A design discovery practice in which a designer produces roughly two dozen prototypes per week at varying fidelity — sketches, low-fi mocks, clickable flows — most of which are discarded after being used to iterate with the team, stakeholders, or customers.
The resulting time split is roughly 90% discovery-oriented prototyping / 10% finished, delivery-ready assets for engineers — the inverse of how design workload is often imagined (visible polished mockups vs. the much larger invisible iteration effort behind them).
Supports Design as a Discovery Discipline (Not Downstream Delivery): prototyping volume, not mockup polish, is where design discovery actually happens. Related: Discovery (Product Discovery Process).
Cagan cites Figma's roughly $20B valuation as indirect evidence for the value of prototyping-centric discovery — a company built specifically to support prototyping workflows captured that much market value, which he reads as the market pricing in how central prototyping has become to product work.
Из тем: The Product Operating Model