Product, business & communication
Deliver technical demos and answer RFPs
Build demo environments, tailor narratives per persona, write technical responses to RFP/RFI.
~10 focused hours·intermediate
Tools: Demo environment (sandbox tenant/staging), Slides, Loom, RFP/RFI response templates
Market relevance — share of job ads asking for this
What employers mean
You should be able to…
- Build and maintain a demo environment that doesn't break mid-presentation
- Tailor the same product narrative to different personas (technical buyer vs business buyer)
- Write clear, accurate technical responses to RFP/RFI questions under deadline
- Handle live technical questions during a demo without derailing the narrative
- Prepare a fallback plan (recorded video, static screenshots) if the live demo fails
- Translate a feature list into a story that maps to the prospect's actual pain points
Needs first: Explain how LLMs work and where they fail
Learn — free, link-checked
The few resources that matter
Read · beginner · 30 min · atlassian.com
Team Playbook: plays library
A library of facilitation exercises for running the reviews/retros/health-checks you'll lead as a PM. — Atlassian
Course · beginner · 120 min · academy.hubspot.com
Inbound Sales
Free, certified course on discovery calls, tailored demos and objection handling — the exact loop a POC needs. — HubSpot Academy
Read · intermediate · 30 min · tryexponent.com
Forward Deployed Engineer Interview: The Definitive Guide
Maps almost 1:1 to what Indian GenAI startups (e.g. Sarvam AI-style roles) ask about running a client POC end to end. — Exponent
Read · intermediate · 40 min · docs.aws.amazon.com
AWS Prescriptive Guidance: patterns
Real solution-architecture patterns and decision guides you can mirror when writing a solution design doc. — AWS
Practice
Demo script + RFP response for an AI document-search feature
Build a small, reliable demo environment (even a scripted/seeded one) showing an AI-powered semantic search over a sample set of company policy documents. Write two versions of the demo narrative — one for a technical evaluator (architecture, latency, accuracy) and one for a business buyer (time saved, ease of use) — plus a written response to 5 realistic RFP questions about the feature (security, accuracy, data handling, cost, SLAs).
Done when
- Demo environment runs reliably at least 5 times in a row without manual fixes
- Two distinct narratives exist for the same demo, targeting different personas
- RFP response answers 5 specific questions with concrete, non-vague statements
- A fallback plan (recording or screenshots) exists in case the live demo fails
Prove it
Evidence a recruiter can check
- Recorded demo (or two, one per persona)
- Written RFP response document
- Demo environment repo or setup notes
Interview
Questions you'll get asked
- Walk me through how you prepare a demo environment so it doesn't fail live.
- How do you tailor a demo differently for a CTO vs a business stakeholder in the same call?
- Tell me about a technical RFP response you wrote — how did you make sure it was accurate?
- What do you do when a live demo breaks in front of the client?
- How do you handle a technical question mid-demo that you don't know the answer to?