Design and engineering teams should stop treating Figma as the ultimate source of truth. It is a simulacrum. The real source of truth is what customers experience in production. Orienting the entire team around the live product ensures everyone is solving for the actual user experience.

When stakeholders interact with a feature built in actual code, it feels nearly finished. This creates an "aura of inevitability," shifting the decision from allocating resources for exploration to a simple "yes/no" on shipping the feature, which dramatically accelerates buy-in.

Prototyping directly in the production environment makes high-quality interactions achievable without extensive resources. This dissolves the traditional design dilemma of sacrificing quality for speed, allowing teams to build better products faster.

Traditional SaaS development starts with a user problem. AI development inverts this by starting with what the technology makes possible. Teams must prototype to test reliability first, because execution is uncertain. The UI and user problem validation come later in the process.

The team no longer relies solely on PRDs and design docs. Product managers are now required to build a functional prototype as a core part of the development cycle, ensuring ideas are validated with a working model early on.

AI development tools have radically compressed the product design cycle. Instead of presenting wireframes or mockups, teams can now arrive at initial stakeholder meetings with fully functional, data-connected demos, dramatically accelerating the feedback loop and decision-making process.

Anthropic leverages the low cost of execution in the AI era by building multiple potential product versions simultaneously. This "build all candidates" approach replaces lengthy spec-writing and low-bandwidth customer research, allowing them to pick the best functioning prototype directly.

In AI, low prototyping costs and customer uncertainty make the traditional research-first PM model obsolete. The new approach is to build a prototype quickly, show it to customers to discover possibilities, and then iterate based on their reactions, effectively building the solution before the problem is fully defined.

Instead of prioritizing a problem and then designing a solution, leading companies build prototypes for multiple problems simultaneously. They then productionize the problem-solution pair that proves most effective through internal testing, a concept called "product shaping."