Isn't that trivially true? Scenario 1) Spend $10,000 to make one prototype. You get one shot, so you prepare and do as much pre-work as humanly possible, but because you only get one shot, you forgot the ask the question that in Hobbs sight was obvious. Scenario 2) prototypes cost $1,000 so you get multiple shots. So you don't do as much pre-work, throw a half dozen things at the wall. One of them sticks! It really resonates with customers. You iterate a few more times, and when it's finally on the market, you have a successful business.
The difference is all that pre-work. The problem with that is some things are only obvious after you've built one and it doesn't fit just right for some reason. That reason is impossibly harder to just reason about and figure out vs iterating where possible. For software things that's easier. For hardware, we have stories like the palm pilot engineer having a wooden block with them for a week before deciding on the form factor for it. Such pre-work is valuable, but if the cost of prototypes is way down, you can afford to iterate instead of trying to psychically predict everything up front. Of course that doesn't work for eg trips to the Moon, but most busineeses aren't doing that.
The problem is in validating the prototype. Whether the users are consumers or enterprises or internal stakeholders, they aren’t going to try 10 different prototypes. They will try one or two.
Most business software isn’t complicated to implement (i.e. it doesn’t require multiple prototypes to determine which technical approach is best). Usually for most apps you approximately know the technical implementation. What requires taste, experience, or whatever you want to call it, is the user experience and if your software actually solves a real problem. You can’t really just churn on prototypes to solve that. You will lose the patience of your user base.
Even so-called UX and product experts get stuff wrong all the time. Going from idea to prototype to feedback in hours or days rather than days or weeks feels like a superpower, at least in the very customer facing parts of what we do.
Did CAD make engineers better? certain products are only possible because of CAD but the pen and paper guys weren’t obviously less efficient, and I personally think they were very efficient.
When prototypes are harder to build you focus on answering the biggest questions. I feel like you spend more time iterating on details in CAD, even when the larger idea is invalid.
