Advice on presentations – including that given on this blog, is often geared toward the “showbusiness” presentation. We’re usually talking about the big conference talk or product launch, where you can afford to put in the time to make a good, slick performance: a few days of preparation for a half-hour talk is not unheard of.
Not every presentation fits that mould. There are plenty where putting so much time into the presentation would be harmful, but where is the guidance on constructing those presentations?
The minor event
If you spent a few days preparing for a sprint-end demo, or reporting back to your team on some study you did, you’d significantly harm your productivity on the rest of your job. In these contexts, you want to spend a small amount of time building your talk, and you still want to put on a good show: to make your team and your stakeholders feel happy about the work you did, or to make the case persuasively for the tool or technique you studied.
As such, in these cases I still build an outline for my talk outside of the presentation software, and construct my slides to follow the outline. I’ve used OmniOutliner in the past, I use emacs org-mode now, you could use a list of bullets in MarkDown or a pen and a sheet of paper. It doesn’t matter, what matters is that you get what you want to say structured in one place, and the slides that support the presentation done separately.
I try to keep these slides text-free, particularly if the presentation is short, so that people don’t get distracted reading them. If I’m reporting on progress, then screenshots of some progress dashboard make for quickly-constructed slides. My current team shows its burndown every sprint end, that’s a quick screencapture that tells the story of the last two weeks. If there’s some headline figure (26 stories delivered; 80% of MVP scope complete; 2 new people on the team) then a slide containing that number makes for a good backdrop to talking about the subject.
The recurrent deck
The antithesis of the conference keynote presentation style, the recurrent deck is a collection of slides you’ll use over and over again. Your approach to integrating with third-party APIs, your software architecture philosophy, your business goals for 2018…you’ll need to present these over and over again in different contexts.
More to the point, other people will want to present them, too: someone in sales will answer a question about integration by using your integration slides. Your department director will present your team’s goals in the context of her department’s goals. And this works the other way: you can use your CEO’s slide on product strategy to help situate your team goals.
So throw out everything you learned about crafting the slides to fit the story. What you’re doing here is coming up with a reusable visual that can support any story related to the same information. I try to make these slides as information-rich as possible, though still diagrammatic rather than textual to avoid the presentation failure mode of reading out the slide. My current diagram tool is Lucidchart, as it’s my company’s standard, I’ve used OmniGraffle and dia too. Whatever tool, follow the house style (e.g. colour schemes, fonts, iconography) so that when you mash up your slides and your CEO’s slides, it still looks like a coherent presentation.
I try to make each slide self-contained, because I or someone else might take one to use in a different presentation so a single idea shouldn’t need a six-slide reveal and a colleague will find it harder to reuse the slide if it isn’t self-explanatory.
A frequent anti-pattern in slide design is to include the “page number” on the slide: not only is that information useless in a presentation, the only likely outcome is a continuity error when you drag a few slides from different sources to throw a talk together and don’t renumber them. Or worse, can’t: I’ve been given slides before that are screenshots of whatever slide was originally built, so the number is part of a bitmap.
Good reusable slide libraries will also be a boon in quickly constructing the minor event presentations: “we did this because that” can be told with one novel part (we did this) and one appeal to the library (because that).
