Feb 12, 2026 · 4 min read
Most managers start a presentation by talking about themselves. They spend the first three minutes explaining their background, the history of the market, and why they decided to build their product.
This is a massive mistake. When you delay showing the actual software, the audience starts making assumptions. They assume that if it takes you this long to get to the product, the product must be bad.
You have exactly 15 seconds to put your product on the screen. Do not talk about what the software does in the abstract. Put it on a display and let the audience experience it immediately.
Once the product is on the screen, do not just read a list of features. You need to tell a story.
Come up with a specific, highly relatable scenario. Walk the audience through the exact steps a real user would take to solve a painful problem. As you do this, narrate exactly what is happening on the screen. Describe where your mouse is moving and what you are clicking.
This technique keeps your words perfectly synchronized with the visuals. It prevents you from needing to read from a set of notes, which inevitably makes you sound like a robot.
Every memorable demo has a "wow" moment. This is a specific feature or action that makes the audience physically react with a gasp or a nod.
These moments usually happen when the software suddenly empowers the user in an unexpected way. Think of the first time you ordered a ride from your phone and saw the car moving on a map in real time. That is a wow moment.
You cannot guess what your wow moments are in isolation. You have to practice your demo in front of different groups of people. Watch their faces. When you see their eyes light up, you have found the moment you need to highlight on stage.
Amateurs let their computers distract the audience. Professionals control every pixel on the screen.
Before you present, you must eliminate all technical distractions. Create a brand new user profile on your computer specifically for presenting. Hide your taskbar. Hide your browser bookmarks. Turn off every single desktop notification and chat alert. Make sure you know exactly how to make your browser completely full screen.
The audience should only see your product. They should never see your personal search history or a pop-up message from a coworker.
If you do enough live demos, the technology will eventually fail you. The conference Wi-Fi will go down, or your staging server will crash at the exact wrong moment. You must build a safety net.
Record three or four short videos of your product working perfectly. Save these video files locally on your hard drive. If the internet breaks, you can smoothly switch to the video and continue narrating the story. If you are doing a high-stakes presentation, you should also have a second laptop fully booted up and ready to go in case your primary machine dies.
If you hit a bug or a glitch during the live presentation, do not point it out.
Managers often panic and draw attention to the mistake, trying to explain why it happened. This only highlights the failure. Most people in the audience will not even notice a small glitch if you keep your voice steady and simply move to the next screen. Stay calm and just keep going.
Building a great product is only half the battle. The other half is proving to the world that it deserves to exist. A demo is not a technical manual. It is a performance. By keeping your digital environment clean, getting straight to the point, and planning for inevitable failures, you remove the friction and let the product speak for itself.