Hello everyone! I am back to inject more words into the cloud. Last week we had a discussion about various writing superpowers. Let’s talk about one more superpower this week: Making presentations.
You will need to make presentations more and more as your career progresses. There are going to be a variety of different presentations you need to make, and in many cases the audience will be incredibly different from presentation to presentation. You will make presentations to your team, you may make presentations to your customers, and you will very likely make presentations to your boss.
Sometimes your boss might want you to make a presentation for his peers or his leadership. You might get peeved that they are asking you to do their job. You should think about it as an opportunity. This is one of those exercises that might help you get promoted someday.
So what makes for a good presentation?
There is a classic saying:
Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.
It is some good advice.
Usually when I start my presentations, I will put together an introductory slide. It will give a list of headers for subsequent slides, or subsequent sections if it is a really big presentation. I will then create one slide for each header and start to fill them in as I edit.
Here is an example of a business pitch deck:
The first slide contains these six lines:
- The Mission.
- The Problem.
- The Market Size.
- The Product.
- The Revenue.
- The Team.
And then I will create six slides with each header from the above list.
The important thing about a good presentation is that it is not a massive wall of text. There is a great book called The Art of The Start. You should go buy it right now if you have not read it. (Disclaimer: This is an affiliate link). It talks about the 10 20 30 Rule.
- 10 Slides
- 20 Minutes
- 30 Point Font
It helps to make sure you are making your points succinctly and also presenting the information in a manner that is digestible.
If you have to decrease the size of your font to fit more on the page, you might be doing something wrong.
You should also find your presentation voice. I tend to inject humorous images into my presentations.
Here is an example from an ancient talk I gave at GDC.
Yes, there is not much alignment of interest between the spider and the fly.
The reason I add some entertaining visuals to my presentations is to help people pay attention to the subject matter. When you are making a presentation, you need to be able to “read the room” and be aware if you are losing your audience. You might be presenting too fast for people to follow. You might be talking about something incredibly boring. You might have gone into overtime in your presentation and are losing people to multi-tasking.
There are a variety of different ways to ensure that you are keeping people engaged in your presentation.
You can take pauses from time to time to ask if people have questions.
You can make odd off-topic comments that have entertainment value.
You can be physically animated and do something to grab people’s attention.
You can stop the meeting for a break, if it is really long, and then come back later and give a quick recap before resuming.
In general, if you are talking for more than 40 minutes, you will need to do something to keep the audience engaged. For a few years at GDC talks, I would conduct an audience survey and include cash prizes. That is a great way to warm up a room!
I would recommend that you ask for help with your first few presentations. Find someone on your team, or within email distance, who can help you with building your presentation structure. You should also ask a trusted peer, or trusted leader, in advance of your presentation to give you some feedback on the presentation once it is done. This is important so they know that you want them to view the presentation through that lens.
Make sure you also keep your presentation on the rails. If there are distractions or moments when things go out of control, remind everyone of the purpose of the meeting and ask if you can get back on track.
These are some good guidelines to making presentations. They are not immutable rules. I have blown a few presentations to organizations in the past, and sometimes these can be educational moments. In recent memory, I had to make a presentation to a green light committee, and the meeting went off the rails. I was fairly new to the organization, and at any moment I could have interrupted people and asked if I could finish my presentation. I chose not to, and was able to learn a significant amount of what I needed to change in my presentation in order to get the contents approved.
As with any skill, practice makes perfect. The more presentations you make, the better you will become at giving them. With any luck, this will turn into a superpower that will help you progress your career.
Thank you again for reading, and hopefully you have purchased the affiliate-linked book from above. If you have not, then thank you for helping me retain my status as one of the worst affiliate marketers ever. It is a great incentive for me to keep my day job! Maybe next week we will continue our conversation about superpowers. You can prepare yourself by purchasing some superhero merchandise, like this awesome Atom T-Shirt from DC Comics.
