Before the rise of the agile framework, software development was primarily done using traditional project management methodologies, such as Waterfall. Once the product was ready, the product demonstration, or demo, would be the meeting that determined whether the customer was happy with the final product or if the team had wasted months, if not years, building the wrong product.

In Scrum, there’s the Sprint Demo meeting, which serves exactly the same purpose, with the only small but important difference that, at worst, the team has been working on the wrong product for some weeks, rather than years.

Then remote working became the norm, and teams have encountered new challenges, like isolation and lack of opportunities to share knowledge across team members and teams.

For this reason, I’ve witnessed how demo meetings have mutated into a place where people can celebrate their achievements, show their problems and ask for help, share some learnings or ideas, and so on.

In any case, whether you’re still doing Waterfall or if your team only does Sprint Demos, there is one secret that will allow you to make the best of them.

The Secret: Engage Your Audience

Based on my experience, the secret to doing a good demo is very simple: think of your audience.

There’s always a Slack message to reply to, a bug to fix, a PR to submit, or other important things that developers may be thinking of doing rather than listening to you, and remote working makes it easier to get distracted by a random notification that will make things worst.

When you do demos, you need to fight for your audience’s attention, and the best way to do that is to think of them.

Demos are not about you, what you found interesting, or how you solved a problem. Demos are about your audience, why they may find something interesting, or how they may use your approach to solve problems.

The very first thing you should do in a demo after you introduce yourself is tell your audience what’s in it for them. They are going to invest 5, 10, or 30 minutes of their time listening to whatever you prepared. And you only have a few seconds to engage your audience, so make sure you get to this point as quickly as possible.

There are other important tips, like having a structure for what you will present, preparing for possible questions, etc. They are important, but not as much as this. If you don’t engage your audience, there won’t be anyone paying attention to the awesome content you have to share.

How to Engage the Audience

Sometimes it may be difficult to identify why anyone would want to see what you’re presenting, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to put that into words that are clear. Here are some examples to inspire you:

Example 1:

I want to show you what I’ve done so you can confirm that it meets your expectations

Audience thinks: I want to see how this feature works and if it matches my expectations.

Example 2:

You may be interested in how we implemented this feature, as you will have to do something similar for another project.

Audience thinks: I can save time on my next project if I learn from this other similar project.

Example 3:

You may have solved a problem like this before, and I need your help with this problem.

Audience thinks: My help is needed. I may be able to help solve this quickly if I pay attention to the problem.

Example 4:

You may need to get involved in this project down the track.

Audience thinks: I better pay attention; otherwise, I may miss many important details when I am involved in the project.

Example 5:

I thought that you would find this interesting because…

Audience thinks: They know what my interests are; surely, this is something I don’t want to miss.

It’s also worth highlighting that whatever reason you give, it needs to be sincere. Don’t say that this may be of interest to your audience if you don’t believe it.

Also, if you have a diverse audience, you may not be able to find a reason to share your demo with everyone. In those cases, consider whether that’s the best place/meeting to do that demo, and if it is, just go ahead and be as honest as you can. That way, at least you’ll be telling some people that they can reply to that email that’s buzzing them and that they won’t miss anything relevant for them.

How to do demos

The traditional way of doing demos is to just go live in a meeting, have some code running locally (bonus points if it’s in a test or production environment), and maybe some slides if the topic is not too technical.

If you share running code (work in progress or not), make sure that you have all the dependencies ready and running for your demo; otherwise, you’ll be wasting everyone’s time while you get set up. If for any reason you can’t do that, do the demo anyway! Better to do a not-so-efficient demo than not do it at all.

If in your demo you mainly need to talk, don’t feel forced to use slides. Slides are a tool to support presentations, but if you don’t need them, you will do fine just talking to your audience as long as you are able to express they ideas without this aide.

In recent years, I have found that a good approach for demos is to do a video recording, for many reasons:

• You have time to prepare and rehearse the demo, and you can always record it again if something goes wrong.
• You can pause the recording if you need to check some data, bring up another application, or are waiting for an app to finish running. Once you’re done, you can resume, but the audience will not experience this waiting time.
• Some people speak very slowly (me for instance), and we can change the playback speed of videos, so the same content can be watched in less time.
• If you feel like trying new things, you can add some effects in your videos for extra fun.

I have used a few tools for recording videos, and I’ll tell you what I think of them…

Loom

Loom, recently acquired by Atlassian, is very simple to use and has many interesting features, such as AI transcripts, video trimming, removing filler words, and others. Videos are stored in the cloud, so once you record, it’s basically set and forget. This is a commercial solution, but it comes with a free plan. You can explore this option at https://www.loom.com.

Pros:

• Easy to use and set up
• Can edit videos
• Some nice AI features
• Automatically uploads videos to the cloud
• Videos are published on their own page to share, add comments, and reactions

Cons:

• Requires a licence (there’s a free plan, though)
• Rigid format

QuickTime

I have tried to use QuickTime on a Mac, but I find the UI so counterintuitive that I never did a demo with it. If you have a Mac, it’s installed by default.

Pros:

• Free

Cons:

• Just for Mac
• Very few features
• Unusable user interface
• Need to manually upload videos for sharing
• Need to add a link to another service (like Confluence) to add comments
• Probably it does not allow editing videos (I did not bother checking)

OBS Studio

Recently, I’ve started using OBS Studio. This is a very powerful open-source product that allows you to record video, audio, and camera. I’m sure I don’t know half the features it provides, and the setup may be slightly difficult (especially compared with Loom), but after recording a few videos with it, I feel very comfortable using it. After recording a video, you’ll have to store it somewhere else to share it. So far, uploading it to my company’s Google Drive account and adding the link to a Confluence page works very well. https://obsproject.com

Pros:

• Highly configurable (frame rate, video size, etc.)
• Can add multiple cameras, audio streams, screen captures, etc.
• Free

Cons:

• Need to manually upload videos for sharing
• Need to add a link to another service (like Confluence) to add comments
• Need another software to edit and add effects (I use Capcut: https://www.capcut.com/)

Summary

As you can see, doing demos is all about who you’re demoing to rather than what you’re demoing. If you neglect your audience, there will be no audience.

I hope that the examples I provided to engage with your audience are useful, and that you try some of the apps I showed if you haven’t already.

Feel free to leave any comments or questions in the section below.

JM