General Demo Strategies

1. Don't apologize or minimize the work you've done, in comparison to some future ideal. instead, merely explain your process, current state, and future plans.

For example: rather than saying "We still don't have the phones talking to each other right now, which is disappointing because we really wanted to get that done," we'd want to say something like, "For now, we decided to punt on the difficult problem of phone-to-phone communication and file streaming, in favor of focusing on getting our user experience and interface for local playback nailed down first."

2. Anticipate questions and know how to answer them confidently, even if it's all hypothetical right now.

My mentor asked me, "So what happens when you drop someone off and they leave the group playlist session? How is this process different when that user is the main host, vs. someone else who's joined the room?" I didn't necessarily have a great response. We want to anticipate questions like this, especially for the Germany demo, and have solid answers or at least ideas of how these things are going to work: "If the departing user is the host then another user is prompted to sync to the Bluetooth..." "The currently playing song is cached on the sync'd phone so playback won't stop even if the owner of a song leaves..." Again, even if it's all hypothetical, it's good to have ideas and present them confidently.

3. Present a specific use case and real-life situation to motivate your flow through the application.

If you don't do this, the presentation often ends up feeling like a boring feature tour from a bunch of engineers: "So you can click on the 'New Jam' button, and start a new playlist, and then you can add a song from your library, or delete a song..." It's much more engaging to have a real-world scenario: "So Audrey's driving Jay and I out to a team dinner, and we want to share what kind of music we're into on the way..." This ties into what Audrey suggested in the "Prepare for presentation" issue, about possibly role-playing a specific scenario.