Collaborative Demo

Have you ever been to an ineffective product demo? Where the engagement is quite low, and/or time for feedback is very limited in the end. I've seen it many times, and also fallen into this trap myself... I recently coached a company to get more out of their demo. I proposed a collaborative approach to them which I've never tried before. It turned out to be very good for them, so maybe something to try?.  

The typical and IMO ineffective product demo

It is a product owner, or someone else, that do the demo and guides through the product increment, with some feedback along the way... But: 

• Very low utilization of the brain power in the room. Basically one person showing and the rest listening - if they don't fall asleep, and that risk increases with the number of people in the demo.
• You are missing the untrained eye moment. You do only have one chance to see the mistakes of a first time user... Don't destroy it by showing the right path first.
• You learn much more if you are active and do things for yourself. So much of the demo will be forgotten by your stakeholders when they get the product live in production.

The Collaborative Demo 

So I suggested another approach for the demo to this company, addressing the points above. I call it Collaborative Demo:

1. Put all done stories on a demo board. This will enable collaboration and create transparency. All stories are untested in the beginning, and the goal with the Collaborative Demo is of course to have all stories tested in the end.
2. The audience/stakeholder divides itself into groups of max 3 persons (or individual), with the product increment runnable for each group (like on a laptop). 
3. Every group grabs one story (untested should be picked first) at a time and tests it without any instructions. Team members observes where they have problems and collect feedback, and guides when needed.
4. The group puts the story back on the demo board again, in the right column. And grabs a new story.

This approach was very much appreciated by the team and its stakeholders. Maybe worth an experiment? If you try: Please share your experiences, and any potential improvements.