The Five-Minute Prototype That Changed a Vendor Meeting

When the vendor says it’s complicated, the best move is to prove it isn’t.

Every product leader has been in this meeting. The vendor is walking through a timeline that feels inflated. The estimates are padded. The complexity is being sold, not explained. You know it in your gut, but you don’t have the ammunition to push back. So you nod, ask a few sharp questions, and schedule a follow-up.

Rebeca Assuncao, a Senior Product Manager and Digital Product Team Lead at NEOM — the Saudi-funded megaproject building a city from scratch — decided to skip that part.

When stakeholders were unclear about the complexity of a booking system, Rebeca didn’t write a requirements doc or schedule another alignment meeting. She opened a tool and built a working prototype. In five minutes.

Then she walked into the vendor meeting with a live demo.

“I did this in five minutes. So with your expertise now, we can do it better. So let’s do it together.”

– Episode 40, The AI Product Leader

That line is the whole move. She didn’t build the prototype to replace the vendor. She built it to reset the power dynamic. When the person across the table has already demonstrated what’s possible, the conversation shifts from “could we do this?” to “how fast can we make this better?”

This is what I call being an AI player-coach. The senior leader who stays hands-on with AI, not to become an engineer, but to close the gap between what they’re responsible for and what they actually understand.

Why five minutes matters

The speed is the weapon. A prototype that took three weeks would prove you’re capable. A prototype that took five minutes proves the vendor is overselling.

That distinction matters for every product leader sitting in meetings where technical complexity is used as a shield. Vendors do it. Internal engineering teams do it. Consultants do it. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes out of habit. When you can build a working version of the thing they’re scoping at six figures, the conversation gets honest fast.

Rebeca’s day at NEOM swings from executive strategy at 9am to API-level engineering conversations at 10am. That range used to require different people in different meetings. Now it requires one leader who’s willing to get her hands dirty with the tools.

From prototype to product

The five-minute prototype was only the beginning. For her Blueprint capstone project, Rebeca built a complete AI-powered roadmap tool. Solo. Using Lovable for the UI, Firebase for the backend, and the OpenAI API for intelligence.

She had never created a database before.

“I built this product all alone using Lovable as my UI… I connected to a Firebase backend. And I never before created a database alone by myself.”

At one point, she was running three AI conversations simultaneously: Claude for Firebase setup, the Lovable chat for UI, and ChatGPT for overall strategy — checking each tool’s responses against the others. It was messy and real and it worked. Senior leadership at NEOM agreed to deploy the tool internally.

The skill underneath the skill

What Rebeca describes isn’t coding. It’s the same muscle product leaders have always used, pointed in a new direction.

“Before you write requirements, now you write prompts. It’s kind of the same — you have to be a specialist in the problem and providing context.”

That reframe is worth sitting with. The best requirements writers have always been the people who understand the problem deeply enough to describe it precisely. Prompting is the same discipline. The context window replaced the PRD template, but the underlying skill is identical: know your domain, articulate the constraints, be specific about what success looks like.

Product leaders who have spent years writing detailed specs already have this muscle. They just haven’t applied it to AI yet.

The middle is disappearing

Rebeca sees a fork in the road for product managers, and she’s blunt about it:

“I do feel that for product management these days there are kind of two paths to stay relevant — or you become a specialist in growth… or you become a technical product manager. Because the middle will disappear.”

The generalist PM who coordinates between teams without deep expertise in either growth or technology is getting squeezed from both sides. AI tools are eating the coordination work. The leaders who stay relevant are the ones who go deep in one direction or the other.

The five-minute prototype is proof of which direction Rebeca chose. And the vendor meeting is proof of why it works.

Polly Allen is the founder of AI Career Boost and host of The AI Product Leader podcast. She spent years leading AI at Amazon Alexa before building the AI Career Boost Blueprint, an 8-week program for Director+ product leaders becoming indispensable AI player-coaches. Subscribe to The AI Player-Coach newsletter →