Your prototype runs. Congratulations — you’ve just done the cheapest requirements analysis of your life. And I mean that without irony: anyone who builds a clickable version of what until now existed only as a wish in the head of the department, and does it in a matter of days, has learned more about their own process this week than in the three workshops before it. The prototype isn’t the problem. It’s the best thing that can happen at the start of a project. It’s just that now comes the expensive part, and from the outside it looks like the rest — when in fact it is the real work.
The starting position has changed, and that is good news for every IT manager. Modern AI and low-code tools now make it easy to throw together a screen, a workflow and a bit of test data in a few days. The department builds something with an AI tool, a working student clicks together a low-code interface, or you yourself try out on a quiet afternoon whether the idea even holds up. Suddenly you can see it, touch it, click through it. And it is precisely in that moment that something happens in the viewer’s mind that costs a lot of money later: management sees it running and thinks it’s almost finished.
Why the prototype is a win anyway
Before we talk about the expensive part, the cheap one deserves its due — because it is half the battle and far too rarely used. As long as a process is only described, it stays soft. Everyone nods in the meeting, everyone means something slightly different, and the expensive misunderstandings only come to light in operation, once the system has already been built. But the moment a prototype exists, that flips. IT managers and the department click their way through and notice at once what they really need — and what they only thought they needed.
The special case that nobody mentioned in the workshop shows up on the third click. The assumption that was actually wrong becomes obvious. The effort everyone underestimated becomes visible, because now you can touch it. A prototype runs the discussion against a concrete object instead of against guesses. It is the most honest requirements analysis there is, and it costs a few days rather than half a project. My advice to every IT manager reading this: go ahead and build the prototype yourself. Don’t let anyone talk you out of it. You will understand your own process better in three days than in three workshops.
Build the prototype yourself. I’ll build the last mile.
Where the last mile begins
The prototype is not the product. Between “runs on my machine with 20 test records” and “runs in production with 15,000 real records” lies a whole world, and from the front it is invisible. That is the last mile: the production-ready, secure, maintainable fifth that costs four fifths of the effort. It is not what you see in the meeting. It is what stands its ground on Monday morning after the nightly importer stumbled at three o’clock.
In one of our projects, the department had built a clickable prototype for a supplier evaluation. A clean screen, a workflow you could follow, clicked through in eleven seconds — with 25 hand-picked test records. Management was convinced the thing was almost finished. Then we looked at what sat between that state and real operation, and the list was longer than the prototype itself. Not because anyone had done a poor job, but because the prototype was never meant to show exactly that. It shows the ideal case. Operation is made of all the other cases.
The 25 clean test records became roughly 14,000 real ones, grown over years, with three spellings of the same supplier, with empty mandatory fields and with ratings from an old Excel file that someone wanted to carry over. The screen that showed everyone everything in the prototype suddenly needed a permissions model: purchasing may evaluate, management may see everything, the supplier themselves nothing at all. An interface to the ERP was added, whose documentation promised a field mapping that looked different in reality. And there came the question the prototype never asks: what happens when an import only runs halfway through overnight?