Lightning Demos

The best idea in the room probably already exists somewhere else.

Not the whole solution. A piece of it. The way one app handles a confusing signup. The way a checkout flow you used last week made a hard decision feel easy. The way a tool in a completely different industry solved the exact problem you're staring at, and you'd never know it unless someone walked you through it.

Lightning Demos is a short, structured exercise that goes and gets those pieces, on purpose, before anyone starts inventing. It's not a slang phrase for showing off your work. It's a fifteen-minute hunt followed by a round of quick demos: you give people fifteen minutes to dig up great solutions from anywhere, they each demo what they found, and you walk out with a wall of working solutions you didn't walk in with. Then the real work of coming up with ideas starts, and it starts with a head start instead of a blank page.

The exercise is Jake Knapp's, from Sprint (he built it with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz at GV, Google Ventures).

What it is

Lightning Demos is a fast round of "look what I found." Each person brings a few examples of great solutions, from any source, and gives a quick three-minute demo of each, naming the source out loud as they go. As they demo, one person captures the single good idea from each demo as a simple drawing on the whiteboard, with a one-line title and that named source written next to it.

That's it. No discussion of what to build yet. No voting. You're collecting raw material, not deciding.

The source can be anything. A competitor. A company in a different industry entirely. An internal tool nobody outside the team has seen. An old project that got shelved. A consumer app you use on your phone that has nothing to do with your work but nailed the one interaction you're trying to figure out. The further afield, the better, because the obvious competitor is the one everyone in the room has already copied to death.

This isn't a new instinct, and you don't have to take it from a book to believe in it. Before anyone draws their own solution, the smart move is to gather what's already out there: expert testimony, competitors, the products other people love. All of it feeds the goals, the opportunities, and the inspiration for what you might build. Lightning Demos just makes that gathering its own deliberate round, with a timebox, so it actually happens instead of getting skipped.

Because here's what happens when you skip it. You put smart people in a room, you say "okay, come up with solutions," and they reach for the first thing in their own heads. Which is, almost always, a slightly-tweaked version of whatever your team already built, or whatever the one competitor everyone watches just shipped. The room narrows down to one safe idea before it ever opened up. Lightning Demos pries it back open by dropping a pile of unfamiliar, working solutions on the table first.

When to reach for it

Reach for it right before people come up with solutions, whenever you want them working from real material instead of from nothing. "Sketch" below is the step where each person draws their own proposed solution on paper, not casual doodling.

Two specific spots:

The sketch lead-in. A design sprint is a fixed multi-day workshop with a set agenda by day, run from a single goal to a tested prototype. In one, Lightning Demos is the Tuesday-morning warm-up that feeds the Four-Step Sketch in the afternoon (the Four-Step Sketch and Design Sprint both have their own pages here). People demo what's worth stealing, the good ideas go up on the wall, and then everyone sketches their own solution with that wall in view. The demos become the inputs.

Any kickoff that needs raw material first. It's not married to the sprint. Drop it in front of a Decision Jam, the group's quick idea-and-vote workshop, or in front of a standalone brainstorm, or any time your process hits the point where it says "now generate solutions" and you can feel the room about to default to the same three ideas it always lands on. Fifteen minutes of demos buys you ideas the room wouldn't have reached on its own.

When do you skip it? When the room is already overflowing with raw material, when you've just come off a week of customer interviews and everyone's heads are full, you may not need to go shopping for more. The point of the exercise is to bring in what the room is missing. If nothing's missing, don't burn the time.

How to run it

Concrete timeboxes. Adjust to your group, but start here.

1. Frame the question. (2 minutes) Say plainly what you're collecting examples for. "We're trying to figure out how to make late-payment reminders feel helpful instead of nagging. Bring me anyone who's made a reminder, a nudge, or an awkward ask feel good." One clear question. Without it, people bring demos of things they think are cool but useless to you, and you've wasted the round.

2. Hunt for examples. (15 minutes, silent and individual) Everyone goes and finds a couple of great solutions worth stealing from, pulling from the same spread of sources from above, fast. Two examples each is the sweet spot. Keep it silent and individual so nobody anchors on the first person's picks.

3. Demo each one, fast. (about 3 minutes per demo) A "demo" here is one example, not all of a person's examples, so two examples means you take the floor twice. Take turns. Each person walks the room through one example at a time and answers one question. What's the good idea here, the part worth stealing? Three minutes, hard. This is a demo, not a presentation. No backstory, no business case, just "here's the thing, here's the part that's good." When the timer's up, move on. A room of six with two examples each is twelve demos, so the timebox is what keeps you out of the weeds.

4. Capture the one good idea from each. (happens live, during the demos) Put one person on the whiteboard, ideally you or whoever's facilitating, so nobody loses their turn to hunt and demo. As each demo lands, they capture the single best idea from it as a quick drawing, give it a one-line title, and write the source next to it. Not a careful illustration, a box-and-arrows sketch anyone can read at a glance. Ugly is ok. For an idea that isn't a screen, draw the idea, not the interface. A tone-of-voice example becomes a sticky with the actual line on it ("running late? no worries, here's a one-tap reschedule") and the source under it. A pricing trick becomes three boxes showing the tiers. The output of this step is the whole point of the exercise. A wall of titled, sourced building blocks.

One idea per demo. If someone's example has three good ideas, capture the best one. The constraint forces a choice, and it keeps the wall from turning into noise.

Total time is about an hour for a group of six. Here's the math, so it survives a second look. Two minutes to frame, 15 to hunt, then twelve demos at 3 minutes each is 36, which lands you near 55 and over an hour once you count transitions and the inevitable overrun. Capture happens live during the demos, so it doesn't add its own block. More people or more examples each pushes it past an hour fast, so cap the count or split the room if you need to. Then you go straight into sketching or whatever generation exercise comes next, with the wall right there in front of everyone.

What good looks like

You know it worked when the wall is full of working solutions someone in the room actually saw work, from a range of sources, with no single demo dominating it.

That's the test. A good Lightning Demos session ends with a dozen or more captured ideas on the board, pulled from a real spread of places, half of them from outside your own industry. People keep glancing at the wall while they sketch. Combinations start showing up that nobody walked in with, the reminder pattern from a banking app crossed with the tone from a consumer fitness app, because the raw parts were sitting in front of them.

You know it went wrong when the wall is one loud person's pet idea, dressed up as a demo. That's the failure mode, and it's the same enemy every exercise in this part is built against. The senior voice, or the loudest voice, deciding for the room before the room has even looked at the options. Lightning Demos beats it the same way the rest do. Everyone hunts on their own. Every idea goes up with a source, not an owner. The wall wins on what's on it, not on who put it there.

So watch for the room that brings three demos of the same competitor everyone already copies. That's not gathering raw material, that's confirming the bias you walked in with. Push them wider. The whole value is in the example from the industry you'd never think to look at.

You're not deciding anything yet. You're loading the room. Do it right and the wall's full and varied, and nobody's pet idea is running the show. The people about to come up with solutions sit down to a full table instead of an empty one.