Bob demo and field guide

DEMO PLAYBOOK

• Know your audience before you start — exec audiences want the business outcome, dev audiences want to see the prompts and reasoning for earlier SDLC stages, while SRE teams are more interested in later stages.
• Practice the SDLC flow at least once beforehand so you know what can be shown live and what can't. Then pre-warm your environment — have the repo cloned, IDE open, and cluster connected before you go live.
• Lead with Stage 00 every time — anchor the business case and paint the big picture of Bob supporting the full SDLC first. You don't need to run every stage; pick and choose the ones that resonate most with the room.
• Pick the app scenario in Stage 01 according to your audience's industry — a payments app for FSS, an inventory service for retail, a patient portal for healthcare. Relevance beats a generic demo every time.
• Stage 01a (Java Modernization) is a strong hook when the customer has a legacy Java footprint
• Highlight Bob's reasoning, not just the generated output. Explain the why behind each decision Bob makes.
• Have fallback screenshots or a screen recording ready for flaky network or cluster days.
• Listen carefully to the tech stack the audience mentions — if they bring up Jenkins or deployment pipelines, lead with the IaC/CI-CD stages; if they talk about incidents and on-call, go straight to Stage 05 Day-2 Ops. Their words are your cue.
• Keep discovery questions ready: ask about their current pipeline, pain points, and team size. Let them talk — it's a sign of genuine interest, their story shapes which stage comes next, and what follow-up to offer: a recording, a custom script, a sandbox, or a deeper-dive session.
• End with a clear "what's next" — a trial, a workshop, or a follow-up call. Don't let the momentum die after the last stage.
• When the "why IBM?" question comes up, hit three points: (1) Quality — Bob's output speaks for itself during the demo. (2) Cost efficiency & transparency — show BobCoin cost per interaction at the user level, and the BobAnalytics dashboard as an enterprise-wide spend and usage feature. (3) Deployment flexibility — on-prem is on the roadmap for customers with strict data residency requirements.
• If security is raised as a concern with SaaS, walk them through the key security and governance topics and clearly explain how Bob addresses each one. Capture their specific requirements in detail and avoid making assumptions based on the customer's industry or profile. Organizations with the strongest security standards are often the ones that benefit most from evaluating new technology in a well-governed, controlled trial — for example, they can select a low-risk project or defined use case specifically for the evaluation.

FROM THE FIELD

Lessons learned and best practices shared by colleagues from presenting Bob demos in the field.