The stakes were high.
A long time ago in a different life the team I was leading was given the task of creating a demo of the big name video game we were working on to use as a pitch to publishers to pick up and fund the game.
The CEO had laid out the situation in a very dramatic fashion by showing everyone in the company how much money we had in the bank, what our burn rate was, and the date we would be going out of business unless we got publisher funding. So no pressure.
The demo we came up with showed not only game play but the end to end toolset, we called it the big red button, where artwork could be created, gameplay tweaked, and then exported to the game engine and tested. This was long before these tools existed off the shelf. It was a big push, took many hours of overtime, but when it was all said and done it was so good it not only got us a publisher, it sold the company.
A demo done well can get you the contract, the investment, the next milestone payment while a bad demo can get you cancelled, off the project, investment pulled, or a cancelled contract. Not every demo has epic consequences but doing the right demo for the right audience at the right time is something that needs some thought.
A demo for a large company’s CEO is much different that a Sprint demo for in-house stakeholders, both need to meet the audience expectations. With that in mind here are some of the things I like to think about before doing / creating a demo. I like to keep things simple and not be too dogmatic about all the rules so here are some thoughts and guidelines.
The Good: What a Well-Crafted Demo Actually Does
Unless it is a sprint demo it is not about showing every feature, think about the right story for the right room. Know your audience cold. Are they interested in the technology, potential user value, latest progress, or more subjective topics like good gameplay, or smooth work flow etc? Somewhere in there you should answer the question, "Why should I care?" for the audience.
The Bad: The Most Common Demo Killers
I've committed every one of these offenses myself, some of them more than once, so consider this less of a list and more of a confession.
Not testing the way you'll actually present. Not on your laptop in a quiet room, on the conference room display, over the client's WiFi, with the screen mirrored the way it will be on the day. I once had a demo fall apart because the browser I tested on wasn't the browser on the presentation machine. Thirty seconds of setup cost twenty minutes of credibility.
The feature dump. This is one I fall into all the time. You built the thing, you're proud of the thing, you want to show all of the thing. Don't. Nobody in that room needs to see everything. They need to see the right things for why they're in the room.
Demoing to the wrong audience. Showing the rendering engine to the CEO. Walking the CTO through the customer dashboard. I've done both. The CEO doesn't care how it works. The CTO already knows what a dashboard looks like. Know who's in the room and show them what they actually care about.
Live data disasters. There is a reason I wrote a whole post about synthetic data. Nothing kills a demo faster than a half-empty database, a name field that says "Test User 1," or worse, someone recognizing their own real data on a screen in a room full of people. Fake data that looks real beats real data every time in a demo setting.
Rushed pace. Going too fast reads as nervous. It also reads as not trusting your own material. Slow down. Let things land. If you're rushing, you've probably got too much in the demo anyway, see feature dump, above.
The "we'll have that soon" trap. If it doesn't work, it's not in the demo. Full stop. "This is coming in the next sprint" is a great way to make everyone in the room mentally subtract whatever confidence they just built up. Demo what exists.
Death by context. Every demo needs setup. Nobody wants to watch you click through screens without understanding why. But I've sat through demos where fifteen minutes of background preceded five minutes of actual product, and by the time we got to the thing, half the room had already checked their phones. Set the stage, then get on it. If your intro is longer than your demo, that's the problem.
The Ugly: When It Goes Sideways
So what happens when things go sideways? Demo crashes, the WiFi dies, the stakeholder goes off-script. If traveling the world and working in technology has taught me anything it is to have a backup plan. A backup deck, having things running on more than one computer, safe words between presenters of when to reel things in are all things I like to think about.
Planning, practice, dry runs, and honest rehearsal, not just winging are all great, having a backup plan for when things go sideways is not something often planned for but can save the day. I can think of at least three different occasions when having a spare computer, a mobile wifi connection, or a backup presentation have saved the day.
The Right Demo for the Right Moment
Not every demo has epic consequences, but every demo deserves intentional thinking. Try to match the format to the moment. A milestone check-in vs. investor pitch vs. sales close are three completely different animals and need a different story to be told.
As a wrap up it’s time to remember my worst demo ever. It was a long time ago but remember it to this day and it still makes me queasy. A team I was on was developing a 3D helicopter game where you, the pilot, attempt to complete the missions / objectives presented on the screen. I was presenting to a group of folks from Japan that I didn’t know at the time were there to determine what games should continue to be developed (didn’t know my audience). I knew the game like the back of my hand, the graphics were cool, the gameplay was ok and advancing, so I figured I’d just wing it and jump right into showing off the gameplay, pointing out what I was doing on the mission and the cool parts. Yeah, that didn’t turn out so well.
Without providing context or a compelling story the audience saw this kid demoing some weird game with a helicopter that shot stuff. They had no idea why they should care or what was supposed to be interesting about what they were seeing (probably the biggest miss). So there is a reason you never saw that helicopter shoot-em up game next to Mortal Kombat 3 in the arcade.
