A computer-vision ramp-safety proof of concept performs well on a curated set of 200 sample images. The vendor recommends moving straight to airport-wide production deployment. What pitfall should the PM recognize here?

One of the most common proof-of-concept pitfalls is mistaking success on a small, curated dataset for readiness to scale into full production. The 200 sample images were likely selected or filtered in ways that don't represent the full diversity of real ramp conditions — lighting changes, precipitation, varied camera placement, unusual object types — so strong proof-of-concept results say relatively little about production-grade reliability. The correct response is to insist on broader validation, likely via a pilot on a wider but still bounded dataset, before committing to airport-wide rollout. The idea of repeating the proof of concept using the exact same 200 images is a meaningless test — repeating the same images only confirms determinism, not generalization, and tells the team nothing new. The claim that proofs of concept never require any validation once they succeed on their initial test set is the vendor-hype trap itself, stated as if it were sound practice; CPMAI explicitly calls out proof-of-concept-to-production overconfidence as a named failure pattern. The suggestion to immediately trademark the proof of concept before any wider deployment is irrelevant to the technical and methodological question being asked. This scenario tests the Domain II Task 1 enabler on recognizing proof-of-concept limitations and pitfalls, a theme that recurs across CPMAI's whole approach to phased validation.