Ask HN: How to give better internal demos of in progress work?

It sounds like you already know the answer - focus on details. Don't give a full product demo, go in depth on the actual work you have done recently. If that means digging into intricacies of one small feature, then that is what you do.

Learn to tell a story about what you are doing. What are you building, why does it matter and how does it make things better. And tailor it some to audience members, e.g. engineers will be curious on the technical how, marketing or execs will likely want to know more about what it will look like to clients and how it improves the product and they don't care about the framework you used. If you are in a startup founders can blur those lines when they are involved in engineering but always start with the What, why and how it makes things better. You can even tell a compelling story about why changing a 3rd party library matters if you follow this process. Don't skimp on details, but don't go overboard, try to find a balance again based on the audience.

Here's a tip: tie business objectives to what you're doing.

Simple example: You want to increase sales. Sales are impacted by page load time. You spent the last week shaving X milliseconds from the page load time that impact sales.

A good way to train oneself to do that is ask "Why" and "So?" recursively on your activities.

Activity: I'm removing unused static files and finding ways to optimize cache.

Why? Because the pages are larger than necessary and load slower.

So? So people may get impatient during the checkout and leave the page

So? So sales depend on conversion and people actually going through the checkout. We've looked at our analytics and found that X% are dropping, and we've talked to N users and they said they left because the page didn't load.

I usually do this by recording short Loom videos every once in a while during the course of a project. It's really fast to do and lets people follow along on progress. Combining video and voice makes it much easier for your message to come across.

Example of a recent frontend demo: https://www.loom.com/share/09cf1b75cfcc423bad9f2587a2e35933

The nature of my work is often visual, which can be helpful for demos. But I've also seen video recordings of backend dashboards and logs work as long as you explain what's important.