How did AI help me deliver the best client demo possible?

Imagine this—you are building a product MVP for two users: a teacher and students. These users are to work together to develop annual goals for students, which they will try to work on during the semester. Both groups of users use two separate applications, and progress towards achieving this goal is measured using teacher feedback and student self-assessment.

You are in the final phase of beta testing, which means production deployment to your end users. You have already had a few demos and tests with target users, and you have obtained valuable feedback on various increments of both applications, but you have not yet had the opportunity to present both solutions fully connected to your stakeholders (and the client). And now the question - how to do it, to encapsulate 4 months of teamwork in an hour meeting? And get a blessing, but above all, is it valuable feedback?

This is the challenge we set for ourselves as a development team, and in addition to joint discussions, ChatGPT helped us.

ChaGPT Helpline

The last demo is on the calendar. We call chatGPT, and I explain to him through a prompt:

we are finishing the project, and in order to close the scope of the MVP phase and move on to beta testing and sales - we need to get the green light from the stakeholders (client-side teachers, other Product Owners, CTO, CEO) - and that it really was a great team!),
we have an hour, maybe 1.5 hours, to explain how the application behaves
we need to keep the stakeholders and devs engaged
I am looking for alternatives to the standard demo form (we don't want to bore anybody).

The answer was long, and I will tell you about how we planned our demo in detail soon. However, I will detail specific answers from the Chat that confirmed the direction of my thinking about this demo, namely:

So I came back to the team, and we confirmed what we had been thinking for a long time: let's do an interactive workshop!

A short planning demo, and off we go!

We sat down together as a development team and planned our hour-long demo meeting with stakeholders. We really wanted our stakeholders to experience both products to the fullest, and we thought this was the first step in the beginning of "knowledge sharing."

Based on ChatGPTt's suggestions, we decided to:

pair participants in advance, assigning each person in the pair an appropriate role: teacher and student,
separate "rooms" for each pair,
prepare tasks to be performed as part of testing both products (we prepared the tasks in the form of instructions for each pair),
develop a simple MIRO board where each pair could leave their feedback and thoughts on the tested flow.

We organised everything remotely, using channels (rooms) on Discord, which was a natural choice for us, because it is the client's communication channel.

Demo - progress and conclusions

The session began with a brief presentation of the Agenda demo—this time, we skipped the presentation and discussion of the latest changes. We wanted the participants to start playing with the products immediately.

10 of the planned 16 people came to the meeting (Yup, that was a difficulty we didn't foresee). We informed the participants about their pairs and roles. After giving each person task instructions, we divided the pairs into rooms.

The instructions with tasks were prepared for a given role. This meant that the person who was our “teacher” had to perform a set of tasks in one application and the person who was a “student” in the other. Since the prepared solutions are focused on the collaboration of these two users, some tasks require cooperation between these roles—just like in school life. Each of the five pairs had the same scope of tasks to perform.

The tasks had to reflect the processes that teachers and students were soon to implement in our applications. Hence, our "students" tested, among other things, the process of logging in with a QR code, co-creating goals with the teacher and implementing self-assessment . "Teachers" tested, among other things, generating these QR codes, co-creating goals with students, or exchanging feedback .

We left our testing group the choice of writing down their thoughts either on an ongoing basis or after the tests were completed. We used the MIRO board for this purpose, which looked like this:

Completing all the tasks from the instructions took from 10 to 20 minutes - those who already knew the applications a bit better came through the applications and completed the tasks more efficiently. It was also interesting that everyone completed the tests without significant problems and shared their thoughts in an open, approximately 20-minute session in MIRO.

WHAT WENT GREAT:

planning demo was short, and the instructions for each role were clear - as evidenced by the time it took to complete the tasks and feedback from the participants
we collected valuable comments from the participants - and we decided to implement the most important ones before beta testing,
we finished in 1 hour,
we got the blessing from the stakeholders and clear satisfaction with the results,
absolutely everyone got involved: programmers, designers, teachers, company owners. The observations were varied (after all, everyone paid attention to something different), but all of them were accurate and valuable.

What went so-so and what I would change

I would try to prepare instructions that would require even more independence - to verify better the intuitiveness of the designed processes in the applications,
at the end of the meeting, we held an open session with conclusions, and unfortunately, not everyone had time to express their opinion (and they wanted to). Next time I would divide the participants into two groups, e.g. teachers and students, divide them into rooms and ask them to prepare statements with the most important points/thoughts,
each pair carried out the same range of tasks. It is possible that a better solution would be for each group to test a completely different area of the application, e.g., one group would use the reward system, and the other would create a goal.

Summary

Organising this interactive demo with the help of ChatGPT turned out to be a bullseye. With the support of AI, we managed to plan and run a meeting that engaged all participants and provided us with valuable feedback. Using the workshop format allowed stakeholders to fully experience both applications, which was crucial to gaining their acceptance.

The demo was well organised, and the prepared tasks were spot on, as confirmed by the positive feedback from the participants. The comments we collected allowed us to make necessary corrections before the beta testing phase. Although several aspects could be improved, the event's overall success strengthened our belief that this approach to project presentations was effective and inspiring for the entire team.