This week was exhausting!
I hit two big milestones for projects I’ve been working on for a long time.
I finished the second of two React courses for egghead.io
and Jamund Ferguson and I gave a demo and the
announcement of paypal-scripts at work. And it
went super well! Hooray!
The paypal-scripts demo was a big deal for me because I know the impact that
paypal-scripts can have on JavaScript engineers at PayPal and I want it to be
well represented so folks will give it time. It also is a big deal because I’ve
been working on it for so long and it’s always good for folks to know and
appreciate that what you’ve been working on is worthwhile 😅.
Knowing how important it is that this demo went well, I worked hard to prepare
so it would. I thought I’d share a few of the things I did to make sure that
this worked out. I hope you find it helpful in making your demos better in the
future!
Start with “Why”
If you haven’t had the chance to read the book
“Start with Why” I highly
suggest you give it a read (or listen as I did). It will change the way you
approach communicating with others to be more effective in getting your message
across.
What does this mean for paypal-scripts? Well, we started by establishing the
problem that paypal-scripts was built to solve. We talked about how at PayPal we
have thousands of configuration files for tools like ESLint, Babel, and
Webpack. Extrapolating from that (and other factors), we determined that it
costs PayPal over $1 million per year configuring tools over and over again. 😱
By starting things out this way, it made the need really clear.
Know your audience
It helps even more if you can relate the problem to the people you’re
illustrating. It almost makes the people listening think: “We really need a
solution to this problem!” To help them feel this way you need to speak to
them in terms they understand and about things that are important to them. In
our case we included both the developer productivity as well as the problem in
terms of money because those are things that are important to the audience to
whom we presented.
Make things as quantitative as possible
It can often be hard to measure technical things, but put forth an effort to
make estimates. This puts things into perspective for folks who may not be as
familiar with the problem space. Amount of money is often a good number for most
folks 🤑
Pre-record any demos
The first part of your presentation starts by establishing and getting sympathy
for the problem and the demo shows off the solution. Nothing ruins your
efforts to capture your audience more than a demo that goes wrong. So if
possible, make a recording of the demo. Edit out all the fluff. I highly suggest
following the guidelines in
this free egghead.io course
from John Lindquist about creating great
screencasts.
Making sure the demo goes off without a hitch is one reason to pre-record it.
Another reason is it respects the audience’s time and keeps their attention. For
example, my demo of paypal-scripts was 12 minutes long recorded. Giving the same
demo live would have been well over twice that time. There’s a tendency to
ramble when you’re talking about stuff like this. If you pre-record it, you can
edit that unnecessary and distracting rambling out and focus on what you really
want to get across. Doing this will help you avoid this:
That said, make sure that you’ll be able to deliver a live demo in case folks
have questions about things not covered in the recording, or if people want to
verify that what your demo is not just smoke and mirrors 😉
Practice
Before we gave the presentation, Jamund and I ran through it. We discovered some
technical difficulties with the presentation that would have been real problems
during the presentation. We also noticed some deficiencies in the slides and
thought of more things we could say to clarify important points. When we
actually gave the presentation we nailed it. Things went super well because we
had already done it before.
Conclusion
**You can be the best developer in the world, but if nobody knows what value you
bring to the company it wont do you or your career a whole lot of use.**Make
sure to maximize the impact of your communication by preparing well for demos
like this. Good luck!
