This is an excerpt from my upcoming Developer Marketing and Developer Relations book. Be sure to subscribe to this newsletter and be notified when pre-sales are available.

We’ve all met people who can turn a story about meeting the Pope into a laborious, tiring affair that has you scanning for the exits. At the same time, we’ve also met people who can turn a story about chewing bubblegum into a hilarious, intoxicating experience that pulls you in and can entertain you for hours.

Great Developer Advocates and Product Marketing Managers almost always fall into the latter category.

I’m going to teach you the secrets of a great product demo. I’ve delivered product demos on stage with countless BigTech execs past and present. There are two tricks to a great product demo, whether you're doing it live on stage in front of tens or thousands of people, or in front of a camera for YouTube or your website:

• A captivating scenario that either inspires or amuses
• An engaging story about a real customer problem with a start, middle, and end

But the preface to all of this is something very important that seems to be lost on the many keynotes I’ve seen of late from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. The demo must be real. No faking. No videos. Do it live, on stage or in front of the camera, without a net.

The scenario

A good demo scenario is a small slice of life that resonates immediately and deeply with your audience. When you first take the stage and describe your scenario (for example, “Today, I’m going to show you how development and operations teams work together to prepare for Black Friday...”), everyone in the audience should be able to relate to and appreciate what’s going to happen next.

Remember, you aren’t going to solve all their problems on that stage. Your job is to show them that you understand the kinds of challenges they face daily.

You can get ideas from customer scenarios (talk to your Sales and Customer Success teams) and engineers. Be sure to avoid contrived or overly idealized scenarios. At the same time, avoid overly trivial scenarios. Socialize your ideas with your product and engineering team, your customers, and members of the marketing and sales teams.

Is your scenario about a front-end developer who is racing against a deadline? Or is it a database developer trying to speed up performance in time for a huge rush on Black Friday? Maybe it’s a backend developer trying to get ready to launch a new online game.

In the end, you want to be memorable. So, your scenario should either inspire or amuse:

• Inspire: how can your product help people achieve something extraordinary? For example, your database can handle enough transactions per second that equals WalMart and Amazon combined on a typical Black Friday. These are ideal for launch keynotes and customer presentations.
• Amuse: invite audience participation in something frivolous and lighthearted. For example, maybe you have a chatbot that hilariously mixes up coffee orders until you use your product to fix it. These are fantastic for meetups and community events.

Think of the scenario as the stage on which you’ll work your magic. Identify a scenario that many of your target audience will relate to (and be willing to pay to address), and start your demo by telling them about this scenario and what the hero is up against. Set the stage.

The story

Every good story has a protagonist–the hero. And every hero goes on a journey. In your case, the target user is your hero, and the problem they’re trying to solve is the journey. These are the stars of the story. Not your product! You may want to jump into features and benefits, but you can’t do that until you describe the WHY first.

The next thing every good story has is a transformation. In a novel or film, the most important part of the story isn’t what the protagonist does to get from point A to point B; it’s how the protagonist changes on the journey between point A and point B.

Luke Skywalker transforms from a simple farm boy with lofty dreams but filled with self-doubt to the hero who saves the galaxy and defeats the villain by learning to trust himself. We all love pew-pew-pew and lightsabers, but the difference between a mediocre movie and one that has stood the test of time for three generations is that we root for (and ultimately believe) Luke’s transformation.

In a product demo, you will show how the hero’s fate will change because of the products you are shipping. Focus on only 2-3 capabilities. Now is not the time to regurgitate your entire feature list. You’ve chosen a great scenario, so concentrate on a small number of feature areas that solve the problem.

The key in the transformation stage is to build slowly. Choose features that will garner applause from your target audience. Build your outline so that you progressively show more amazing features. Don’t lead with your most important feature.

Causely has a phenomenal product that delivers autonomous service reliability in cloud-native environments. Fortune 100 customers, including big banks, love them. They start their demos with a Jira ticket, indicating that the scenario will be about using the insight their product delivers, not merely identifying a problem.

As you’re showing each feature, tell the hero’s story. Explain how their fate changes with each new feature you show. Show how a team can work together across organizational boundaries using your product. Or maybe how your database can scale and help them reach more lucrative customers.

At Causely, the demo takes them from a Jira ticket that raises a problem and assigns an owner, toward a journey starting with the types of problems that can be identified, the integration between their tool and systems of record that already exist in an organization, and the analytics that show how much a customer’s systems have improved since the introduction of their product.

The finale

And finally, you reveal the “aha” moment: what success looks like. Faster deployment. More resilient databases. Scalable servers. Whatever the case may be, now is when you demonstrate the fully functional scenario and recap what you showed.

You took the hero from a position of self-doubt and thanks to your product put them in a position of confident triumph.

Causely's product demo tells the story not of a nerdy tool with a bunch of cool features but of a product that launches an organization's transformation into one that is more resilient, collaborative, and effective.

Mitigating mistakes and errors during live demos

As I mentioned, keynote demos on stage should be done live. It depresses me whenever I see an obviously canned demo or, worse, a video where someone is pretending to type. Have confidence in your product! Of course, the demo gremlins do exist and the demo gods must be appeased from time to time. I get it. But there are things you can do to protect yourself against the demo gods:

1. Rehearse. The best actors in the world put months of rehearsal into their craft. Nobody shows up on stage or set ready to tackle their nerves and perform. You have to work at it. I can still remember word-for-word my entire demo on stage with Bill Gates from 30 years ago. That’s how much I rehearsed that thing.
2. Have a “shadow” backstage. One year, I did a demo on stage with Steve Ballmer and had someone on my team shadow me backstage. We practiced daily for several hours for two weeks leading up to the keynote. He echoed every one of my mouse movements and keyboard entries. Upon hearing my code word (“peanut butter”) backstage, he knew to instantly switch the KVM to the computer he was shadowing me with.
3. Canned data. If your demo requires live Internet access, assume the Internet connection will be too slow or will drop at some point. Be ready with canned data so you can still show off the features of your product.
4. Have a backup (and one-liners) ready. Developers in the audience will understand if you attempted a live demo and it didn’t go well. Be ready to accept your fate with humility and a little humor, and have a backup machine or scenario ready to go.

Summary

Demos are the pinnacle of the art of Developer Relations. Great Developer Advocates get excited for the challenge and pressure, but nobody is born with an innate ability to deliver an amazing product demo. It takes a lot of preparation and practice to make it look easy.