How Prototyping Can Help You to Get Buy-In
Eugene Yan
Data scientist Eugene Yan says pitch decks often lose to a working demo. A clickable prototype beats a perfect slide deck almost every time.
Based on reporting by Eugene Yan — read the original for the full story.
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Eugene Yan has a confession that a lot of data teams will recognize: he's watched carefully researched proposals, full of charts and projections, go nowhere, while a scrappy prototype demoed in a meeting got immediate buy-in. His explanation is refreshingly unglamorous. People, especially non-technical stakeholders, struggle to picture an abstract idea from a document. Show them a screen they can click on, and suddenly the thing feels real.
Yan's own story is the best evidence here. At a previous job, he tried to convince leadership to invest in computer vision for a massive product catalog, starting with image classifiers and eventually moving to image search. He got turned down flat, partly because colleagues doubted the team had the chops to pull it off. So he built it himself, on his own time, hacking together a Theano-based ResNet implementation and using cosine similarity on embeddings for image search. It took months. But when he demoed it, the same stakeholders who'd rejected the pitch got genuinely excited, particularly about visual search for fashion items, which made up a big share of transactions. That demo is what kicked off real investment in GPU clusters, and the feature eventually shipped in the app in 2018.
He's careful to note prototypes aren't a cure-all. They answer
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
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