product is. And the power of this is that invariably, most people, when they sit in a boardroom, they get out PowerPoint and they guess what a product should be.

In fact, Sometimes hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars get spent on nothing more than a good PowerPoint deck with some groovy icons, some funky fonts, and just a guess. And that's so good and well, um, [00:02:00] you know, but you know, those ideas, in fact, this is really crazy. So many of the biggest products in the world.

The original idea they had was completely different. YouTube, Instagram. They were completely different things before they became these zillion dollar successes. And so even the best product people in the world are guilty of doing a bit of guessing. What it turns out is once people actually get a chance to use your product.

You start to know what actually solves the problem that they have, what helps relieve pains? What, what helps create gains, um, and rapid prototyping is the agent to move from guessing in the early days. To knowing. And I think, you know, who wouldn't want to do that because as a startup, then you actually know if you've got something and as an [00:03:00] executive in a large company, you can de risk your project.

I mean, fantastic. So it's all about giving us so much more certainty about the product services actually going away. And the reason that this is so cool is you don't have to go out and build the entire. Before you can actually test it. You can actually start testing immediately from day one. And this is great because if you just build like a model or a sketch, some sort of light version of the idea, you can actually get some great feedback.

And so you can start learning from the beginning and we can avoid that old school waterfall approach to building product where people spend so much time and effort only to realize they've built something that actually nobody wants. In fact, the creator of the lean startup, Eric Reese, he talks openly [00:04:00] about the fact that what inspired him to write the lean startup, which loves experimenting and prototyping by the way.

What he did. And he confesses that he was part, yeah, he was a founder of the startup that spent five years, $40 million to build a product that nobody wanted. Now, if you want to avoid that, regardless of whether your startups scale up or large enterprise start rapid prototyping, stop guessing. Start really knowing what people want.

And, you know, I've seen this across so many different types of companies, you know, I've personally been involved in rapid prototyping projects and products, which were for small startups. Well, for some of the largest companies in the world. So it works for everyone. And I just want to kind of double click on this and [00:05:00] tell you that I've done everything.

I've tried to think of the craziest variety of products that I've actually used rapid prototyping on. And this is, this is like, this is as crazy as it gets. This is the breadth. Of, uh, businesses you can apply rapid prototyping to. So I have done high-tech biometrical authentication for a bank. I've done media prediction algorithms for a consumer goods company.

I've done cancer detection devices for a large healthcare company. I've even worked with a famous fashion brand to create a whole new pair of jeans. And at the heart of all of these was rapid prototyping. My point here is simply it can be applied to anything, algorithms, high tech security, medical devices, genes.

Of course the easy [00:06:00] one here is like apps, products, services, digital SAS kind of things. Um, but it can be so much more than that too. So rapid prototype, I mean, anything can be prototyped. Take it from me. As long as you use the principles that we've set out in this whole series, uh, which we also said yeah, in our master class, which you can get for free online at.

At bottom-up data here and you'll actually be able to take the mass class for free as well as many others. So that's bottom up.io where you get to enjoy, uh, as going even deeper into masterclass, into rapid prototyping. So, yeah. It can work for anyone and it can work for anything. And the real hot of, of rapid prototyping is the chance to create something with the end user.

And it is a tool that you will find yourself coming back to [00:07:00] time after time. And do you know what, whenever you want to do something new, prototype it. Whenever you have an idea, ask yourself, how can I test it? How can I validate it? How can I learn if it really is the right thing, because too often people are leaving this validation way too late.

And look, I think if you're going to pivot pivot while the idea is still a sketch on a piece of paper, um, don't pivot once you've written the code, I want to come back to this story of Eric Reese, author of lean startup. He talks so much about the idea of experimentation and about validating. And this is what makes rapid prototyping.

So damn important. It's a leading central character in the movie of validating your product. And what's so [00:08:00] fun is you don't have to be a guru in Photoshop or illustrator. If you. Pretty handy with a pen and paper you're so on the way to doing great prototyping. So, this is really a tool that you can put in the tool belt.

And this is something that will take all the mystery and all the risk out of moving forward and doing the unknown cause Hey, building a first time product isn't easy. Yeah. Maybe you can take some inspiration. You can borrow from. A few products and services you've seen before, but you've got to pull it all together for the first time.

And that's where rapid prototyping is just so damn good. And I can tell you my last thought here is that I couldn't believe when Tom Shi. Introduced me to rapid prototyping and all those years ago, back in San Francisco, I was like, Oh my [00:09:00] gosh, this is the thing I've been looking for. How do you know if you've got a winner?

And he showed me how to prototype. You spent years at Google prototyping. And it was so revealing when he showed me rapid prototyping. And ever since then, I have been prototyping. All the time, every new product that I've been involved with, we've built prototypes. We've tested with users. And I can only tell you that's not only a great way to do rapid prototyping, but yeah, his whole methodology, this whole framework we have with bottom up rapid prototyping is at the very heart of it.

So I hope you've enjoyed this series. I've got a very exciting series coming up after you can have to come back and have a listen to that. If you want to know what that is, it will be at least as good as a rapper prototyping. Maybe a little bit better. So there you haven't, that's another episode of the bottom u...