Public sprint demo
Imagine that your team is developing product for some market. There is no specific customer yet, so product owner is an internal product manager. And at some point you realize that there is lots of functionality, but from user’s point of view it just doesn’t work at all – bug here, bug there, small, but very important piece of functionality is not implemented because team is comfortable adding data via database. Product owner expresses his concerns from time to time, but it doesn’t help. Developing first version of product is quite difficult task and team loses its enthusiasm as they don’t see real customer. End quality is decreasing. What to do?
In Scrum there is a concept of sprint demo – meeting, when new version is shown to customer (product owner). Usually it is held privately – the team, product owner and possibly some stakeholders. Making sprint demo public is neither prohibited nor promoted by “best practices”.
Public sprint demo can provide the company and the team with several advantages:
- Awareness of public presentation (especially to peers) creates stronger commitment
- Awareness of public presentation makes the team think about usage from user point of view – they have to demonstrate it to the public
- It leads to more stable product – nobody wants to demonstrate how unstable the product is in front of peers
- Public presentation makes other people aware of what is going on therefore increases transparency and unites company
- Public sprint demo allows the team to show off their achievements therefore increasing satisfaction
- It increases presentation skills of the team, makes them used to public attention
- Attendees can give valuable feedback on the product
- Successful public sprint demo gives the team strong feeling of great achievement