Being pragmatic
Prototyping is an essential part of the design process. However, not everyone is familiar with the role it should play. Here are some considerations to help you ensure that prototyping is properly applied in practice.
A prototype is not an early version of your product
The term prototype is often used in many different ways. People may describe an early version of the product as a prototype since it has many edges to be polished. However, these half-baked products do not fully recreate the final experience (since they are incomplete), require additional effort to build, and represent a bigger commitment to a specific direction.
A prototype is built specifically to test an idea, and their missing parts are a result of a conscious decision to prioritize those elements that are exposed to the user and are relevant for the design questions to get answered. A prototype fakes as much as possible, to the point that it is useless to reuse. That's not a problem since learning from it...
