I attend too many a lot of demos.

Over the years, I’ve observed that engineers have a tendency to jump into complex solutions without providing sufficient context first.

When confronted with this approach, audiences often disengage, especially people leaders who can be several steps removed from technical implementation details.

It’s frustrating to see a great solution not get the reaction it deserves.

Here’s the thing. Generally speaking, people have a low tolerance for complexity. Senior people leaders, in particular, are already drinking from a firehose and often struggling to somehow tame and orchestrate an overwhelming level of complexity.

The key to making complexity engaging is justification. If you take a few minutes at the start of your demo to justify the subsequent complexity, your audience will be significantly more tolerant and perhaps even genuinely interested.

How do you justify complexity? It’s simple. Start your demos by addressing the following question:

What problem are you trying to solve?

WPAYTTS.

Someone should make silicone bracelets with that or something.

There’s a directly proportional relationship between (1) how effectively and comprehensively you describe the problem, and (2) how interested in the solution (and willing to to grapple with complexity) your audience is.

Demos are often time-constrained. Sometimes you have to cut corners. Do not cut this one. Always describe the problem.

You can provide additional details downstream. If you’ve adequately justified the solution by describing the severity of the problem it’s intended to address, people will inquire about implementation details organically.

You can use this simple outline as a starting point:

  • The problem
  • The solution
  • The impact

The majority of demos I attend spend 95% of their allotted time on the solution. A distribution that approaches an even split between these three phases will often be more effective.

I often engage in RDD, rage-driven development (as opposed to resume-driven development). Consequently, I tend to be intimately familiar with (and furious about), the problem. I find complaining about it at length to a more or less captive (and interested) audience oddly cathartic, and there’s no better way to whet their appetites for a solution.