The Two Adams and the Pretotyping Problem
What happens when you put two prototypers and a pretotyper in a room?
A great conversation that clarifies why most innovation efforts get the sequence wrong.
If you're new here: I'm Leslie Barry, founder of Exponentially. We help enterprises build Innovation Engines that turn ideas into evidence and results. This newsletter is where 3k+ leaders and innovators get practical ideas on Pretotyping and rapid experimentation. Subscribe here.
Two Adams Walk Into a Bar (Well, Almost)
Last month, I did something I wasn't sure would work: I agreed to a live LinkedIn webinar with two people named Adam.
Adam Murphy, a human-centered strategy expert. Adam Norris, a design and prototyping specialist. And me—eight years deep into pretotyping at scale.
The format was simple: let's talk about what makes pretotyping different from prototyping, and why the distinction actually matters.
What I didn't expect was how much the conversation would clarify something I've been wrestling with for years: why do smart teams keep jumping straight to "can we build it?" before answering "should we build it?"
Here’s what we discovered.
My Job Is to Stop People Getting to Your Job
About 15 minutes in, Adam Norris asked me how I got into pretotyping.
I told him the truth: through building startups, failing at most of them, and getting really frustrated that we kept spending time and money building things nobody wanted.
Adam's a prototyper. He makes physical products real. He helps teams test whether they can build something, whether it works, what it costs.
My job is to stop people taking bad ideas to Adams job.
But if I can help teams figure out should we even bother before they get to Adam, we save time, money, and a lot of heartbreak.
That's the difference:
Prototyping asks: "Can we make this thing?"
Pretotyping asks: "Should we bother to make this in the first place?"
And here's the kicker: most organizations skip pretotyping entirely. They go straight from idea to prototype to MVP—without ever testing if customers actually care.
→ Watch this 2-minute clip to hear how I went from failed startups to falling in love with Alberto Savoia's approach.
The MVP Trap
Adam Murphy asked the question everyone asks:
"Is a pretotype the same as an MVP?"
Absolutely not.
Here's what's happening right now in innovation: someone has a brain wave, they vibe-code a thing using AI, and they put it out there. They've skipped the most important step: does anybody care?
An MVP is build-measure-learn. You build something minimal, measure how people use it, learn from that.
Pretotyping is learn-measure-build. You learn if there's a problem worth solving, you measure actual customer behavior (not opinions), and then you build.
I gave them a recent example: I worked with a crypto exchange last month. Their first pretotype wasn't code—it was Intercom. We put a value proposition in front of 100 customers, asked them a question, measured if they engaged.
Fast. Cheap. Data over opinion.
And here's the uncomfortable truth I shared: Sadly for everybody listening, mostly nobody cares. No one's interested. All your ideas are bad. Nobody cares about your stupid idea.
It's very difficult to get any level of interest. So you need to test fast and cheap to find out which ideas actually have legs.
→ Watch this 3-minute clip for the full breakdown of pretotyping vs prototyping vs MVP (including the crypto exchange example).
Spotted in the wild:
Three insights from the conversation that you can apply immediately:
1. Disconnect the idea from the person
Traditionally, we pitch ideas like this: "I've got this awesome idea, I'm putting my career on it, give me money." Then if it fails, someone's in trouble.
Instead: test ideas as a team, from the customer perspective. Run structured experiments where you agree upfront what "good" looks like. When customers don't engage, it's not personal failure—it's rapid learning.
2. Low fidelity gets better feedback
Adam Norris made a great point: when you show people a polished prototype and ask "what do you think?" they say "that's pretty good."
But when you show them a pencil sketch or Play-Doh wrapped around another product, they give you real feedback: "It's too tall," "Why purple?" "We don't need another soft drink."
Lo-fi isn't a weakness—it's a feature. It invites honest critique.
3. The right question defines the right prototype
Not every test needs to be high fidelity. If you're testing whether bar layout improves customer flow, build it out of Corflute (which I did for Anheuser-Busch InBev in Boston).
You don't need feedback on aesthetics. You need feedback on flow. Match your fidelity to your question.
The 60-Day Product Launch
Adam Norris shared one of my favorite examples: Carlton United Breweries launching their first seltzer in 60 days—from idea to shelf.
How? They ran a Design Sprint. Marketing, agency, decision-makers all in one room. Adam's team brought prototypes to life in real-time—3D printing different can shapes, printing new labels, testing with consumers iteratively over three days.
Meanwhile, the technical team was in the kitchen changing flavor proportions based on live feedback. "Too much vodka? Add less." "Lime needs mint? Let's try it."
They didn't answer every final detail in those three days. But by iterating so quickly, they compressed months of work into 60 days.
The breakthrough? Asking "what would have to be true?" instead of "why can't we?"
→ Watch this 3-minute clip to hear Adam walk through the full Carlton United Breweries story.
Why Innovation Leaders Last 18 Months
Toward the end, I shared something I've researched on LinkedIn:
The average lifespan of an innovation leader is 18 months.
Why? Because they don't build sustainable systems. They rely on champions pushing upstream against an organization designed for stability and repeatability.
If that's true, you can't fight the system. You need to work with it. Create something the system recognizes.
I learned this firsthand when I took four customers on what became the "Global Pretotyping Summit" in 2019. We visited CES in Vegas, then toured Google, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley companies. Seeing Facebook run 10,000+ experiments concurrently—releasing features automatically based on data—was a wake-up call. The companies that scale innovation don't rely on heroes. They have systems.
→ Watch this 2-minute clip about how the "Global Pretotyping Summit" accidentally became real.
That's why we built Rapidly—a platform to manage ideas and experiments at scale. Because running 5–10 experiments a year is a waste of time. If 90% of ideas fail, you need to run hundreds of experiments to find the winners.
And that only works when you have a system.
How to Get Started
Both Adams had great advice for people wanting to build this muscle:
From Adam Norris (prototyping):
Get hands-on. Buy a competitor product, mold Play-Doh onto it, scan it with your phone's free 3D scanning app, change the label, reprint it. You can get a rough prototype in under an hour.
Prototyping has never been more accessible. The tools are there. The question is: can you make time for it?
From me (pretotyping):
Read Alberto Savoia's book The Right It. Take my free pretotyping course on YouTube. Download Rapidly and try it. Join our Slack community (850+ people from around the world).
But most importantly: just do it.
You've got that idea that's been bothering you for a year. Whip up a website. Put it out there. See what happens. Learn.
Don't be scared to fail. You're going to fail 100%. But the outcome of failure is learning.
→ Watch this 4-minute clip for practical tips on getting started with prototyping—even with zero tech skills.
The Bottom Line
If you knew it would take 20 failures to make a $100 million product, how fast would you want to fail?
As fast as you possibly can.
That's pretotyping. That's prototyping. That's rapid experimentation.
The only way to beat the default outcome—which is failure—is to fail faster, cheaper, and smarter than everyone else.
Full conversation: Watch it here for the uncut version, including stories about the accidental Global Pretotyping Summit, how Facebook runs 10,000 experiments a day, and why getting bad feedback on a prototype is actually the goal.
Tool of the Month
I've been experimenting with Claude paired with Windsurf Editor, and it's changing how fast I can prototype digital products. Think of it as having an AI pair programmer who can write, test, and iterate code in real-time—perfect for rapid pretotyping of software ideas. If you're testing digital concepts, this combo lets you go from idea to working prototype in hours, not days.
Build the System to Test Ideas Fast
Stop wasting months on AI and Product ideas nobody uses. I work with teams to embed rapid experimentation using pretotyping as a core capability to test ideas fast, kill the losers early, and invest in the winners—in weeks, not quarters.
👉 Reply if you want to explore how to get started.
"Prototyping asks 'can we make it?' Pretotyping asks 'should we bother?' Most teams skip the second question—and that's why most ideas fail."
Until next month, happy innovating!
Leslie
