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Phase 5: Prototype
In the Prototype phase, the Design Sprint team will work together to create a prototype of your concept. This is when many decisions are made around what exactly the concept is and includes. You will aim to create a prototype that is just real enough to validate, and you will do it really fast!
In the context of Design Sprint, we use the word “prototype” in a slightly different way than in standard product development. A Design Sprint prototype is a facade of the experience you have envisioned in the Sketch phase. You are building just what you need to make the prototype real enough to get an authentic response from a potential user in the Validate phase. This means mapping out the exact flow for the experience and only building the steps you want to test. There is no need to build a full functional back-end or to solve for every flow in your product.
You can think of your prototype as an experiment in order to test out a hypothesis. This means you have to think critically about what you will build in order to get the feedback you need to validate or invalidate your hypothesis. Anything can be prototyped in a day if it is clearly mapped out.