Sprint demo is a stage

Over the years KMS established a quite unique way of doing spring demos. We will run an org wide sprint demo session for 1.5 hours every other Tuesday, where each sub team will submit what they want to demo. But we arbitrarily limit each demo to be within 6 minutes: shorter is fine, longer is not allowed. There was a period that some teams could not demo anything meaningful. They said their projects were special; they needed longer time than two weeks to show progress….Then we started to ask each sub team to plan their sprint based on “what value can you demo to stakeholders in two weeks.” - a classical Amazon working backwards way. We found the teams that could not demo meaningfully were usually the somewhat dysfunctional ones. The teams who did well in demo used the opportunity to show case their achievements and get feedbacks from stakeholders. But isn’t six-minute too short for a meaningful demo? Indeed a good demo requires planning, and presentation skills, but most importantly it requires deep understanding of what stakeholders need: how can they be delighted by your demo? Some engineers would spend the 6 minutes going through a code review, or a design document. The worse one was to spend the 6 minutes on PowerPoint slides. Some engineers would spend the time on the subtleties of a deep end stuff … listeners got lost in the first 2 minutes. Eventually we come up a mental model for good sprint demos. 1. Know your audience and work backwards. “Why” is your problem worth solving? Why should they care? Tailor your content and language for the audience 2. What is your main message? Get it out up front: it maybe the result: “I reduced the latency of API X by 30%, from a to b.” Or it maybe the problem: “the most annoying ops pain of KMS is xxx … I made it gone …” 3. Give the context (Big Picture), use data to explain more on “what” is done, less than “how” it is done; be engaged with your listeners For the managers: sometimes I would spend an hour to help engineers do a great sprint demo in 6 minutes. Is it worth it? Totally! If you think the two weeks sprint as the preparation for a show, the sprint demo is the show! This is where engineers learn how to present and articulate their work’s customer value concisely, precisely and sometimes dramatically. Amazon’s most important leadership principle is Customer Obsession. During a sprint demo, the listeners are our customers - serve them well, delight them! “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” William Shakespeare