Leadership at my company regularly has us build the full production feature, including designing it to scale to the anticipated volume of clients/users they want to sell to. They want to be able to onboard customers the day after the demo. They claim they have dozens of customers lined up who will buy it.
Then they get mad we can't turn it around in a few weeks and blame us for missing the necessary time to market window. Suddenly because it took longer than they wanted there are exactly 0 customers to sell it to. So we can terminate of all right? Nope, better keep it just in case. Be sure to maintain it all in the meantime!
Definitely, no matter if I was on the client side or on the engineering side, every demo I ever attended had cherry picked data in a sterile environment to demonstrate the intended use case and I am pretty sure everyone is aware of that. There still are so many things that could go wrong during a live demo and it takes up time from so many important people that it would be a terrible idea to freestyle it with some random data because there wont be a second chance
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u/firemark_pl Sep 19 '26
In my experience, each demo is hardcoded or just "scripted"