Imagine this: The team gathers in a room, excited about a new idea.
The idea wins nods from every side — the product team, the managers, the bosses.
The plan just looks great.

Launch day comes.
After hundreds of working hours, you press the button, people smile and clap.
But soon, the first support messages start to come.
More and more problems appear.
Money that was expected does not come.
The happy mood disappears.
Everyone feels it: weeks of effort, but the wrong bet.

Sound familiar?

In this article, you will learn how to minimize the risk of repeating this mistake.

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What is rapid prototyping?

Simply put, rapid development is creating a test version of the idea before you spend any engineering time building the product.

These models help check if an idea really works.

They show if the product:

• meets requirements

• solves user needs

• makes sense for the cost

This approach is used in many industries, from physical products to software.

In software, this usually means a clickable prototype — a simple version of the product that looks real but isn’t fully built. You can click through it to test if it’s easy to use, if people understand the layout, and if the words and visuals work well.

How to put rapid prototyping into practice when building products?

Ideally, a prototype of the product should be created after user experience research, gathering all analytical data, requirements, etc.

Many companies don’t have the time and resources for proper research. I know how it sounds, but it’s a harsh truth.

Then, a sample of the product is tested through user testing, user interviews, A/B testing, and many more.

At every step, feedback is used to make the product or feature better before building the actual product.

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Our experience with rapid prototyping at Rocksoft

From our experience in creating digital products, one main conclusion comes up: you may skip research, but you can’t afford to skip validation.

Why?

If you have budget, resource, or time limitations, it’s easy to set such an approach:

“Ok, let’s build a solution, and we will see how it performs after launch.”

But think about it: how often does this lead your product team to create the same solution over and over again?

And in the end, no targets are met. This is very expensive and doesn’t bring the ROI stakeholders want, users are unhappy, and your business doesn’t grow or may even fall apart.

And here we have rapid prototyping as a genius solution. I know, deadlines may be tight. But think of it: a skilled designer could build a prototype in one man-day, schedule 4–6 testing sessions (each 1.5–2h) in another man-day, and in AI times, analyzing insights — another man-day. Doesn’t this sound nice?

Three man-days that could save months of work?

At Rocksoft, we often recommend this approach.

Improving the dashboard with rapid prototyping

One of our clients came to us with a dashboard. It was a part of a complex system for sustainability, resource usage, and CO2 emission tracking for hospitality objects like hotels, restaurants, etc. A lot of users didn’t want to, or didn’t know how to, use the insights it presented.

Our designers used best practices and client expertise to build a new dashboard that we believe was much simpler and guided users more clearly.

To ensure the new approach was as effective as possible, the client wanted to validate it directly with their users. The whole process speed up significantly thanks to our customers who took care of participants for user testing, they know exactly which roles & persons could bring valuable insights to the table.  

In two weeks, we built and conducted user testing with 6 users on different skill levels in using the product. As the dashboard is used by two main groups — general managers and facility managers — we invited both groups to the validation process.

Outcome? We gained confidence we were heading in the right direction and picked the variant that supports user goals in the system.

Moreover, we noticed missed opportunities and discovered unexpected issues that affected users. Without rapid prototyping, we wouldn’t have known this before launch. We might have found out only after a long and expensive build — which makes no sense, right?

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My thoughts

Your company can’t afford to skip validation.

To tie up my thoughts, I would highlight this statement. It’s quite brave and harsh but aligned with reality.

Next time you work on a new product, feature, or refining existing flows — keep it in mind.

Your users are your best source of truth. As Sam Walton put it,

“There is only one boss: the customer… who can fire everybody simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

This is the reality no company can escape. In the end, it’s your users who decide.

Want to learn more about rapid prototyping? Read how to avoid “this isn’t what I meant” moment, where we dive deeper into how rapid prototyping works in software compared to the usual way of building.