Experiment

The map is not the territory. Eventually, you have to walk into the cave.

Prototyping isn't about fidelity. It's about confrontation. Paper and tape will tell you things that Figma never will, because real people touching real things respond in real ways. Fail fast, fail cheap, fail usefully. The MVP isn't a lesser product — it's a precision instrument designed to extract truth from uncertainty. Every proof of concept is a question disguised as a thing.

design

You can sketch the dragon all you like. At some point you have to walk into the cave.

Paper prototyping is not a cop-out for not knowing how to use Figma. It's a deliberate choice to keep things cheap enough to throw away, because the most important thing about an early prototype is your willingness to kill it when it's wrong.

Real world equivalency is a personal favourite: find the thing that already exists in the physical or digital world that approximates what you're trying to build. Put a real person in front of it. Watch what they do. That behaviour — unfiltered, unguided — tells you more about your product than any usability script.

The MVP is not a minimum viable product. It's a minimum testable hypothesis with a UI.