Every Friday at 3pm, two engineers and one PM run a ten minute demo of what shipped that week. For a year it lived inside a private Loom folder shared with the rest of the team. Six weeks ago, we started publishing the recording to our customer-facing changelog.
We did not plan for it to become a sales asset. That part surprised us.
What the demo looks like
It is not polished. We record on Zoom, trim the top and tail in Descript, and post the file next to the changelog entry in our docs site. The rules we set for ourselves are short:
- Ten minutes hard cap. If we run over, we cut.
- Show the feature working in a real workspace, not a demo tenant.
- One engineer walks through the code path or the migration. The PM narrates why.
- Mention the Linear ticket number on screen so viewers can search for context.
- No slides.
The first public recording covered a small change to how we render org charts. The engineer showed the diff on GitHub, then flipped to the browser and dragged a node around. Fifty-two seconds. That was the whole segment.
How sales found it
Two weeks in, a rep on our AE team dropped a link in Slack. She had forwarded that week’s demo to a prospect who kept asking whether we shipped fast enough to keep up with their internal roadmap. The prospect replied within an hour and asked to move the next call forward.
Then it happened again. And again. By week four, three reps were routinely attaching the changelog demo to follow-up emails. One of them told us the video did something a case study could not: it showed the people building the product talking about a specific decision they made on a Tuesday.
The prospect wrote back saying they wanted to work with a team that ships like this.
What we changed after that
We did not restructure the demo. We did tighten a few things:
- We now include the engineer’s name and role on screen for the first five seconds of their segment.
- We added a short written summary above the video in the changelog so readers can skim.
- The PM tags the relevant Datadog dashboard when we talk about a performance fix, and shows the graph.
The recording still takes forty minutes of prep and ten minutes to run. It is the same meeting we were already having on Friday. The only difference is that it is public now.