From Product Demo to Story 🤌

You’ve built something great. Now show it in a way that clicks with your audience.

A Quick Reflection

How many product demos have you seen that left you thinking:

Wait… what exactly is this for?
Why was this built again?
I don’t understand where this is leading.
I’m lost in all the steps.
Who is going to use this?

Or worse — how many times have you demoed a feature and ended up drowning in a flood of questions?

If that’s happened to you, you’re not alone.
When a demo focuses solely on how it works, but skips over why it matters, it becomes confusing rather than convincing.

From Clicking Around to Telling a Story

A while back, we decided to change how we run sprint reviews. Rather than static updates on what is done and what is next, we changed the format by focusing only on short product demos — just 5-10 minutes to show what was built that week. It felt like a great idea. It gave visibility to the team’s progress, and it opened up space for more cross-functional roles to present.

But in practice?
Most demos turned into someone screen sharing and saying things like:

Now I click here… then I open this page… and this takes me here…

Demos were followed by 10–15 minutes of confused questions:

Who is this for?
How does it help them?
How can a user achieve X goal?

Some presenters felt overwhelmed or defensive. Others asked their managers not to present again.
And this didn’t just happen in sprint reviews — I saw it in senior stakeholder meetings too.

So, what was missing?
Not confidence. Not feature delivery. Just storytelling.

---

The D.E.M.O. Model: A Storytelling Framework for Product Demos

Great demos aren’t about showing every click.
They’re about making people care.

Here’s a simple, repeatable structure to bring clarity and alignment into every product demo, especially when stakes are high.

You’re reading the Prime edition of Product Voyagers — full access to playbooks, tools, and expert takes starts here.