Teams — and stakeholders in particular — are always tempted to skip prototyping and dive right into production-level code.

But in doing so, they're missing out on something. And that something isn't necessarily what you think.

Sure, lo-fi prototyping makes the end result a lot more useful to both users and the business — but what most people don't realize is that when done properly, it also does a tremendous amount of heavy lifting in improving team communication and collaboration.

It's a process that holds the power to prevent product design from becoming a ping-pong game of guesswork: a vicious cycle where the team is guessing at what the stakeholder wants, while the stakeholder becomes increasingly frustrated that what they’re seeing is not it. Design and development are at each other’s throats because the other side keeps surprising them with the latest round of iteration.

Prototypes are the perfect vehicle for increasing communication and collaboration.

They can, do and should generate product requirements. Leveraging that power ensures that when something unexpected comes up (and it will) later, everyone involved in the project is in a position to anticipate and react to it quickly. Which keeps them from painting themselves into any number of corners.

I’ve seen the practices I’ve shared with you here adopted successfully by enterprise organizations of all shapes and sizes across multiple industries – from small startups to massive global companies, names you’d recognize.