2.4 Crafting a Presentation 🎯

note

This section includes an Activity 🎯. Sections marked with a 🎯 are the one's that have an activity in them. Activities are optional assignments. But we highly recommend you do them.

Learning objective

As a product manager, you'll spend a lot of time communicating to a variety of audiences. Often, that means giving presentations. These may take various forms, from recapping interviews with users to reviewing your upcoming priorities. You will give these presentations, but often they will also be shared as a reference for those that may or may not have attended your presentation.

Creating strong presentations and presenting them effectively will give you an important advantage in the job market. With practice, everyone can get better at crafting, designing, and delivering great presentations.

By the end of this checkpoint, you should be able to do the following:

• Describe the importance of communication and presentation as core PM skills
• Identify the best practices and pitfalls to avoid when creating a presentation
• Create an outline for an effective product presentation

Why communication matters

Communication skills are a fundamental part of your product management toolkit. You need to communicate about the product and its development at many levels and to audiences with very distinct perspectives. Effective communication is crucial to your success.

Here are a few examples of various ways you will need to communicate as a product manager:

• Show off your work to clients and stakeholders
• Share upcoming product changes
• Share results from a recent product change
• Convince others of your product vision and ideas
• Solicit feedback on features and enhancements
• Share your team's day-to-day status
• Explain how a new product feature works and why it solves user problems

Poor communication will impact the buy-in you have from stakeholders, the resources you receive from management, and your development team's ability to build what you envisioned. Each of these jeopardizes your position and the success of your product, so ensuring you communicate well is key.

Principles of good communication

As you'll recall from the previous checkpoint, your average day as a product manager will include lots of meetings and other forms of communication. A given day could start with a Scrum stand-up meeting followed by a meeting with one of your developers to present the end-user experience for a small but critical bug. Later that day, you may be presenting a three-year product vision to investors and executives. Then after lunch, you're presenting details of an upcoming release, first to your sales team and then to the customer support team. Each of these situations and audiences requires a different approach.

In all communication situations, these rules of thumb apply:

• Know your audience. What information do they have? What will the audience be doing with the information? What background information or details do they need and not need? Does the audience have specific concerns you need to address?
• Know your objective. Are you trying to persuade them? Are you looking for feedback on particular issues? Is it an update? Is this part of ongoing communication, or is it your one chance to get your message across?
• Less is more. Your audience has other things to do. Eliminate unnecessary information and simplify complex data. No one needs to know everything you know. Remember your objective. Get to the point quickly and state it clearly. What is one takeaway the audience should be left with?
• Be positive. People react to how you make them feel. Stay optimistic, reassuring, and inspiring.
• Listen actively. Whether you're in a meeting or answering a question from the audience at a presentation, focus on listening. Give the speaker the same attention you'd want. Repeat back what they say to confirm you understood them.
• Match your style to your message. What persona do you project with your words and visuals? Is it energetic and promotional? Is it academic and researched? What style would best match your message, audience, and objective?

These principles apply to all communication. They're valuable whether you're leading an informal meeting, presenting a TED talk, or crafting an email. With these principles in mind, you'll next learn how to apply the principles of good communication when crafting a presentation.

To "write," first "read"

It's likely you gave presentations before in some context, maybe as far back as grammar school. It's also likely you never received formal training on how to make your presentations effective and engaging. As a result, perhaps many of your presentations fall flat.

PMs present a lot, so developing this skill should be one of your top priorities. More likely than not, you will be asked to make a presentation as part of your job search. To start developing awareness for what does and doesn't work when presenting, spend some time observing presentations and analyzing their strengths and weaknesses.

First, watch a few minutes of this presentation by Clifford Stoll on TED.

Apply the questions discussed above. What's one thing you remember about Clifford's presentation? Did you get the message? Did something else get in the way? Was this a good or bad presentation?

While it may be amusing, the speaker's eccentricity is getting in the way of his message. The audience will probably only remember the speaker, not the information he was sharing. Unless that's the goal, this is not a very effective presentation.

Now check out this presentation of Steve Jobs demoing the iPhone, and apply the same questions.

You'll notice the message of this presentation is much clearer. While Jobs doesn’t necessarily come off as especially charismatic, he uses techniques such as repeating the message to ensure the most important points are communicated clearly. The iPhone is the star of this presentation, and the speaker's focus is on selling you—the audience—on this new design marvel.

Lastly, take a moment to recall the last presentation you attended. Was the speaker clear and engaging? Were the slides pleasant to look at? What do you remember about their message?

Learning to read other people's presentation is an essential first step to developing awareness of best practices. This will serve you well when you sit down to write or plan your own presentations.

Knowing the obstacles

It's not easy to hold your audience's attention. Perhaps they hate presentations. Or they might be annoyed with a presentation taking them away from important work. Maybe they think your product is a waste of time and resources or have expectations that are not in line with what you plan to share. Prepare for obstacles, and you can plan your strategy and address them.

Some obstacles PMs are likely to encounter include the following:

• Expectations. You may lose your audience without uttering a single word. They may have made incorrect assumptions about your presentation.
• Distractions. You're competing against the audience's laptops or mobile devices. How will you get them to engage and pay attention to your message?
• Not targeting your audience. Maybe your content is important, but you presented it ineffectively. For example, perhaps you shared anecdotes about customer pains, but your audience was interested in hard data.
• Agendas. Your audience may try to hijack your presentation. For example, you're presenting a product roadmap, but someone from the sales team derails it to talk about pet features.
• No clear message. Sometimes it's unclear what you're asking for. What do you want your audience to leave with? If you want your audience to make a decision, do they know that?
• Poor delivery. Maybe you are sleep-deprived or nervous. Maybe you didn't have time to prepare. Regardless of the reason, failing to deliver the presentation effectively can derail all your efforts in preparing it. The final checkpoint of this module will focus on how to improve your delivery skills.

Creating presentation content

The steps to developing a great presentation are the following:

1. Determine an objective
2. Establish an outline
3. Design slides
4. Practice, practice, practice
5. Deliver it

This checkpoint focuses on the first two steps covering the planning of your content. The next two checkpoints will focus on the design, practice, and delivery stages.

Step 1: Determine an objective

The objective of your presentation is most effective when you have measurable outcomes. Establish why you're communicating and what information you're seeking to gather or share. What should be different after your presentation is complete? What are next steps?

Here are some objectives you might set as a product manager:

• Equip the customer support team to respond to expected end-user issues
• Persuade management to hire more developers to fulfill the roadmap for the next release
• Draw clients' attention to fantastic new features in the upcoming release

Notice that each objective begins with an action word. Objectives describe the things you'll do. After a presentation, you should be able to answer whether you achieved each one.

Step 2: Establish an outline

The core of your presentation should tell a story. Like all stories, it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the beginning, make it clear what your presentation is about. This will help set expectations. If it's informative, summarize the information up front, then delve into specifics. At the end of your presentation, provide a summary.

What will this look like when applied? Here are a few examples:

• You tell the audience you're going to be revealing a new product. You reveal it. You explain in detail why your revelation is great. To end, you summarize the main advantages.
• You tell the audience you're seeking feedback or a decision on a particular business problem. You tell them what kind of feedback or decision you're looking for. You present the background, give details on the issue and your recommendations, then end by laying out specific next steps and timelines for the feedback or decision you're asking for.

If you can't summarize what you're presenting, then your objectives aren't clear. If needed, revise your objectives before developing your presentation; don't go into elaborate detail at the beginning and end. This is known as framing your narrative. You're orienting your audience as you lead into your presentation and then you're providing a concise wrap-up that calls back the objectives you established at the outset.

Story arc

If you're making a presentation on a topic, it's because you know a lot about it. You've done your research. You've spent time thinking about and working on this topic. You have lots of opinions and many examples. But, not all that information belongs in your presentation.

Using the story arc that addresses the audience and objectives will help you edit out needless information. A story arc is a way to structure information used in many fields. It's made up of five elements: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.

Exposition. Set out your agenda, make the goal clear, and introduce all the information your audience needs to understand the rest of your presentation. Establish the relevant who, what, and where for the audience. If there is a conflict that needs to be resolved, introduce it and define it. "Tell them what you’re going to tell them."

Rising action. Create tension and interest by presenting data and information as problems and solutions. For example, if you're demoing a new product feature, first share stories of customer pains that you've heard. You could also share data demonstrating a problem that needs to be addressed. If there is a confusing issue that needs to be resolved, describe how the issue began and how it entangled itself. If you're presenting a new business partnership, describe the challenges faced and connect those struggles to the benefits of the new partnership.

Climax. If there's one thing you want your audience to remember, this is it. The rising action should have piqued their interest. This is the big reveal—where the story you've been telling leads. Whether it's a new feature, data from your recent launch, or the roadmap for your product's future, this part either fulfills your objective or clinches the audience's attention as to why your objective is important.

Falling action. This releases the tension you created in order to reach the climax. Explain the solution or options for the issues you've laid out. Show the audience how the new features will address the user pain points described earlier. Lead the audience toward resolutions and calls to action.

Resolution. Wrap up your presentation. "Tell them what you told them." Reiterate what you want them to take away. Decide on any follow-up tasks, including determining owners and deadlines. Make clear the call to action. And always leave time for questions.

At the end of the day, you want to do three things: draw in your audience, tell your story, and motivate your audience to take action. Straightforward as it may seem, doing this well requires a lot of work. The assignments in this and following checkpoints will help you turn these insights into action as you prepare your first of many product-related presentations.

The video below provides more insight into the elements that make up an effective and engaging presentation highly applied by consultants and product leaders from McKinsey and Bain

Activity 🎯

Create a slide deck for a 5 to 10-minute presentation about your favorite product. Pretend you will be presenting this to a product manager at a company you’re interviewing with. Focus on the content, not the design. Think about what will make the presentation compelling. What's your objective? What kind of story do you want to tell? What does your audience care about?

Your presentation should address these questions:

• What product did you choose? Why?
• What do you like most about this product? What do you like least?
• If you were in charge of this product, what would you change or add?
• What would you need to know to make decisions about this product?

This activity is a common interview prompt. Of course, the product doesn't have to be your actual "favorite product." Rather, try to pick something that will generate a good discussion with the interviewer. You want to show that you're a product professional who can "talk the talk," that you look at products with an analytical eye, and that you can articulate what makes a product great.