Quick-Take: Four steps to Presentation

All of us have worked on numerous presentation, and I will share what has helped me create quality presentation, which gets work done, and doesn’t take more time than it should take.

1. Get the purpose and constraints

Create a file with name of your presentation and fill in following details. Fill it, just enough that you will be able to explain it to someone on your team, in an informal fashion.

1. What is the purpose of this presentation?
2. What is the 5 line summary of the presentation? (most of the audience will remember only this much)
3. Who is my audience? How familiar are they with topics of presentation?
4. How much time do I have to present?
5. Are there any topics that will surprise the audience and they will likely love-it or question the sanity?
6. What are the top 3 most likely questions? What are the top two areas of deep dive?
7. When do you have to present it, and how much time you are realistically willing to spend on it?

2. Build it

I will leave this section empty, as there is enough material on this.

3. Get alignment (aka Get it reviewed)

Find one or two sample of your audience, and ask them for review.

Offline reviews don’t work. LGTM, is most likely ‘I didn’t get time to review, all the best’.

If the review doesn’t produce any feedback, obviously it doesn’t mean your presentation is perfect. Get another review with another reviewer.

4. Practice

Gold standard advise is, practice the presentation with timers and record/review the video. Most presentations are not that important and most other times you may not have time or motivation for this. It’s ok not to do this, as long as you identify the right reason for not doing this.

A practical way to practice, is beta test the audience. Find a smaller group, whom you can present. Take notes. Write down all the questions. Identify where all deep dive was required, and what were the questions.

4.b [Optionally]Pre-Share

You could also share offline, before online presentation to the 'final presentation'. (as reminded to me by Aniketh Prakash).

Benefits are,

1. Audience is better prepared with what will be presented, and they will be able to "digest" faster and ask better questions.
2. They will have chance to self-search some of the obvious questions.
3. [bonus] You will build a self-serve presentation (since it will be reviewed offline)

The downside being

1. You loose walk the audience through your narrative and tell/sell the story. You can't have any Ah Ha! moments with this.
2. Your presentation will require much hire bar and work to be shared because you will not be there to voiceover connections.

4.B is still great option for technical presentation which are more dense and are supposed to be self-serve in long term anyways.

All right, hope you liked the list and all the best to you to build your next deck. Do leave a comment if something has helped you communicate ideas better.