Hey, I’m Colin! I help PMs and business leaders improve their technical skills through real-world case studies. For more, check out my Live cohort course and subscribe on Substack.
Gone are the days of spending weeks going from idea to testable prototype. With the latest AI tools, product managers and founders can now transform rough sketches into working applications in minutes - no coding required.
This guide will show you how to leverage AI to rapidly validate your product ideas and get meaningful feedback from users, saving you valuable time and resources in your product development cycle.
Wireframes with Excalidraw
The first step in our process is to create a wireframe. We want this to be high fidelity so the following steps follow our desired styling.
Excalidraw is my preferred tool for this step. First, it has a hand-drawn style that makes it easy for anyone to use. You can import components to save time with common UI elements and convert your designs from low to high fidelity.
Let’s build a simple Content Management Solution app for managing music. This should allow users to create content in an editor and view existing content. Here’s a quick mockup:
Converting this to a high fidelity design takes just a single click using Excalidraw’s Wireframe to Code.
And here’s our result! Not the best looking wireframe but a promising start.
We can apply a specific style by including instructions with the mockup. It seems counterintuitive but this is really just sending the image to an AI model like GPT-4o to generate code. Injecting additional prompts in the image is simple.
With this updated prompt, we get the following result:
Prototypes with Bolt.new
Let’s get started with our functional prototype. I’ll be using Bolt.new for this demo.
I provide a simple prompt including a screenshot of our mock above - “We are building a natural soundscape product with a UI similar to Spotify. Please implement this design exactly”.
Pretty good! Let’s add some real functionality, like the ability to add new sounds.
“Implement the ability to add new sounds. There should be a hover plus button in the bottom right hand corner. Selecting the button opens a modal. The modal is a form that has all required fields for a new sound. Completing the form adds the new sound to the beginning of the sounds list.
Make sure to set up appropriate data structures first, then implement UI changes.”
Wrapping Up
Building prototypes used to be a major bottleneck in product development - requiring either significant technical skills or expensive resources to validate even simple ideas. But as we've seen, AI tools have fundamentally changed this landscape. In just minutes, you can now:
Transform basic wireframes into polished designs using Excalidraw
Convert those designs into functional prototypes with Bolt.new
Iterate rapidly based on feedback without writing code
Share working demos with stakeholders and potential users
This means you can:
Test more ideas in less time
Get real user feedback earlier in your development cycle
Reduce the risk of building the wrong thing
Save engineering resources for validated concepts
Move faster than your competition
Whether you're a product manager testing a new feature, a founder validating a concept, or a designer exploring interaction patterns, these AI tools can help you move from idea to validation faster than ever before. The future of prototyping is here - and it's accessible to everyone.
Tools used today:
Excalidraw - For rapid wireframing and design
Bolt.new - For converting designs into functional prototypes
Love the wireframe to code concept. I've just found that I'm too awful at Figma to do anything quick enough or with enough quality. With the latest tools like v0 and excalidraw we will start to see Figma really get squeezed. Do you still see a place for Figma after the initial validation steps or do you think the prototypes will eventually get good enough?
Really cool .. Have played around with V0 superficially and the output is really good .. It kinda helped me from idea to final production deployment in 2 weeks with all my stakeholders onboarded with the idea . I think it not only reduces the Prototype creation and ideation time but also the time spent to get everyone on board with the idea