From Demo to Product: Telling the Story of Your Work

It doesn’t matter if you’re doing a full rewrite, a migration, or fixing a list of bugs. The most important thing you can do is make your work understandable to non-technical people. Pressing a button speaks a thousand words.

I’ve learned this the hard way. Early in my career as a staff engineer at a fintech startup, I was leading a migration — new architecture, zero-downtime cutover, data backfills. The engineering was solid. The plan was sound. But I didn’t show results early enough. I was heads-down building, running into problems, hitting delays, and the people who needed to understand the value of the work couldn’t see it. I took a lot of heat for that.

The lesson stuck: the story of your work is as important as the work itself. Since then, every engagement I take on — whether it’s a three-week bug fix or a multi-month infrastructure overhaul — I optimize for showing, not telling.

Show Results Early, Show Them Often

When I started working with a startup that needed to go from demo to production, the team had a clear goal: fix the features that were blocking customer conversions. That’s a business goal, not a technical one. And that distinction matters — it shapes everything about how you prioritize and communicate.

After the discovery phase, I had a long list of things that needed work. The temptation is to disappear for a few weeks and come back with everything fixed. Don’t do that. With startups, it’s always about revenue. The features blocking conversions are the priority, full stop. Everything else is secondary until those are working.

I focused on quick wins I could show immediately while building toward the bigger changes. That meant getting the upload pipeline working end-to-end first. It wasn’t the hardest problem, but it was the most visible one. Users could press a button, upload a document, and see their data appear. That single demo bought me the trust to tackle the harder architectural work underneath.

I even spent a multi-hour session with Claude Code mocking up a new frontend with some of their API endpoints wired in. It wasn’t production-ready — it was a proof of concept. But the team could click through it, see what the product could look like, and get excited about the direction. That mock-up directly led to more work with them after their fundraise.

Sometimes executives just like a pretty dashboard and they buy it for that. I’m no designer, but I’ve hacked my way through enough component libraries at this point — between agency work early in my career and years of building full-stack apps — that I can deliver a high floor on frontend quality. A good-looking UI tied to real functionality is one of the most persuasive things you can show someone.

But I didn’t just lead with features. Showing results also means showing business impact.

Discovery revealed that the architecture was way too complex for their stage — a Kubernetes cluster that was expensive and operationally heavy. For a startup, cashflow is everything. A startup shouldn’t have to worry about their AWS bill — they should be worried about their burn for people. I found unused services and over-scoped databases. Right-sizing those and moving to simpler technologies — Lambda, App Runner, SQS — reduced their monthly costs by about 75%. And ironically, the simpler architecture was more reliable too.

The pattern is the same whether you’re showing a feature or a cost reduction: lead with what they asked for, show results, and then use that trust to propose bigger changes.

When Showing Early Invites Too Much

There’s a flip side to showing early: every demo invites feedback, and every mock-up sets expectations. If you show a polished UI, people will assume you’re going to build that — or something like it. Features get requested. Scope creeps. Non-technical stakeholders will often think the flashy feature is the easy one to build when it’s actually the opposite — and the feature they dismiss as simple is the one that takes weeks of foundational work.

This has happened at every company I’ve worked at. It’s not a reason to stop showing early — being scared of feedback and waiting until the end to reveal your work is far worse. But you have to be firm about what feedback you accept. Invite opinions, listen to your customers, but don’t commit to everything they ask for. Showing early also forces you to do foundational work up front — CI/CD, deployment pipelines, infrastructure — which leads to a better engineering environment for whatever you’re building. The feedback loop is worth the noise. You just have to manage it.

Scope Will Always Be Wrong

Here’s something nobody tells you about consulting or joining a new team: the initial scope is always wrong. Not because anyone is dishonest — because the expected state and the actual state are always different.

In this engagement, the team had mapped over 16,000 entities with data in their system. But when I built the full database integration, only about 1,500 were tied to a queryable grouping and actually queryable through the frontend. The rest existed but weren’t wired up. That was as much a surprise to me as it was to them.

That discovery changed the scope entirely. The project was originally scoped for four to six weeks. It ended up closer to ten — roughly double. My original SOW didn’t account for the amount of work the actual state of the system required. I should have done more due diligence upfront and charged a higher rate initially. But the foundational issues were things I couldn’t ignore. For a team putting a product in front of investors and customers, I wasn’t willing to put my name on something that wasn’t more polished. I’m an engineer who cares too much, and that can lead to taking on more work than I should — but we resolved it the right way: clear documentation of what I found, honest conversations about what the work actually entailed, and amending the contract.

The key was setting clear boundaries. The data problem was real, but it wasn’t my problem under the current scope. I said: “my scope of work is X. I don’t want to touch your data without an additional SOW.” We worked that out, and it led to a longer engagement that was better for both sides.

Document everything. When the expected state differs from reality — and it will — you need a paper trail that shows what was asked, what you found, and what actually happened. That documentation is what lets you renegotiate scope without it becoming adversarial.

Trust Compounds

The initial engagement was scoped as a bug-fix project. Three weeks, fix a list of issues. But when you show results early, communicate clearly, and handle scope changes professionally, the relationship grows.

The contract extended. The scope grew from “fix these bugs” to “help us become a real product”:

• CI/CD pipelines — the team had been deploying manually. We set up automated builds and deployments.
• Infrastructure simplification — Kubernetes to App Runner and Lambda/SQS. 75% cost reduction.
• Core logic improvements — with users actually using the product, we could see what was failing and fix the parts that mattered.

I made them understand the importance of structural changes through multiple conversations — it was a growing trust. “Your code should look like this because it’s simpler, easier to develop, and you can see results more quickly. It would take time to get there, but with the current work we’re doing, we can slowly migrate toward that.”

Some things waited. The monorepo migration, the frontend redesign — working product beats perfect architecture. They’re planning those upgrades now, on their timeline, with revenue to fund it.

The arc:

Demo → Working Product → Customer Conversions → Future Product Roadmap

Each phase funded the next. The demo got them users. The working product converted users to paying customers. The revenue funds the roadmap.

Pressing a Button Speaks a Thousand Words

Whether you’re rewriting, migrating, or fixing bugs — the story of your work is the most important thing you can tell. Non-technical people need to understand what you’re doing and why it matters. Status updates and Jira tickets don’t do that. A button they can press does.

Show early. Show often. Make it clickable. Tie your technical work to something visible. And when scope changes — because it will — document everything and have honest conversations.

I learned that the hard way at that fintech startup, heads-down for too long while the people around me couldn’t see the progress. I don’t make that mistake anymore.

This is part of a series on taking startups from demo to product. Previously: How I Start With Any Inherited Codebase. Next up: a technical deep dive on the fixes that matter most. Stay tuned.