Not sure I agree. Framing the presentation to match the audience’s appetite is what generally helped me get insightful conversation going even with largely non-technical crowds. Each demo can be done in at least a few ways, and if one tries to demo APIs to C-suite as they would to their immediate engineering peers, one could end up at a conclusion similar to yours.

I recently joined a startup, There’s about a dozen of us. Eng demos are scheduled weekly, which feels like a blog post so I won’t get into it here.

Sometimes there’s UI to click around and yes, people are slightly more engaged. However, we’ve had successful demos of infra / API stuff. The key, unsurprisingly, was to surface impact on tangible business goals. No point in trying to explain how Terraform works, but there is value in demoing why it works for your team, how it helps ship and operate infra with confidence, how it helps with repeatability, makes infra changes reviewable, etc. Of course, it’s incredibly important that the group sees demos as inviting and bring their curiosity to the room. If that’s not happening well, that’s a whole other problem.

Good rule of a thumb I tend to use is “half the presentation time for each X% of non-engineer audience”. If there’s 20 min of demo for eng peers, that needs to boil down to 10min as soon as one or two non-eng people join. Less time forces me to focus on value added rather than tech details. X will vary from org to org.

And of course it’s always good to offer more detailed demo in a more focused group later on (e.g. “for those interested in the details of how we use Redis, I can do another demo in a smaller group right after this call”)