Sprint demos are our team's opportunity to demonstrate progress to the rest of the company, answer questions about new features, and solicit feedback to improve the product. Giving a clear demo is an important part of that process. Here are some tips to effectively demonstrate a new product feature.
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Spend some time preparing for your demo.
- Practice what you're going to say and walk through the demo at least once prior to the sprint demo.
- Think about what questions the audience might have and be prepared to answer them.
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Be in the meeting room and on the GoToWebinar 5-10 minutes before the meeting begins.
- Click the "Telephone" option in the GTW to avoid audio feedback when you are given presenter rights.
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Close Hipchat, Outlook, etc. and/or enter Do Not Disturb mode before demoing.
- Popups and notifications are very distracting to both you and your audience during the demo.
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If necessary, increase your browser's font size/zoom level to ensure the audience can read small text.
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Before demoing the feature, articulate the business reason that explains why this feature was built.
- Example: "Currently, users have to BLAH BLAH in order to BLAH BLAH. This is not ideal because of BLAH BLAH. Here's how we made this easier DEMO DEMO."
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Give the demo from a farm instead of your local development environment.
- Demoing locally is much slower than demoing from a farm. Long pauses between page reloads are distracting to the audience and they may perceive the new feature as "slow".
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Don't use identifiable student information during your demo.
- Using real student data is a FERPA violation. At the very least, change the student names so they are not identifiable.
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Avoid technical jargon.
- Focus on the end user's experience and not the technical implementation.
- Avoid using terms like "Apangea", "Data Warehouse", etc. Our users experience TTM as a single product, and how they are broken into individual services/applications is not relevant to them.