Working on interesting, complex projects is always stimulating. You learn new things, you watch the product evolve, you feel like you’re contributing. And if you’re lucky enough to lead one, the pride runs deeper still. You feel like you made something useful.
But every project ends. They move through ebbs and flows, stretches of frantic activity and stretches where careful management is the only thing keeping it from tangling. And as a project winds down, you arrive at what is, for me, one of the most stressful moments of the whole thing.
Deploying it? No. Internal testing and QA? Don’t be silly. Users getting their hands on the feature? Not even close.
The most stressful moment, by a distance, is the dreaded presentation in front of the whole company.
Why do I fear it so much? It’s a five-minute demo, done remotely, about something I should be one of the foremost experts on. But you know me by now. Introversion. Impostor syndrome. The fear of sounding like Super Mario through my Italian accent. All of it conspires to make me nervous beforehand.
It’s not my first rodeo, though. This is actually the third time I’ve had to present something I built to the whole company since joining. And this time, I came prepared.
First thing: I know I’ll be nervous. I can already picture the bad night’s sleep, the morning where my stomach is a black hole, the entirely irrational hope that the session will somehow be cancelled or run out of time before my turn. I know these feelings intimately. We’re on a first-name basis. So I plan around them.
Preparation is something I underestimated for a long time with things like this.
Let me start with a principle. I don’t like demos that sound over-rehearsed, or where you can tell the copy is being read aloud. You can always tell. It sounds too perfect, which somehow makes it sound worse. It signals you weren’t confident enough to showcase your own work.
Am I confident? Not at all. But the trick is to sound like I am. It’s a fine balance: be so thoroughly prepared and rehearsed that you come across as natural, spontaneous, like you’re improvising the whole thing. The impression you want to give is “I’m so comfortable with this I can just wing it. Turn up, share my screen, and here’s the best demo you’ll see today.” Far easier said than done.
This particular feature came with a specific problem. It’s visually striking but very low on interaction. Not an ideal setup for a live demo.
My prep started a couple of days before the session. I just began thinking about why we built this feature, what it solved, and where we think it’s heading. I didn’t care about the specifics yet. I wanted to make the concepts mine. Once those were clear, I started thinking about how to frame them for the audience, because these sessions aren’t engineers-only. There’s management, finance, support, sales. I wanted all of them paying attention.
I did this on a Friday afternoon, the last task of the week. I wanted the broad picture clear before the weekend, so it could simmer while I was away. I know my thoughts drift back to these things on their own, and I wanted to use that.
The session was booked for Tuesday, so Monday was meant to be preparation day. In an ideal world. In the real one, Monday was back-to-back calls, unplanned work, and problem-solving, and I only reached the task in the late afternoon. This is where the earlier groundwork paid off. I already knew which points I wanted to hit. I started rehearsing the demo, writing the spiel down while saying it out loud, hoping most of it would sink in. This is the phase where you learn what works and what doesn’t, which parts flow and which ones might trip you up live.
The rehearsing, rewriting and tweaking went on for a couple of hours. I called it a day only once I had something decent in hand. Tomorrow was the day.
Bad night’s sleep. Stomach like an empty pit. The usual false hope that the demo might somehow not happen. But I wasn’t scared. I’d seen all of this coming. I’d manifested it. No time to waste on the distractions, so I just started running through the spiel. Again and again, without reading it. Each pass slightly different, and, naturally, the final run-through the worst of the lot.
The call began, and I’d never seen so many people attending. The new hiring must be going well. Team after team demoed their features while I sat there numb, double-checking my setup and arranging my notes so I could grab them if I froze.
Then it was our turn. I realised neither my lead nor my PM was there to introduce me, both off that day. So I just started. And somehow I was in the flow from the first words. A few sentences in, I knew it was going well. I wasn’t watching the Teams window, but I could see reactions rippling across the screen at the right moments. I was nailing it.
The demo went great. What I said wasn’t what I’d prepared, and that was exactly the point. I didn’t have a memorised script. I had the checkpoints I needed to hit and the certainty that I knew enough to fill the gaps on the fly.
The demo ended. I answered the questions in the chat. The call closed.
“Hey mate, you really brought the feature to life. Great demo.” That was the first DM I saw. Then I noticed the others. It had gone well. It had landed. I let myself feel good about it for half a second.
Then back to it. This job has no memory. Time to prepare for the next thing.