Preface

This book is not a manifesto and it is not consulting collateral. I have spent twenty-five years doing digital design and product development, mostly for founders, mostly people who arrived with an idea and a product they wanted built, roughly in that order.

Across that time I have watched the tool underneath the craft change four or five times: Photoshop on the Adobe Creative Cloud, then Macromedia Fireworks (a great product, quietly retired), then Sketch with Abstract and InVision bolted on, then Figma, and now Pencil.dev and Anthropic’s Claude Design at the keyboard. Each shift changed something smaller than it changed something larger, and for most of that quarter-century the larger thing held: the client had a picture in their head and my job was to get it out onto a screen.

The last two years have undone that. Founders now arrive with a working prototype they built on a Saturday before we have spoken. The book is a description of how I see the product-building process after that shift.

I work alongside founders as a consultant and product specialist; Sliday (the studio I founded in 2009 and still run) is the team I ship through, a group of specialists who act, in this era, as my human agents, because an individual consultant cannot deliver a working product at any scale on their own.

We did not set out to invent a methodology. We noticed that the projects that worked best were the ones where the founder arrived with a working prototype, and we noticed that we had quietly stopped writing thirty-page scoping documents in favour of trimming what was already there. After enough projects had taken the same shape, we wrote down what we had been doing without quite naming it. This book is that record.

Three readers are addressed. The first is the founder who has just shipped an over-built prototype with Claude Code, Cursor, v0, or Lovable, and does not know what to ask for next. The second is the studio owner who has just received one and does not yet have a process. The third is the employee inside one of those studios — the designer, engineer, QA analyst, or marketer whose task list is being rewritten by tools that did not exist two years ago, and who wants to know how to stay in the game.

Some chapters skew one way, some the other; the reader routes before the Preface shows which is which.

The new pitch, when it works, is three words: bring your prototype. That’s the TL;DR. Everything else is the infrastructure — methodological, commercial, and human — that those three words imply.

Inside the studio we sometimes say it the other way round: bring your marble. In the sculpting metaphor that runs through the book, the founder’s prototype is the block (already shaped over a weekend, usually more of it than is needed, waiting for a chisel).

Two routes end at the same place. The ideal version is that the founder has already used an AI tool over a weekend to build a prototype of their own and arrives with it running on their laptop.

The second version, which we sometimes take on in the first conversation itself, is that the founder has not yet done that. We put a clickable draft of their idea in front of them inside an hour, enough that they can press the buttons themselves before a scoping document has been written.

Either way, the engagement begins with the founder holding something that runs. That beginning is what the old engagement never had.

The book draws on conversations with David Kravitz, my long-standing partner at Sliday, with our team in Kraków, and with our clients across three continents. Where I make a claim, I can point at the project where I first noticed the thing. Where I cannot, the claim is downgraded to a hunch and labelled as such.

The voice is “we” when describing studio practice and “I” when describing personal observation; the distinction matters and is held throughout.

If you only want the argument, read Three Circles and Three Arrows, The Hidden Axiom, The Over-Engineered v2, What This Book Cannot Tell You, and Distribution Will Eat Sculpting.

If you are an employee worried about your career, read The Recalibration and Rebuilt Every Two Years first, then work backwards. If you want the full playbook, read everything. If you want to argue, my contact details are in the back matter.

— Stas Kulesh, Kraków, 2026