Prototypes as the spec

Overview

In February 2026, the CEO asked for a demo for a 400-hotel chain. The sales call was in 24 hours. I shipped a working prototype that night: a QR → review → tipping flow, localized and in their brand. The next morning I iterated the payment and review routing while the sales cycle ran.

That turnaround isn't a party trick — it's how I work. In my last year at Canary I shipped roughly 50 working prototypes on a personal hub, and they repeatedly replaced Figma as the engineering handoff spec. This page is the receipts.

Shipped from the Prototype

In July 2026, a segmentation redesign shipped to production as an 8-PR vertical slice built directly from my prototype. The PM linked the prototype as engineering's source of truth — at one point unblocking engineers mid-build by sharing the live prototype URL while I was on a plane.

No redlines, no spec doc, no handoff meeting. The engineers built what the prototype had already proved: real interactions, real edge cases, real copy. When the spec is something you can click, the ambiguity that normally fills a sprint of back-and-forth just isn't there.

The Code Is the Design

When a European hotel chain named a service-request integration their #1 deal-blocking feature, I designed the guest service-request flow as working code instead of static mocks: a 5-step wizard engineers built production from directly.

The design brief shipped with evidence tables and a funnel-completion target above 60%, but the artifact that mattered was the running flow. The pattern extended again in July 2026 to a second service-request integration, covering a meaningfully larger share of the ticketing base.

Scaling the Practice

The prototypes live on one Next.js hub — a searchable landing grid across 19 feature areas, automated thumbnails, shared design-system components, and per-feature decision logs. Sales pulled demos from it. Marketing pulled screenshots. PMs linked it in tickets.

In February 2026 I wrote the org's “Prototyping with Claude” playbook — repo architecture, prompting principles, guardrails, and the MCP toolchain — so the practice wouldn't stay a one-person trick. Exec leadership named me ahead of the org's adoption curve at the March 2026 EPD All Hands, and I mentored designers, PMs, and marketing designers on the workflow.

The Practice Underneath

None of this is a magic prompt — it's an environment. Claude Code runs in the terminal next to my editor, with persistent per-project memory: every project carries a CLAUDE.md with its conventions, gotchas, and current state, so each session picks up where the last one left off.

MCP integrations connect it to my actual tools — Linear, Slack, Notion, Figma, Todoist, Gmail — so morning triage happens in one conversation instead of six tabs. And a running lessons.md turns every mistake into a one-line rule tied to a specific failure, so errors don't repeat across sessions. It compounds.

This portfolio is the same practice pointed at a personal project — the scroll animations, the theme system, the chat bar you might be using right now. I design every decision; AI removes the distance between the idea and the working thing.

What I've Learned