Design Engineering

Why Strategic Collaboration Now Demands Vibe Prototyping Literacy

Strategic collaboration is evolving. Learn why mastering vibe prototyping is now essential for modern product teams shaping the next generation of enterprise tools.

Apr 10, 2025

There’s a shift happening in product design that’s steadily gathering pace in start-ups and end-ups alike. Practices called vibe coding and riff building have started to gain popularity and while few have concretely embedded these, there’s a clear and exciting change happening in how product teams are working.

Clearly, tools are rapidly evolving. How product designers explore, communicate and validate product ideas is being transfigured. Expectations are rising. Product roles and the line between strategy and execution are blurring - fast.

But here’s what’s often missing from the conversation…

Most of the attention has focused on what solo designers or individual entrepreneurs can do with these tools. That’s exciting—but it’s only half the picture.

In growing businesses, great products are rarely the result of one person building in isolation. They are the result of effective, cross-functional, multi-disciplinary, often messy, teamwork. And increasingly, the ability to collaborate with speed, clarity, and intent is what makes the difference between a nice idea and a product that actually lands.

At Super User Studio, we’ve spent 20+ years working in this collaborative space, where strategy meets execution, and where design needs to scale beyond mockups into real-world, testable, evolving artefacts that depict the future Vision of a product.

More recently, we’ve been experimenting with emerging AI tools and latest product design practices to understand how these can continue to serve businesses and individual designers to realise their best ideas yet.

And now, we’re ready to share what we’ve learned.

What Is Vibe Prototyping?

You may have heard of Vibe Coding, a practice that leverages AI tools to support developer collaboration. Vibe Prototyping is a practice that enables designers to explore product ideas with more depth, expression, and interaction than static design tools can offer. It’s not about producing production-ready code, but it can be used to feed directly into production workflows.

Used strategically, Vibe Prototyping is collaborative, fast and catalytic. Most often, it lives somewhere in between—part sketch, part simulation, part provocation. As such, it reaches beyond fidelity or tooling, its mission instead is to create artefacts that help teams think together, better, faster. That’s what makes Vibe Prototyping so valuable in strategic work.

As usability expert Jakob Nielsen recently noted in his piece Classic Usability Still Matters for AI, practices like Vibe Coding are already enhancing ideation and development work, but the real power emerges when AI tools amplify team-based collaboration, not just individual productivity. And that’s exactly where Vibe Prototyping fits in.

Tools Are Just the Surface

We’ve worked with tools like Lovable, Bolt.new, v0, Replit, Cursor, Builder.io, Chat GPT, Manus, Perplex…. etc (a new one seems to come out every week)**—and they all bring something different to the table.

Some help us move from Figma to functioning prototypes.
Some help us test backend logic or generate UI variants.
Some spark ideas that wouldn’t emerge in a blank file.
But here’s the thing: the tools aren’t the interesting bit.

What matters is how and why you use them - and who you’re working with while you do.

How We’re Using Vibe Prototyping at SUS

We’ve integrated Vibe Prototyping into our work in a few key ways:

Bringing Figma designs to life - Turning UI into working artefacts to test interaction, logic, and flow - often producing early components that carry through to production.
Spinning up MVPs - For internal tools or new product ideas, prototyping helps us validate quickly and meaningfully, without needing full-stack support up front.
Collaborating during strategic sprints - When working with clients or teams to shape product direction, we use Vibe Prototyping to give early ideas more form. Whether that’s modelling logic, exploring agentic workflows, or aligning on UI behaviour. It helps everyone move from abstract to tangible, fast.
Refining detailed UI patterns - From tables to card compositions to nested interactions, we use prototyping to iterate with real content and real flow. This closes the gap between design intent and actual experience.

In each case, we’ve found that these new methods don’t just speed things up, they unlock new kinds of collaboration. Especially in early-stage, strategic work where ambiguity is high and alignment is everything.

In fact, a landmark study by Harvard and Procter & Gamble showed that AI-assisted teams were three times more likely to generate top-tier business ideas than those without AI support. Even more strikingly, these teams completed their work faster and reported significantly higher positive emotional engagement throughout the process. Read more here →

Why This Matters to Product Designers

In complex product environments, strategy and execution are no longer separate tracks. They’re connected. Fluid. Interdependent.

Product designers who can prototype with intent, who can use code-fluent tools not just to show, but to shape thinking, are becoming essential to high-functioning teams. And teams that don’t build this capability risk leaving their best ideas stuck in the abstract.

Without literacy in these new ways of working, you’ll struggle to collaborate on the truly strategic stuff.

The future of digital product design isn’t just higher fidelity. It’s higher alignment.

And Vibe Prototyping helps create the artefacts that make that possible.

We’re Launching a Vibe Prototyping Masterclass

To help more product designers build confidence in this space, we’re creating a practical, design-led course on Vibe Prototyping.

We’ll walk through our workflows some of which we’ve described above, but more importantly, we’ll focus on the mindset, behaviours, and collaboration patterns that surround the tools.

This course is for:

Designers looking to go beyond static mockups or Figma spaghetti click through prototypes
Product Teams trying to improve collaboration across disciplines
Strategists and product leads who want to make ideas tangible faster
Anyone who’s felt the gap between concept and execution - and wants a repeatable way to close it

Crucially, we’ll share what we know is working for other product teams.

And It’s Not Just For Product Designers

For teams looking to move faster, Vibe Prototyping offers a major advantage.

It can help you:

Grow faster by reducing friction in product delivery
Align more tightly around your product vision—and make it visible
Create richer stories and working artefacts that support funding conversations
Scale smarter by building collaboration into your product design DNA

Whether you’re chasing product-market fit or gearing up for Series A–C funding, this approach helps you prototype the future you’re aiming for—and bring your team along with it.