It’s never been faster to build software.
That should feel like a gift for product teams.
But often, it turns into a trap.
Because speed without judgment doesn’t get you to value faster.
It just helps you ship the wrong thing sooner.
For years, we told founders and product teams to focus on the MVP.
Build version one. Get something out there. Learn.
But that mindset doesn’t hold up anymore—at least not the way most people practice it.
Here’s what I mean…
The old MVP game was about building fast. Now it’s about validating faster.
When Jerel Velarde, one of our PMs at Full Scale, started building one of our internal tools, he wasn’t focused on shipping a “working” product. He wasn’t obsessing over what v1 would look like. He wasn’t even asking engineers to start coding.
He was trying to validate—in a single day—whether the idea was worth building at all.
He called the approach prompt prototyping.
No sprints. No engineering backlog. No long planning meetings.
Just fast UX flows, real interface mockups, AI-generated scaffolding, and enough interaction to see how users respond.
Not to impress anyone.
To kill the bad ideas before they made it into the roadmap.
Because let’s be honest...
Most MVPs don’t get validated.
They get released.
And then ignored.
And then buried in backlogs while your team wonders what to build next.
If AI can build anything, your job is knowing what not to build.
This is the real shift.
AI raised the floor for building, but it also raised the ceiling for what teams are expected to deliver.
The teams who win won’t be the ones who can ship code faster.
It’ll be the ones who validate faster and have the conviction to say:
"This is the right bet. Let’s go."
And the courage to say:
"We thought this mattered. It doesn’t. Kill it."
The MVP mindset we inherited was often about launching something minimal.
But we didn’t always ask if that minimal thing would prove anything useful.
Prompt prototyping flips that.
You build just enough to answer the next most important question:
Does this idea matter?
The job of a product team isn’t to build a product. It’s to reduce risk.
In early-stage companies, your biggest risk isn’t how long it takes to build.
It’s building the wrong thing.
It’s wasting 3 sprints chasing a feature no one wants.
It’s launching a tool that looks good but doesn’t solve the core pain.
It’s investing engineering time on the wrong bet—because nobody tested it first.
In that world, every unnecessary commit is a cost.
Every unvalidated idea that makes it past planning is a liability.
Jerel told a story about a hackathon project where, instead of handing a Figma link to engineering, he handed over an actual code repo. He had already validated the UX, the need, and the flow—before the engineering team wrote a line of backend code.
That’s where product leadership lives now.
In the bets you kill.
Not just the ones you launch.
If you’re still shipping “just to see what happens,” you’re playing the wrong game.
I’ve been in that position.
Thinking we were validating when we were just deploying.
Believing shipping meant learning.
Believing progress meant movement.
But when you ship a product no one uses, it’s not feedback.
It’s silence.
And silence is expensive.
The better strategy now?
Use AI, use your own hands, use whatever it takes—to build something testable fast enough that you don’t waste another week guessing.
You don’t need a dev team to validate every idea.
You need better product judgment and faster loops to confirm you’re building the right thing.
Build to validate. Not to launch.
You don’t need a working MVP to test the idea.
You need a way to learn quickly enough to stop wasting time on things that don’t matter.
AI changed the game.
It didn’t remove product risk.
It amplified it.
So stop focusing on the “minimum viable product.”
Start asking:
What’s the minimum test that proves this idea deserves to live?
That’s how product teams earn their next sprint.
And that’s how engineering stops being the bottleneck—because you're only building what matters.
Want to hear how we’re doing this in real time at Full Scale?
Check out my full conversation with Jerel on the latest episode of the Product Driven Podcast. We go deep into prompt prototyping, PM-engineer workflows, and why the new rules of product management demand a very different kind of leadership.
👉 Listen to the episode now on YouTube or on your podcast player.