Blog entry: Weekly Demos Bond and Engage Engineering Remote Teams
Why Demos? As your company grows and your teams become more specialized and disparate, it gets progressively harder to feel like one team working together for a common goal. One of the most effective ways to maintain a cohesive group, create a culture of collaboration and to make sure the left hand knows what the other six hands are doing is to host weekly engineering demos. For teams working remotely or for growing companies with new engineering team members, demos can help any engineering department stay connected by putting names with those new faces.
Consider your audience. There are benefits to having each engineer know what’s going on in the rest of the company, but Engineering Demos should not be a scrum of scrums. Avoid summaries in lieu of demonstrations. This is an opportunity for your staff to show the obstacles they’ve overcome, how they did it and share what they learned in the process. The audience for this session is the other engineers and their managers. They want to see techniques and lessons learned that will help them do their jobs more efficiently.
We continue to refine the process to make sure the engineering staff is getting as much as possible from this session and here are some general guidelines we’ve learned along the way.
Encourage the teams to make the demos short. Two to three minutes is a good length per presentation. If a presenter asks for extra time or a demo must be cut for time either within the presentation or with the Q and A afterwards, consider asking that presenter to do a full session on that topic. If the subject represents a change in technical policy or innovative technology your engineering department is adopting, a brief “teaser trailer” can be a part of your demos, but try not to let it take over the meeting.
Each team should present. If a team does not have content in a week to create a two-minute demo, it may be time to ensure everyone is working on the right things. There are exceptions like being very short-staffed for a week or if most of the work is too similar to the previous week. Giving each team a pass once a month to use at their discretion may keep the content fresh.
Rotate the presenter for each team. Very few software engineers got into programming because they have a passion for giving speeches. One of the tricks to overcoming this common resistance to public speaking is to keep it casual. Some will want to spend more time preparing than others. We see technical mistakes every single week from screen sharing to the state of test environments. Embrace the hiccups.
It’s good for you. Remind your more reluctant engineers that getting comfortable speaking in front of groups is an important part of career advancement whether that person wants to follow more of a managerial track or more of an architectural / technical track. Presenting is a great way to show off technical and leadership skills. Encourage turning on the cameras. The presentations are more engaging with a face, it helps people remember the presenter and goes a long way to bonding teammates.
It’s good for teams. Demos are not intended to be a summary of the teams’ activity for the week, but each teams’ priorities come out along with the coding solutions. This not only has the benefit of sharing the priorities across the engineering organization, but it can also help eliminate redundant work. We’ve seen multiple examples of one of our engineers discovering they can leverage the efforts of one team to get to their solution more quickly.
Prepare an agenda. Like any good meeting, the attendees should know how long they are going to be listening, and the presenters like to know the order. Introduce each person and the topic and encourage discussion. Sprint goals are the ideal starting place for your agenda. Focusing on that plan without significant interruptions during the sprint leads to demos that reflect that plan. Choose presenters and finalize the topics in each Friday morning stand-up. This gives teams time to prepare and keeps the spirit of teamwork by letting them volunteer. The last column in your project management tool (e.g.: Jira, Shortcut) holds a list of suggestions for more specific demo titles. One common exception or addition to the agenda can be an engineer showing something they learned that week while working toward the teams’ goals. Demos that display overcoming an obstacle, mastering a technique, or sharing a new tool or plug-in are often the most engaging demonstrations as confirmed by audience response.
Do it live. Sometimes because of conflicts or time zones, or nervousness, your presenters will want to pre-record their demos. That’s ok, but live presentations are much more interesting. The number of questions the audience asks of the presenter is a great indication of their engagement, and they can only ask questions when the presenters are live. Mix up the recorded demos and the live ones to maintain your audience’s attention. We host our demos at the end of the business day on Fridays. If the demos are engaging, you send everyone into their weekend feeling accomplished and ready to reward themselves for a productive week.
