Prototype review practice exercise for product managers

What is the challenge scenario?

StreamDeck, a streaming platform, is adding a Watch Together feature: synchronized playback so friends can watch the same content at the same time. The design team spent two weeks on a prototype and considers it ready. Engineer handoff is tomorrow morning, and your design lead has asked you to do a final review and send notes tonight.

The prototype has problems, some obvious, some subtle, spread across four screens: a home feed entry point, a content detail and more options screen, an invite modal, and an active session screen. Your job is not to redesign it. It is to diagnose specifically what is wrong, why it is wrong, and hand the designer exactly what they need to fix it before tomorrow's meeting.

What are you asked to do?

Go through each of the four screens and write what is broken or unclear and why a real user would struggle there, being specific rather than general, for example naming exactly which expectation a screen violates rather than calling it confusing. Classify the primary problem type for each screen as navigation, sequencing, information hierarchy, information architecture, or copy, and say why you chose that classification if more than one applies. Reconstruct the brief the designer was probably given based on what the prototype shows, then write the brief that should have been given instead, focused on what was missing rather than what looked wrong. Pick the single highest impact screen and describe exactly what changes, and just as importantly what you are deliberately not touching in this pass. Close with a handoff note, under 150 words, covering all four screens, that guides the designer without prescribing the visual solution.

What does a strong answer cover?

This bootcamp does not publish a rubric for its practical challenge, so check your own draft against the curriculum's own questions instead of a worked solution:

• Does the critique name what is broken on each screen and why a real user would struggle there, rather than a general impression?
• Does the classification pick the right problem type for each screen, navigation, sequencing, hierarchy, architecture, or copy, with a reason?
• Does the rewritten brief name what was missing from the original, rather than only restating what looked wrong in the output?
• Does the fix for the highest priority screen state both what changes and what is deliberately left alone?
• Does the handoff note describe the user problem and desired outcome without prescribing the exact visual solution?

Skills this exercise practises

Diagnosing specific prototype friction rather than giving a general impression, classifying a UX problem by type, reconstructing a missing brief from its output, and writing a designer handoff note that guides without dictating the visual answer.

Which bootcamp does this challenge come from?

This is the practical challenge from Prototyping for Product Managers, Builders Camp's one week bootcamp on using prototypes to validate assumptions and align stakeholders, led by Andre Albuquerque. Completing it counts toward that bootcamp's certificate. If you build your own prototypes rather than only reviewing someone else's, how to build a prototype with Lovable and how to build a prototype with Cursor walk through the build side of this same skill, and how to build an MVP as a solo founder covers what comes after the prototype stage. The AI prototyping practice exercise elsewhere in this series practises the AI assisted version of the same critique and fix loop.

Builders Camp runs live and self paced bootcamps in product management and AI product building. See the Prototyping for Product Managers bootcamp for current cohort dates and the full self paced curriculum.