Glossary

Prototype

By ArcPM

A prototype is an interactive, testable model of a product or feature — built to make a design concrete enough to experience and validate before committing to full engineering.

Prototypes range from low-fidelity (clickable wireframes) to high-fidelity (near-real interactions). Their purpose is to turn requirements and ideas into something people can actually use, so feedback is about the real experience rather than a description of it.

A prototype de-risks delivery: it surfaces usability and scope problems while changes are still cheap — before code is written — and gives stakeholders something concrete to review and align on.

Example

A clickable prototype of a checkout flow lets users try it end to end, revealing that a hidden shipping cost — not the button design — is where they abandon.

How ArcPM applies it

ArcPM generates an interactive prototype from the decided requirements, keeping every screen linked in the Connected Product Graph to the requirement it realizes — so an upstream change flags the screens that need review.

See ArcPM