If you are part of an agile, or lean, or kanban development team, you probably do or have done demos at one point. Some people call them “end of sprint” demos. Some people call them “stakeholder” demos. We are pretty informal and irreverent about it at Bazaarvoice, and we just call them “demos” because giving them too formal of a name, or process will defeat the purpose. Demos are an amazingly valuable part of the development process, and I highly recommend that your team start doing them weekly.

Why not to do demos

There are a lot of reasons why not to do demos. If you are doing demos because of any (or all) of these reasons, you are probably doing it wrong. (Oh, did I mention that this is my personal opinionated viewpoint?)

• We are forced to do demos so that management can keep an eye on us.
• We do demos so management can make sure that each person is actually doing work.
• We do polished demos for our sales and marketing team and they have to be perfect.
• I don’t really know why we do demos, but my boss told me to, so I just show up.

Prep Work

Before you can do effective demos that help accelerate your development, your delivery, your quality and your culture, you need to set the stage for success. So how do you do that?

At Bazaarvoice, we believe in hiring smart, passionate owners that we can trust to do the right thing for the company, for our customers, and most importantly for our consumers. If everyone is bought into the vision and mission that you are all working to accomplish together, and if everyone is engaged and proactively helping to find creative solutions to those problems, then it is a lot easier to have productive weekly demos. You want to have an environment where everyone can speak without judgment, and where they know that their random idea will be heard and appreciated and not shot down. If everyone is coming from this place of openness, transparency and trust, then you can get some great demos.

Why

We believe that demos are part of the creative, collaborative and iterative process of developing amazing software solutions. The point of the demo is it be a time when everyone on the team (and stakeholders) can get together and celebrate incremental progress. It’s a way to bring out all the current work out into the light and to discuss it. What’s good, what still needs work, what did we learn, what do we need to change, and how could we make it even better. It lets us course correct earlier before we fly into the mountain. And It gives others awareness of what’s going on and brings the “aha” moments.

It’s about learning, and questioning, and celebrating. Everyone who demos gets applause. All work that gets done is important and should be celebrated. All work and everyone means Engineers, QA, UX, Product Managers, Marketing, Documentation, Sales, Management, and anyone who completed something that helped move the cause forward.

When

I like to do demos at 4pm on Fridays. Ouch right?! Well that’s kind of the point. Doesn’t everyone just want to check out early for the weekend? Nope… Well let’s hope not. If people are leaving early and complaining, then pause and go back and re-read the “Prep Work” section.

We actually use that time because it’s the end of the week. It gives us the most time during the week to get things done, and it gives us free space after the meeting if we need to run long for a brainstorming session or to discuss things more deeply. We have 14 engineers/UX/QA on our team, and we schedule demos for 30 minutes. If we finish early, or not, we usually stick around for beers and games anyway until 6-7pm because we just like hanging out with each other. Imagine that.

So isn’t that great? You get to hang out with your friends, show off your accomplishments, and leave work for the week feeling pride in what was accomplished both personally and by the entire team. You are hopefully excited about the future, and probably brainstorming new ideas over the weekend from what you learned from the demos.

Planning

We do planning for our week on Monday mornings. That part is important too and it’s the ying to the demo’s yang. People get into the office on Monday morning and are fresh and ready to go and hungry to know what they can pick up next, so it’s the perfect time to set the stage for the week. What are our top priorities for the week? What do we absolutely have to get done by the end of the week (aka by demos on Friday afternoon)?

Planning is a great venue to ensure everyone is in sync with the vision and Product priorities. Product shares upcoming business epics, UX walks us through new mockups and user findings, Engineering discusses new platform capabilities that we should consider, and QA reminds us of areas we need to harder. It helps form this continuous cycle of planning and validation. It’s a bit odd, because we are very Kanban and flow oriented, but we have found that having some timeboxes around planning and demo’ing gives the team a sense of closure and accomplishment. It’s important to occasionally step back and assess the progress. We have found this sets a really good and sustainable cadence for a productive team.

Next Up

Tell me what part of our story you want to hear next. How do you build a team and culture that enables you to execute on your vision? Follow me on twitter @bchagoly and @bazaarvoicedev to be the first to read new related posts and to join the conversation.