How Prototyping Can Help You to Get Buy-In
Eugene Yan
The article discusses how building prototypes can effectively secure stakeholder buy-in for projects when written proposals fail to convince decision-makers. The author's example involved developing a computer vision prototype using ResNet and transfer learning on image data, which took months to build in personal time before eventually securing approval and leading to an image search feature that launched on the company's app in 2018. The key lesson is that interactive prototypes with graphical interfaces are more persuasive than abstract proposals because they make ideas concrete, prove technical feasibility, and allow stakeholders to test functionality with their own data.
Why it matters
Building prototypes helped get buy-in when roadmaps & design docs failed.
