How to Prepare for a Demo

One of our communities, the Tech Building Cohort, is built around demo calls where members actively share what they’re working on. These guidelines are here to help you prepare to demo your work, whether for one of our community calls, in the workplace, or when pitching your product. They are designed for demoing tech projects over a screen share but you can adapt many of the principles for other kinds of demo.

How to prepare for a demo

1. Prepare all the environments you will need to show, such as your browser, emulator, terminal, database, IDE, chat window etc.
2. If you have a large screen, for best results increase your font size and/or magnification so everyone can see what’s on your screen clearly
3. Test the exact workflow you plan to demo
   1. Make sure your expected behavior is well defined
   2. Test that your project works as you expect on the exact workflow you plan to demo
   3. Fix any bugs on that workflow before the demo, replan your demo flow to avoid showing the bugs, or deliberately show and explain known bugs
   4. Make sure you can complete your demo in the time available to you. In the Tech Building Cohort we expect individual demos to be around 2 to 3 minutes long. In other situations, make sure you know how long you will have to complete your demo, if possible!
   5. Remember the goal is not necessarily to present something perfect, but to avoid being surprised by unexpected bugs during the demo
4. Before joining a call where you will be demoing, close unnecessary distractions such as Slack or emails that could interfere with your demo or risk exposing confidential messages
5. Test your microphone (and camera if you plan to use one). You want to be as clear as possible during the demo
6. Check your internet connection. Try to position yourself where you have the best possible connection, especially if you have slower internet
7. Prepare notes about what you want to say during the demo
8. Make sure you know how to share your screen in the meeting software being used for the demo. For the Tech Building Cohort we use Zoom, see this help article from Zoom

How to give the actual demo

• While presenting, speak aloud about how and why you ‘re doing things
• Explain what each step is doing as you work through your demo flow
• If you also want to show code, explain relevant lines and what they do. Try to link them back to the UI you’ve shown so even non-coders can understand what you’re doing

If you are demoing a hardware project

These guidelines are written primarily for software projects. If you want to demo a hardware project the principles are similar, but also bear in mind:

• To show a hardware project you need to prepare your physical setup more carefully:
  • Switch off any virtual background or blur effects so attendees can see the physical object you’re demoing
  • Clear any background clutter you don’t want attendees to see
  • If your hardware is too big or heavy to hold in your hands, make sure your camera has a wide enough field of view to show it properly
• If it is difficult to setup your hardware project within view of your computer, an alternative option is to pre-record a video of your project and show that on your screen

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