Most scope arguments inside a startup are not really about facts. Two directions are on the table, both defensible, and everyone in the room has enough experience to make a serious case for one of them. So the meeting runs long, and the tie gets broken by whoever has the most seniority or the most patience. Then you spend a quarter building the winner and learn from the analytics whether the room was right.

I have been on the winning side of that argument and still been wrong.

What changed is the cost of finding out. With AI-assisted prototyping I can build both versions of the disputed flow and put them on two deployed links inside a week. Not both products. Just the eight or ten screens the argument is actually about, real enough that someone can click through them without being talked through them. Then a handful of people who resemble your customers use each one, and the room stops guessing.

The outcome is rarely a clean win for one side. More often both prototypes stall at the same step, and it is a step nobody had been arguing about. That finding on its own usually pays for the week.

The version that loses gets thrown away, which is the point. It cost days instead of a quarter, and nobody has to defend a decision they lost.

In my MVP sprints this now sits between the definition workshop and the release-1 backlog. The backlog gets written from what people did with the prototype, not from what we agreed in the meeting where we picked a direction.