21 October 2024
Not only for demonstration purposes: The evolution of Exness Demo Days
‘Easy’ isn’t the word you can use to describe many aspects of working in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment of a trading company – especially one like Exness. But it is quite easy to get lost in the constant flow of information, waves of project updates, whirlpools of ideas, and tides of perpetually evolving products. We do our best to make navigating these proverbial waters of knowledge easier for everyone with effective internal communication channels, explaining where we are, and where we’re headed. That requires brevity, clarity, and expert understanding of the subject matter by everyone delivering the explanation – precisely the characteristics we’d use to describe Exness Product Demo Days: a presentation format that has been keeping Exnessians up to date and informed about the company tech and products for years.
Just like with the products themselves, the Demo Days took time to find their sweet spot and perfect the delivery. We asked Inna Yoschenko, our Internal Campaign Manager, how she approaches organizing the Exness Product Demo Days, what steps she took to evolve the format, and how it benefits the company in maintaining internal awareness of its work.
Tangled roots
Once every month, four Exness Product teams get 15 minutes each to share their progress with the whole company online in an open presentation and real demo format, and answer their questions, should any arise. Neither a formal report, nor a strict evaluation of performance, the meeting is meant for teams to stay up to date and informed about each other’s current work, without having to ‘chase’ relevant people for relevant information. That’s the gist of Exness Demo Days.
Despite its apparent simplicity, the event has gone through many iterations throughout the years, and faced both time-related and organizational challenges before it landed on its feet and became a staple of internal awareness.
Stepping into the shoes of the Internal Campaign Manager title, I was handed over the reins of the long-standing Demo Days project, and almost immediately saw opportunities to tweak and improve the way we handle the event.
The experience of gathering knowledge about the product and reporting it up the chain of command translates very well into holding a quality presentation for the audience."
Inna Yoschenko Internal Campaign Manager in Internal Communications
The right people for the job
Initially, most Demo Day presentations were led by the tech guys from the relevant products, which on paper seemed like a great idea: direct involvement means better understanding, and therefore better delivery.
But not everyone is born to be a presenter. While we encourage constant learning and development at Exness, and presentational skills are a solid area to invest your time into, it can simply be far from the top of a technical expert’s priority list when it comes to personal growth.
On top of that, our employees come from various parts of the world where English is not their first language – which is fine. We provide ample learning opportunities for improvement, and encourage English communication within the company even among Exnessians who share a different language. But as with everything, there are levels to language mastery: one can be completely comfortable reading and listening, and just good enough to vocally deliver their thoughts in a 1-on-1 conversation. But presenting to an audience – even a small one composed of familiar and friendly faces – can be a challenge. This puts a strain both on the presenter who’s stressing and trying hard to deliver the material as best they can, and on the audience trying to read past the thresholds of presentational and language skills.
We don’t want any of these issues getting in the way of a meeting that’s meant to be precise and to the point.
Trimming the fat
At Exness, we always try to aim higher – when setting our goals, plans, and ambitions. But this approach also worked in a more literal way with Demo Days, as we aimed higher in the company hierarchy when looking for presenters, and passed the torch directly to Product managers. The experience of gathering knowledge about their product and reporting it up the chain of command translated very well into holding a quality presentation for the audience.
But as soon as the quality problem was solved, the issue of repetition arose: out of 6 presenters we would usually see 3 of the same faces, often sharing the plans and progress of a project in its infancy. Although sometimes cool to know, this information wasn’t half as exciting as witnessing the launch of a product long in development, exploring its results, and comparing them to initial expectations. Demo Days desperately needed some variety injected into the format, and that’s exactly what we did.
We closed the gate on plans and announcements: only real results, live demonstrations where possible, or recorded footage of launched projects in action.
The initial 6-topic format could spill well over 1,5 hours, putting the audience to sleep, or force presenters into rushing their delivery and leaving the short end of the stick to the closing presenters who barely got any time for their section, let alone Q&A. So we cut down the format to 4 slots, strictly within the 1-hour mark, and encouraged different people to present by focusing on four departments for each event: Payments, Trading, Partnership, and Retail. Within each department I’ve established at least three different contacts among Product Owners with good English, presentation skills, and simply the willingness and excitement to share their work with others.
This excitement translates very well into audience interest, keeping the presenters engaged and feeling valued instead of just going through the motions in front of an apathetic audience.
Opportunities vs Obligations
Nobody is ever forced to participate in Demo Days – at least not by the Internal Comms department. Every month I contact all Product teams, notifying them of the upcoming event, and ask if they have interesting information to share, sometimes poking at long-running projects under development. In the rare cases when there’s not enough material, the Demo Day moves to the next month, which is no big deal. It’s much better to remain silent when there’s nothing to say than to steal an hour of everyone’s time to mill the wind and share nothing of real value.
Despite their optional nature, I try to maintain the importance of Demo Days by occasionally inviting company higher-ups to events, which draws extra attention and benefits everyone involved. Some product owners even made Demo Day participation a must for their teams, keeping external eyes on the project and showing that their colleagues are interested in what they do.
Speaking of interest, Q&A is always a great driver of engagement during Demo Days. We encourage not only asking questions, but doing so live and vocally, instead of typing in chat. Small actions like that contribute a lot to the event’s interactivity, and make the audience’s curiosity palpable for the presenters. Although there’s not always time to answer all questions, we make sure to send the unanswered ones to product teams and publish their responses in follow-ups: nobody is leaving a Demo Day uninformed!
Mic check
Finally, there’s the crucial visual component of each presentation. At Exness, we take our work very seriously – as we should – which doesn’t mean people can’t or don’t have a bit of fun. After a bit of back-and-forth, we lifted the restriction of only using corporate presentation templates for presentations, and allowed completely free-form designs: with memes, stock images, hand-drawn graphs, and whatever else the creative minds of our talented Product teams can come up with. After all, having both the attendees’ eyes and ears on the material means more engagement, more interest, and more consistency – which is proven by our stable 200 – 250 people audience during each event.
On my side, it’s crucial to check every presentation, confirm the presenters’ presence, and – if necessary – allow them to practice their delivery with me to provide feedback or simply boost their confidence. I always encourage presenters to keep it simple: try explaining their project to me like I’m their grandma sharing a cup of tea with them in their kitchen on a Saturday afternoon. Good delivery doesn’t need complicated terms and multi-layered paragraphs to make sense.
One could say that maintaining internal awareness of company products has never been easier, but it had to go through a long road of challenges and changes to get where it is now: keeping Exnessians aware, informed, and knowing that their hard work never ever goes unnoticed.