Your Demo Will Fail Today

Demo-fail is fascinating to me. There is a reason they call it Murphy's law rather than Murphy's rule or Murphy's maybe, you can and should depend on failure. Doing so will increase your chances of saving yourself at the worst possible moment.

Murphy's law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

To start off this discussion here are some of my favorite demo failures.

1. Apple:
Apple's demo failed when it was unable to load a browser window on the new iPhone 4 and Steve was stopped from being able to do the first Facetime demo.

"I'm sorry guys, I don't know what's going on," he said to the crowd of analysts and developers. "Scott got any suggestions?" he asked. Someone heckled from the crowd, "Verizon!" Everyone laughed, and Steve Jobs replied "We're actually on Wi-Fi here."

The thing that is fascinating about this demo failure was the amount of flawless practice that had been put into the demo previously. Steve Jobs and the Apple team had spent hundreds of man hours if not thousands testing the demo, practicing on stage, and going through the process to ensure it would be perfect. The root cause? They had not anticipated over 570 Wi-Fi connections in the room that would bring the network connection to it's knees.

2. Microsoft:
Recently, the Microsoft surface demo failed badly when the Internet Explorer was unable to browse pages "smoothly", actually not at all. It will make you cringe watching it, but props to Steven Sinofsky for handling himself well. You will also see him run at (0:59) to grab a replacement surface tablet to continue the demo.

3. HireVue:
Like any growing startup many of the members had slaved away to put insane hours and prep into an epic digital disruption customer conference and product feature release. The executives were up until midnight the night before going through live demos over and over again on stage with lighting and the full experience for the next day. Then at midnight one of the critical laptops with the mobile demo software failed. The mobile demo was a core part of the conference. The laptop could not be booted and engineering had to scramble late into the night to update a new laptop for the demo. The new laptop lacked the performance of the demo laptop and during the live demo a lag was produced between the CEO's iPhone swiping and the projector. Keep in mind this demo had been practiced multiple times with flawless execution previously.

Tips for success:
How do you fight the bear of Murphy's law? The thing that helps the most is to depend on failure absolutely.

Your demo WILL fail today. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to respond?

I have had many personal demo failures that have been epic, video links breaking during presentations, cloud instances that NEVER go down crashing, etc... I think planning on failure ensures the best response to it. Notice with Microsoft they had a second tablet ready to go if the first one failed for any reason, same with Apple (unfortunately switching phones had no impact since it was a WiFi issue).

1. Screencast the demo.
This is painful to do instead, it may seem fake, but it is much better than no demo at all so consider it. A screencast is still believable for your audience and that way there is a guaranteed fall back plan. If AWS burns to the ground I can still play my video and speak to it. This reminds me of lip syncing celebrities :)

2. Demo redundancy:
The demo device must have redundancy. If you are demoing from a laptop, tablet, or smart phone having a backup that is demo ready and tested can prevent the possibility. When I worked for Intel/Micron we had million dollar robots and machines for the automated wafer handling in the fab. Even those devices with excessive redundancy would fail and break entire FOUPs of wafers. Chips fry, memory fails, disks crash, network connections fail, OS's become unbootable.

3. Don't update ANYTHING before the demo:
Do not update ANYTHING once your demo is working. Not your OS, your programs, security updates, nothing. Ensure the exact same state is in play during the demo as it was during the practice. Updates, though typically good, can break so many things. The Java Virtual Machine you relied on will crash now, the OS you depended on will no longer boot, the hardware failure you didn't know was pending will present itself, etc...

I hope your demo doesn't ever fail, unfortunately at some point it will, and hopefully you will take it in stride like the examples above and transition flawlessly to your plan B.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Here are some of my more popular posts at a glance: