Apply agile prototyping - eliminate tech debt

Prototypes allow you to explore design ideas, test assumptions, and gather feedback from users while minimizing technical debt. For the ones who might not know, technical debt refers to future work that builds up over time when a team codes quickly to get a product or prototype to market, rather than code well to create the best possible solution.

In many cases, given today's technology, you can create high-def prototypes that require no technical debt at all. Any time savings that might be potentially gained by bypassing prototyping is lost many times over in development if your MVP interfaces and functions need to be redesigned and recreated after they have been committed to code.

Here are some of the advantages and benefits that are gained if you apply agile prototyping to your product design and development process:

• Ownership and collaboration: Increase team consensus and ownership; discover potential usability issues and correct them in prototype before programming a line of code and potentially assuming tech debt.
• Workflow efficiency: Reduce and eliminate the need for extensive story writing and requirement documentation. It's much different when everyone can click and engage over an actual experience versus imagining and interpreting user interactions using wireframes or mockups.
• Validate often: Gather real-time feedback from users and rapidly evolve your MVP quickly, sprint by sprint.