In defense of the slide deck

Recently, as the weather has turned more and more Seattle-like in Jet City, I've been spending some time reflecting on my years as a product design leader and strategist. My most recent position in corporate design was at Amazon's Prime Video, where they did things decidedly differently than in most other product development orgs of which I've been a part. One of the first oddities that I encountered at Amazon was their (in)famous fetishization of written documents, e.g. the PRFAQ, and disdain for the slide presentation. The prevalence of white papers as a communications medium in the product design organization struck me as strange, and not in the cute way in which they internally refer to their culture as "peculiar," but in the much more serious way in which the document-centric culture minimizes or even prohibits use of a visual communication tool that is so often critical to the success and influence that design teams are able to wield in a corporate culture.

What's particularly painful about the prohibition against presentations at Amazon is that at least some of the blame can be traced back to Edward Tufte, and his 2003 campaign against Powerpoint, represented by his pamphlet, "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within." Tufte was and remains an information design hero to myself and countless other designers. From this designer's point of view, however, Tufte's crusade against the low "information density" in a PowerPoint slide entirely misses the point--the information density of a full bleed image or video is orders of magnitude larger than that of the densest chart in a research paper. As designers, the kinds of information we seek to communicate cannot often be adequately represented as charts and graphs.

As a designer and design leader, I've spent an entire career using slide presentations to rally a team of designers or executives around a vision for a program or product, garner support for design, product or feature ideas, improve alignment across functional teams, and to sell in new products to Fortune 50 customers. In fact, in several of my previous organizations, slides were considered such powerful currency that wars were effectively started by the misappropriation of someone else's slides, or the unwelcome commandeering of the projector during a meeting. Slides had a real power to captivate and influence the audience and to lend credibility to the presenter. In fact, part of the logic for switching from Powerpoint to Keynote for our slide decks was to make the content more difficult for other teams to steal.

Well-designed slide decks, with beautiful imagery, audio and video, are powerful generators of emotional response. Radically successful consumer products can't simply meet user needs, they must also inspire passion and desire in your target customer. If you are unable to engage your organization's right brain in internal communications and decision making, then your product is unlikely to achieve emotional resonance with your customers. I'll never forget the slide presentations of celebrated Stanford design professor, Matt Kahn (https://exhibits.stanford.edu/Kahn). I guess Tufte would consider them zero information density: they were just full bleed images from an old school slide projector. But those slides, accompanied by his witty and insightful talk track, could tell more captivating stories than any of the hundreds of PRFAQs I had the displeasure of reading in my short time at Amazon.

How do you use slide decks in your product design organization? Are you presenting straight from Figma now?--now that's a topic for another post...

In summary: use the right tools for the job and don't allow your product culture to be limited by cultural prohibition against particular modes of communication.