Giving interesting & impactful presentations

About a year ago, I gave a presentation at work. I don’t remember what it was about but a colleague reached out to me and gifted me a book on public speaking - Ted Talks, The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson. This book turned out to be one of the most amazing gifts I’ve ever received because a year down the line, I’ve had to give quite a number of important presentations and the lessons from this book have been my guide. If you’ve ever wondered why TED Talks are so impactful even if they’re only a few minutes long, this book explains why and how.

Since reading the book, I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from the presentations I’ve had to give and I wanted to share about these for a couple of reasons:

1. I’ve found that as I’ve grown in my career, especially as a DevOps and Observability Engineer, part of my work has been helping individual teams and even the company at large understand the impact of my work and helping them see why they should care and contribute towards my team’s goals.
2. I’ve also gotten a number of speaking opportunities and it’s very important to me to always leave an impact on the people who listen to me

This article isn’t only for people who are public speakers but for anyone who wants to learn how to share their thoughts and get buy-in from stakeholders.

The key lessons I took from this book are as follows

• Decide on your message
• Every great presentation has a specific message and purpose. Whenever you’re tasked with sharing information or a presentation, the question to ask is “What do I want people to get from this”. You might start out with a couple but try to streamline them especially if you have limited time so that you don’t overwhelm your audience. This is also helpful for you in getting content that supports this message. I have to say, this step is non-negotiable. In a world where there’s so much information overload, you want your audience to be able to pick actionable points from your presentation. In the last presentation, I shared with my company, I was asked to talk about my team and the work we do. After really thinking about it, I decided that what I wanted to take away from the talk was an understanding of what we do and how everyone can contribute towards our goals. This influenced my choice to reiterate and end on the note of “What is your role in our Observability goals”. I found that after that, we got more interaction and buy-in from teams looking to understand more and contribute towards my team’s goals which in my books was a great success.
• Build your content
• Basically, plan for EVERYTHING you’re going to say. In the book, Chris talks about how they plan even for jokes that’ll be told during a presentation. After deciding on your message, fleshing it out and deciding what can contribute to driving home the message is the next step. In doing this, it’s important to take everything you want to say into consideration. This is a continuous process of getting your brain dump out of your head to fine-tuning it until it passes across the message you have defined.
• Decide on your medium
• Having the right accompanying medium is very key in passing your message across. This could be slides, short videos, pictures, music or even a physical item. The point however is that when choosing your medium, it should complement and not overshadow your message. For instance, having wordy slides might take your audience's attention away from your words if they spend the time trying to read your slides instead of listening to you. Your medium should be a teaser and create an expectation for your audience to want to listen to what you have to say next. It could also serve as a guide for you during your presentation. For instance, having bullet points that come up one after the other is a good way to preempt yourself on what to say next. Bullet points should also be short and sweet so your audience can scheme through and turn their attention back to you. Using animations within your slides can also be a way of gradually unveiling your content so that the screen moves along with you as your presentation progresses.
• Get feedback
• After you’ve worked on your message, content and medium, it’s easy to feel like your work is done. However, remember you’re talking from a place of knowledge and context and your audience might not necessarily know what you know. By finding friends, family or colleagues who are willing to listen to you and give honest feedback, you’re able to fine-tune your presentation such that your choice of words, depth and tone will befitting not just for you but also for your audience.
• Know your presentation by heart
• I used to go into presentations heavily dependent on my slides. This meant that my slides were clunky and I’d be reading from the slides as well. This means I could easily have sent the slides to my audience and have them read at their convenience. One of the key lessons I learned from the book was memorising my talk. This might seem obvious but it’s not always the case. Now, what I do is
• Write out the content of my presentation
• Say it to myself a number of times till I’m satisfied
• Practice with friends and family to get their feedback
• Say my speech to myself A LOT of times till I know it by heart
• Most of the talks I’ve given usually have slides so I don’t stop practising till I can go through my entire presentation in my head without looking at my slides or notes. This means that I know when each slide comes in and what I’ll say while that slide is up. I find that doing this helps me step or look away from my laptop and really connect with the audience because I’m speaking from my heart. Bonus point is you also look like you really know what you’re talking about if you’re not just reading from your screen!

Now that you know some of my guiding principles, I want to share what tools help me through this process. Having access to the right tools can be instrumental in making this

Tools

• Notes Apps (Or plain old notebooks) - In preparing for your presentation, it’s important to put your thoughts on paper (actual or virtual lol). This is a great way of streamlining your thought process and cutting out what is unnecessary. You can make use of regular notebooks or apps that help you work on the go. My go-to apps are my Notes app on my phone, Notion & Google Docs because I have them on my phone so I can practice anywhere whenever I have downtime. If you’re also collaborating with other contributors or want to get feedback on your work, using the apps I mentioned make it easier to do so.
• Canva - This is my go-to for my presentations. I always try to make my slides and videos catchy so they complement my presentation and also capture my audience’s attention. Canva is great for almost any type of design. Canva has so many templates you can use out of the box or customise depending on your preference. It’s also very user friendly because all you have to do is drag and drop and there’s a large repository of resources you can get if you wanted to have a custom design.
• Loom - This is great for screen recordings and I love that you can have capture demos on your screen while also capturing your video. This is a great way to run through slides if you had to submit a presentation for a virtual conference or you wanted to post your slides but add oomf to it.
• Lucidchart - One great way to communicate your message is through diagrams. Clear diagrams can be a powerful medium of communication. You can use these to support your words and give a pictorial view your audience can carry in their mind. Lucidchart is great for more technical or business diagrams. You get a lot of templates out of the box for things like Network diagrams for engineers or Sales funnel diagrams for sales teams. They also have a large database of templates you can use to make a diagram in a few minutes.

I’m really excited to have written this because I’ve gotten questions around my presentations and I’ve been wanting to share. I’d love to hear what your process is as well because I’d love to continue to improve my own process.

If you've gotten to the end of this article, then yay! I hope you've learnt a thing or two. I'm Ibukun Itimi, a DevOps Engineer with 6+ years of experience. I've spent most of my career working with Engineering and Product teams to gain visibility into system performance and reliability while building and scaling teams and being an advocate for prioritizing the DevOps and Observability culture in the organizations she has worked with.?I'm passionate about finding opportunities to share my work and experiences in tech which I do by sharing articles on LinkedIn and also by creating online courses. You can check out my page for more of my articles and also check out my latest course, Incident Response with Pagerduty as well!