The purpose of a Demo

Off the top of my head, I can name two camps in the “we have a demo” crowd.  One says that we have a Demo to present the functionality we’ve developed to solicit approval of the work we’ve done to the company.  Another says that we present the work we’ve done to the company to solicit approval of the functionality we’ve developed.

There’s a subtle distinction there, and I think it’s a fairly critical one.  

In one case you are saying “Here is the work we’ve done.  If you have a problem with that, I’m sorry (not really)”.  The second says “We’ve done this work.  Did we do it right?”

I think that it’s critical that when functional software is first presented to people that we, as engineers, listen to what’s being said by the pople who support our efforts in the field.While we may know how to break problems down into their elemental properties, it doesn’t mean that that we understood the problem properly or had all the available information in the begining.  It’s important to appreciate that a critique of the end result is not a critque of our ability to reason through the problem.  

More often than not, our solution was valid given the available data at the time.  When the solution is questioned, we need to recognize that the data has changed and we need to re-evaluate our solution to the original problem.

As you can probably tell, I suffered through a bad demo today.  The reasons for the failures are legion, and some rest squarely in my lap.  There were two, however, that seemed the most avoidable:

• When an audience member tells you that a missing field is critical to the market, you do not tell them, in essense, to “Shut Up because I’m demoing what’s been done.”
• You do not schedule a demo and try to create theater around it like it’s some grand delivery from the engineering group.

Both of these failures were driven from the same mindset:  That the functionality being demo’d was some Promethean gift and that the mere mortals in attendance should not look that gift in the mouth.  Bad form.

There were many other lessons re-learned as well (know your audience, have a rough rehersal, etc) but those stuck out as the most  egregious because of the mindset they represeted.  Mindsets are tough to change, processes aren’t.