Executing engaging showcases

Showcases (or Demos) are a must-have tool in an agile team's repertoire, showcases help teams get that all important feedback from software users and product stakeholders at the end of a weekly/bi-weekly development cycle. However, have you ever felt that we are just going through the motions and not getting a lot of engagement from stakeholders? Maybe the business and technology complexity forces a long drawn out timeline which is jading people, or maybe we just haven't paid enough attention to building engagement.

Why should we care about engagement in a Showcase?

Our experience in running successful Agile practices, backed by core principles, has taught us that getting feedback early and often is non-negotiable. It's highly unlikely that an unengaged audience will be able to actively participate and help us get that meaningful early feedback, therefore, it's in the interest of the team building the solution to draw in the users and keep them engaged.

Ideas for building an engaging Showcase

To be completely honest, I have personally struggled with out-of-the-box thinking in this area, since sometimes showcases can be attended by Senior leadership and you don't want to come across as being non-serious. So this short article is more about triggering conversations and soliciting ideas than sharing any pathbreaking ideas of my own. A couple of things that I have seen working well in keeping audiences engaged are:

• Clear and coherent business narrative: Many times the stakeholders in showcases can come from different backgrounds and building this solution isn't their day job (unlike yours), so use a consistent business narrative to bring them back to the business narrative and to illustrate to them how the features being showcased tie back to that business narrative. This is especially important for projects that have a heavier technical component to them, like building a data platform or a backend processing solution.
• Jeopardy, anyone? My colleague, Nimisha Asthagiri recently ran a showcase for our team using a simple and novel concept which helped generate a lot of positive engagement from the audience. (1) She broke down the five areas that we were planning to showcase into five fun worded statements that was purposely kept a little abstract. (2) Then, without sharing any further context, she asked the participants to share their votes for the one(s) they really cared about by using Zoom's annotate feature. This helped us get some real-time feedback about what our audience cares about, got the audience engaged upfront, and then by using the opening slide like a section navigator she was able to generate excitement for the most voted sections.

• Dry runs with the presenters is a good preparation exercise, especially if you have team members who aren't comfortable with presentations and need that extra prep to feel more relaxed during the showcase.
• Short recordings with voiceovers can help circumvent the demo gods that invariably play some mischief during showcases. These short recordings can also be a great tool to get engagement from distributed teams operating in difficult timezones. However, we need to make sure that the quality of the video is clear and there is a voiceover that provides the needed context.

What ideas have you been able to use to engage audiences in showcases?

------

Interested in other book reviews and articles by Jagbir??Here is a quick reference guide.