Part IV · The rehearsal and the room · 9 min

A script, not a tour

Assemble the nine-beat script — each beat with what is on screen, the one line to say, the risk, and the fallback — and review it like code.

Objectives

  • Build a demo as a nine-beat script rather than a feature tour
  • Give every beat a line, a risk, and a fallback
  • Treat the script as a reviewable file that traces to findings and criteria

THE ENGAGEMENT

A tour shows features in the order the menu lists them. A script tells a story in the order a person can follow. Yours is nine beats and about thirty-five minutes, and it starts where the customer already lives — a morning brief in M365 Copilot — before it ever opens Dynamics. Each beat carries four things: what is on screen, the one line you say, the risk, and the fallback if the risk lands. Here is the whole board:

9 beats · about 35 minutes

The close maps beats to criteria

  • S1One client 360.
  • S2One mandate lifecycle with stage-appropriate AI.
  • S3RFP first-draft from weeks to hours, with provenance.
  • S4Onboarding orchestration with visible state and automated document chase.
  • S5Tier-1 service deflection safely grounded in client data.
  • S6Every capability shown has a governance answer.

Read down the criteria column. Every beat proves a success criterion the client set in discovery, and the close is nothing but the traceability table made visible. Demo craft in one sentence: start where they live, never apologize for a preview label — name it — and let the last beat be their own words handed back.

THE HARNESS

The demo-director assembles the script from the findings and the entity model, giving each beat its line, risk, and fallback. Because it is a file, it is reviewed like code — you can diff a change to beat five, comment on the risk in beat seven, and see the whole arc in one place. When the script is agreed, the director hands it to the understudy to walk in a real browser, which is the next lesson.

Why the fallback is part of the beat

Amateurs script the happy path and improvise the failure. Professionals script the failure too. Every beat names what could go wrong on stage and exactly what you do when it does — usually cut to the rehearsal screenshot of that same beat, working. Writing the fallback while you write the beat forces you to admit the risk while you can still design around it, instead of discovering it at minute twenty in front of Security.

In the field

Take one workload and write its beat with all four fields — on screen, the line, the risk, the fallback. Say the line out loud. If it needs a second sentence to make sense, the beat is doing too much; split it.

In the repo after this lesson

  • 05-agents/demo-script.md — the nine-beat script