Prototypes are multiplying and living on laptops. The case for a shared shelf, the graveyard fear, and the tending rules that decide which one you get.
We built a new problem this year: the growing list of not-ready-to-ship prototype work has nowhere to live. In our design leadership sync this week, a lead demoed a prototype he’d made by pointing a coding agent at an idea and letting it run in the cloud for 2.5 hours; it came back with a working flow and a video walkthrough, and he introduced it with a caveat I want to keep: “an experiment, not ready to ship.” Another lead demoed a dashboard he built to watch every experiment we have in flight, because the experiments have multiplied past what anyone can hold in their head. Both live on laptops, and the team has started asking for a shared home, something like a gallery for the almost.
My engineering partner pushed back when the ask reached him, and he said it with love: his fear is a graveyard of half-baked ideas, and he’d rather push people to build into the actual product. He suggested shareable artifacts as a lighter-weight middle step, and he’s got a point on the graveyard, because a shelf of abandoned demos convinces a team, one dusty artifact at a time, that experiments don’t matter.
The study hands me the counterargument, though. The share of designers who say collaboration decreased because of AI jumped from 5% to 20% in a single year, with more of the work happening solo in prompts and terminals, and the connective tissue of teams hasn’t kept pace with the speed. A prototype on 1 laptop teaches 1 person, and a prototype with an audience teaches a team.
The difference between a graveyard and a greenhouse is tending.
So here’s the decision in front of us, and where I’m landing as a forming thought. An experiment earns a place on the shared shelf when it arrives with 3 things: an owner, a shelf life, and the 1 decision it’s trying to inform, introduced out loud the way our lead did it, as an experiment, not ready to ship. Everything without those 3 things composts, and the compost is fine; the greenhouse only stays a greenhouse if somebody walks the rows.
4 books for deciding where the almost-work lives.
The shelf
Where does your team’s not-ready-to-ship work live today, and who tends it? I’d genuinely love replies on this one.