Demo narrative

Demo Narrative

Overview

Produce a scripted, scene-by-scene demo flow with talking points, wow moments, fallbacks, and a seed-data checklist — before the live demo. Output is .forge/demo-narrative.md: the audience and goal, the one key insight the demo must land, the scene script, the fallbacks, the Q&A anticipation, and the dry-run checklist. Pairs with seed-data-and-fixtures (the data backing each scene) and gtm-strategy (the wedge feature the demo is selling).

When to Use

• A sales, investor, or partner demo is scheduled in the next 7 days
• A product walkthrough is being recorded
• A pitch deck is being built and the demo flow needs scripting
• The team has done "ad-hoc product walkthroughs" before and lost deals or stalled them

When NOT to Use

• Pre-product, no working software yet — use gtm-strategy and competitive-analysis instead
• A demo for an internal audience that has full context — informal walk is fine
• The user-facing surface isn't ready and the demo would expose work-in-progress

Common Rationalizations

Thought	Reality
"Just show the features"	Feature parades don't sell. Stories sell. The audience remembers the moment, not the bullet list.
"We don't need a dry-run, we'll wing it"	The demo that crashes live is the one you didn't rehearse. The cost of one crashed demo > the cost of every dry-run you'll ever do.
"The data doesn't matter, they get the idea"	Dead-state UI with lorem ipsum kills credibility instantly. The audience pattern-matches "fake" and disengages.
"We can improvise the talking points"	Improvisation without preparation is rambling. The audience reads rambling as "they don't know their own product."
"Fallback is for cowards"	Fallback is for people who've ever lost a deal to a 502. Every live system breaks; preparation decides whether the audience notices.
"We don't need a wow moment, the product speaks for itself"	The audience has seen 12 demos this quarter. Without a wow moment, the demo is forgettable, which means the product is forgettable.

Red Flags

• A demo scheduled in <48h with no dry-run done
• Lorem ipsum, "Test User", or all-now() timestamps visible in any scene
• No fallback plan if a live API call fails
• No identified wow moment — the demo is "let me click through the menus"
• Feature parade structure ("here's the dashboard, here's the settings, here's the reports")
• Demo length unbudgeted, no buffer for questions
• Slack/email/notifications visible on the screen sharing surface
• Screen recording or live demo without testing the network the demo will use

Core Process

Step 1: Define audience + goal

Write at the top of .forge/demo-narrative.md:

• Audience: who (role, seniority, prior context). What they care about (cost / speed / risk / status quo).
• Goal: the one decision you want them to make after watching. Examples: "agree to a pilot", "introduce us to the security team", "wire transfer for Q3 commit".
• Time budget: 30 min total → 18 min demo + 12 min Q&A. With 20% buffer.

Step 2: Identify the one key insight

The demo must land one insight — the audience-shaped reframe of the product. Examples:

• "Your team is spending 4 hours/week on this; we make it 4 minutes."
• "Every existing tool requires X to use; ours requires nothing."
• "The data you already have can answer Y in real time."

Write the insight as a single sentence. Every scene in the demo serves this insight.

Step 3: Write the scene-by-scene script

5-7 scenes. Each follows: setup → tension → wow → resolution.

Per scene, document: scene goal, setup talking track, tension, wow moment, resolution talking track, required seed function, fallback (recorded GIF or screenshot), and time budget. Example:

### Scene 3 — "The 4am page" (3.5 min)
Goal: show the runbook auto-resolving a paging incident.
Setup: "You've had a 3am page. The on-call gets out of bed, and..."
Tension: alert fires, walk through what an engineer normally does.
Wow: click "Auto-mitigate", service recovers in 8 seconds, show audit log.
Resolution: "A 6-hour incident compressed to one click."
Seed: seedDemoIncidentScene() — incident at 03:14:22 UTC, runbook-001 alert.
Fallback: if auto-mitigate fails live, switch to assets/demo-incident.gif.

Each scene ends with a transition that hands to the next. No "next, let me show you..." — every transition reinforces the insight.

Step 4: Identify fallbacks for every scene

For every live action:

• What can fail (network, API, browser, third-party dependency)
• The fallback (recorded GIF, prebuilt screenshot, narrated story)
• The trigger ("if the spinner runs longer than 5 seconds, switch to the GIF")

Each fallback is rehearsed during the dry-run. The audience never sees the switch.

Step 5: Write the seed data checklist

Cross-reference seed-data-and-fixtures. For every scene:

• The named seed function (seedDemo<SceneName>())
• The state the scene assumes (logged in as @demo-user, dark mode off, no notifications)
• The reset script (between scenes if needed)

Verify the seed runs cleanly in the demo environment within 48h of the demo.

Step 6: Prepare Q&A anticipation

List the top 10 questions the audience will ask, with prepared answers. Examples:

• "What about security/compliance?" → cross-reference security-and-compliance skill summary
• "How is this priced?" → cross-reference gtm-strategy
• "Who else uses this?" → 3 named reference customers if available; honest if not
• "What's your moat?" → cross-reference competitive-analysis

Mark questions that the demo-runner should not answer in the room and should redirect to a follow-up.

Step 7: Run the dry-run checklist

Within 24h of the demo:

• Demo runs end-to-end on the exact machine + network that will be used
• Every scene's seed data is loaded and verified
• Every wow moment fires correctly
• Every fallback rehearsed (intentionally trigger each failure mode once)
• Notifications, badges, Slack, email — silenced and hidden
• Screen sharing tested with the actual conferencing tool
• Demo fits in time budget with 20% buffer
• Demo-runner can articulate the one key insight without notes

Step 8: Header

Prepend a forge:meta header to .forge/demo-narrative.md (generated_by: demo-narrative, generated_at: <ISO 8601 UTC with Z>, depends_on: [.forge/seed-data.md] if .forge/seed-data.md exists else [] — paths only, never hashes, generated_from: {.forge/seed-data.md: <upstream content_hash AT generation time>} if seed-data exists else {}, content_hash: <sha256 first 8 of THIS file's body>). See forge-dependency-graph.

Verification

• .forge/demo-narrative.md written
• Audience, goal, and one key insight stated in one sentence each
• 5-7 scenes scripted with setup/tension/wow/resolution
• Every scene has a named seed function in .forge/seed-data.md
• Every scene has a fallback plan
• Top 10 Q&A items prepared
• Dry-run completed within 24h of the demo
• Zero lorem ipsum or "Test User" in any scene
• Demo fits time budget with 20% buffer