demo-script

Demo Script Skill

Feature-tour demos die politely: "here's the dashboard, here's settings, here's our AI" — a museum walk through someone else's house. The demo that lands is a story about the audience's day: their actual workflow, with its familiar pain, walked through the product — pain first (recruit the [deck-narrative-arc](../deck-narrative-arc/SKILL.md) tension), the wow moment inside the first three minutes (attention is front-loaded; demos that save the best for last perform it to phones), and every click scripted on a rehearsed golden path with the contingency kit standing by — because live demos break, and the difference between a stumble and a disaster is whether the recovery was pre-built.

What This Skill Produces

• The storyline — the audience-persona's task, start to done, with the pain named before the product answers it
• The click-path script — every step: the click, the talk-track line, the thing to point at
• The wow placement — the moment chosen for this audience, landed by minute three
• The contingency kit — the reset state, the backup recording, the narration bridges for every known fragility

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The audience and their workflow — who's watching (the user? their boss? an exec who'll never touch it?) and the task they actually do; the demo walks their Tuesday, and exec audiences get outcomes-dense, click-light versions
• The wow candidate — the moment that reliably drops jaws for this audience type (the migration that takes seconds, the answer that used to take a day) — chosen deliberately, not discovered mid-demo
• The product's fragilities, honestly — what's slow, what's flaky, what needs data seeded; the kit is built from the real list
• The demo environment — live product, staging, or sandbox; and whether the data in it tells the story (demo data is a script character — "Acme Corp, 47 orders" beats "Test test 123")

Framework: The Script Rules

1. Their workflow is the plot: the demo opens in the audience's world — "it's Monday, the report's due, and the data's in four systems" — and every feature appears as the answer to a step in that story. Features that don't serve the storyline don't appear (the counterintuitive discipline: the best demos show less).
2. Pain before relief, wow by minute three: thirty seconds on the familiar pain (nods are the goal), then the product enters — and the chosen wow lands early, because the first three minutes get 100% attention and it buys the next fifteen. Build-up demos are performing their finale to an audience that left.
3. Script the clicks and the words together: each step is click + line + pointer ("click Import — 'and this is the part that used to take your team a day' — watch the counter"). The talk-track carries the meaning; silent clicking makes the audience do the interpreting, and they interpret slower than you click.
4. Demo data is cast, not filler: named, realistic, sized to impress honestly ("your actual order volume") — and reset-able in one step, because the second demo of the day inherits the first one's mess without a reset ritual.
5. The contingency kit is the professional's tell: the known fragilities each get a bridge ("while this loads — the thing to know is…" — narration absorbs up to ~10 seconds of anything), the backup recording sits one tab away (switched to with composure: "let me show you this on the recording — same flow"), and the reset state is verified before the meeting, not after the break. Demos break; audiences forgive breaks handled calmly and remember panics forever.

Output Format

Demo Script: [product] → [audience persona] — [T] min

The Storyline

[Their task, start → done · the pain, named · where each shown capability answers a step]

The Click Path

| # | Click/action | Talk-track line | Point at |

|---|---|---|---|

[The wow marked ★ at its minute · the skippable-if-short section marked]

The Contingency Kit

[Fragility → bridge line · the backup recording's tab · the one-step reset · the pre-meeting verification checklist]

Quality Checks

• [ ] The demo opens in the audience's workflow, not the product's navigation
• [ ] The wow lands by minute three
• [ ] Every click has its talk-track line — no silent stretches
• [ ] Demo data is realistic, named, and one-step resettable
• [ ] Every known fragility has a rehearsed bridge and the backup is loaded

Anti-Patterns

• [ ] Do not tour features — the storyline earns each capability its scene or it stays home
• [ ] Do not save the wow for the finale — front-loaded attention is the demo's only guaranteed asset
• [ ] Do not demo on unseeded data — "Test test 123" breaks the story's spell mid-sentence
• [ ] Do not improvise around breakage — the bridge lines exist because live composure is a rehearsal product
• [ ] Do not show the exec the click-depth — altitude-match the version to the audience or lose them at Settings