#363 It’s Demo Day
Friday Ship #363 | September 1st, 2023
This week we had our first Product Demo Meeting. And not taking anything away from the post – it was Awesome!
Folks have been asking to see more work in progress, or what cool things we are building in the Product circle. We have Slack channels, and squad/team meetings where work is discussed but there was no space to come together and share the great work we’ve been doing.
I’ve known from the past that meetings or get-togethers like that can be really motivating, and are generally full of energy. Who doesn’t like to see new features, and get excited to use them?
What is our Product Demo Call?
In order to facilitate our demo, we set up a Standup meeting in Parabol to collect everyone’s projects and make it easy for others to either check it out before the call or to leave an artifact for others that can’t join. I kept reminding people to check it out, and add their demos, as things like that can easily get lost.
Then on the day and time of the call we all got together, and went through all of the items. Facilitating the meeting was fairly easy. Just handing it off to the person next in line and then asking to see if there were any questions or thoughts.
Why a Product Demo?
There is various reasons why we or others would want to do a product demo.
- Especially in teams that work together virtually it can help to bond, and connect individuals and teams closer together. Otherwise we tend to stay in our silos, and not see what else is going on. Slack is so fast paced, that no one can keep up with everything.
- It helps to get feedback from others, that don’t regularly see your work. Diversity is a great thing, even in having multiple different views and opinions about a new feature can help see something that you didn’t.
- Demos also boost morale. As I mentioned above it gives teams the opportunity to present their work, and show the cool things they’ve been thinking about for a while. On a normal basis this doesn’t happen. Work gets shipped, and then it’s out there.
Tips for Facilitating a great Demo
- Keep it slow and easy. Help everyone to go slow and explain things in a simple fashion.
- Give a little backstory. If it is a bigger feature or project, maybe share a little story of why you looked into it and what you want to get out of it.
- Allow for various presentation styles. Not everyone enjoy speaking or showing things in front of a either the whole company or even more people usual. Make it possible so that they can share things later in a video or in writing.
- Leave space for questions and thoughts.
- Make it fun and engaging.
And last but not least some screenshots from our demo and some new features we’ll be releasing soon 🙌
Metrics
We continue to see a seasonal dip in our metrics, but weekly meetings are starting to ramp back up as summer comes to a close.
This week we…
…shared internally a new outlook on how to expand beyond our current tools. We’ve been starting to look beyond the Agile market and how we can test hypothesis in an easy fashion, to see where we’ll go next.
…worked on some fun new and experimental features. As part of Slack week, some engineers worked on projects that they can’t get to usually.
…started Role Feedback Retro’s in our Exco Team. Always good to look at our roles and see were we can do better or maybe change a few things.
Next week we’ll
…get back to our regularly scheduled sprint work.
…start a phased rollout of our AI discussion prompt feature.
Marcus Wermuth
Marcus is leading our Product Team as the Head of Product Development. He is very passionate about virtual leadership, and has been writing and speaking about it online. Most recently he worked at Remote, and before that for almost 7 years at Buffer as engineer and engineering manager. He is very passionate about coffee, food, music and lately running. Marcus lives and works from Munich, Germany.