Engineers love to build beautiful things you can’t see.

A pristine CI/CD pipeline.

A backend that scales to infinity (despite having 50 users)

A state management setup so elegant it belongs in the Louvre.

All of it carefully crafted, rigorously tested, and totally invisible to the customer.

Who doesn’t care.

They care if the app opens.

If the button does something.

If they can use it, touch it, see it.

The classic Demo trap

Your frontend engineer just spent a week building a gorgeous new UI. It’s beautiful. It’s got hover effects that belong in a design museum.

In the demo, they say:

“Here’s the new onboarding flow!”

And the customer says:

“Cool, can you click through it?”

And the engineer replies:

“Well, the buttons don’t do anything yet. The API endpoints are coming next sprint.”

Silence.

The customer is thinking:

“That was a very expensive slide show. WTF am I paying for?”

Customers want Clicky Things that work

To the customer, that button is either alive or dead.

There’s no “in progress” state.

They don’t care that the frontend and backend are handled by different teams.

They don’t care that this is sprint 4 of a 7-part epic.

They don’t care that “we stubbed the data layer for now.”

They want:

  • Working software
  • Visible progress

Anything on screen is fair game

If it’s not hooked up, don’t show it.

If clicking it does nothing, don’t show it.

If you need to say “just imagine it works,” shut it down.

You only get so many moments of customer attention. Don’t waste them with a broken magic trick.

Show things that work end-to-end.

Show progress customers can see and experience.

That builds trust. That gets you the next check. That keeps the work funded.

Below the iceberg is sexy (Just not to customers)

Yes, your design choices are smart and cost-effective.

Yes, your deploys are zero-downtime with automatic roll-back in case of issues.

Yes, your code abstractions are incredible, and can be re-used for any imaginable scenario.

Customers don’t give a shit.

If you must say something, tell them this:

“There’s a lot behind the scenes making sure this is resilient and scales.”

That’s it. Now move on to the thing they can click.

Fly the damn plane

Yes, build infrastructure.

Yes, refactor the backend.

Yes, test your code.

But while you do all that, keep flying the plane. Customers don’t want to hear about engine upgrades if the plane hasn’t taken off yet.

They want to see movement.

They want to feel momentum.

Then they’ll fund your fuel.

TL;DR

Never demo potential. Demo results.

Don’t say:

  • “This will be great”
  • “We’re almost there”
  • “Imagine this working”

Show what works.

Win trust.

Keep the money flowing.

Just earn it first—with software that does something.