We learned in the very early days to treat everything as a PR opportunity with the customer. So the showcase is a big thing for us. We run showcases every Tuesday. We prepare the demo environment with real-world data, put together an entertaining narrative that introduces and connects the new features for users, and rehearse it all a few times to ensure the showcase is a valuable and meaningful experience for the customer.
One of our recent clients is a business entrepreneur. We built his e-commerce idea into a minimum viable product over 8 weeks so he had something to show investors, hopefully wow them and help him close funding. After a few weeks something unexpected happened. The showcase got turned on its head. Rather than demonstrate new features to the customer, the customer started demonstrating the latest version of the product back to us! He was able to do this easily because he sat with us in the lab for 3 or 4 days a week. He was constantly involved, previewing emerging functionality and providing feedback as we built out stories in vertical slices, sharing his latest insights, sketching out new ideas and always discussing options. By demonstrating to us, he was progressively building a more compelling pitch to take to investors. Using the product to actually show the business mechanics together with the user and merchant retail experiences carried much more weight with investors than using a presentation deck to explain what these things would be like.
The customer was in front of different investors every week so it was exciting to get his feedback from each pitch. To make a bigger impact we ended up building a time machine into the administration console. As he demonstrated users entering deals at different times, he was able to show how the deal mechanic changed with volume and then travel through time to when the deal closed and onto fulfillment and payment reconciliation. He told us this made a well-practiced presentation even more slick with a sort of time-lapsed experience of the full retail life cycle for different users.
