Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Presenting is hard.  Sitting in the audience, and trying to maintain a long enough attention span to not pull out your electronic device that, fess up, you’re addicted to, can be even harder.  Especially when you hear one or more of these 5 sentences of doom…

“OK, hang on a second, having some technical difficulties…”

Projectors are not known for their usability.  That said, there aren’t too many variables: a couple types of cables, a couple settings, a few places to look for projection/monitor settings on your laptop.  I learned them.  If you’d rather waste my time than learn them yourself, I’m a lot less inclined to listen to you.

(Also, you never know when you can jump in and be a hero to someone else.)

“You probably can’t read this chart, but here’s what it says…”

Don’t paste in charts from Excel.  Don’t paste in charts from Project.  They will never be legible to your audience, and odds are that they don’t need that much detail anyways.

If you really, really needed to show lots of little numbers and data cells, print out hard copies and pass them around.

“Let me walk you through this slide…”

Closely related to the previous sentence of doom.  If a slide contains data or bullet points that are not self-evident, they are not well-written enough to be in your presentation.

“And then – hmmm, what does this slide mean again?  Oh yeah…”

Let me guess: you finished your slide deck at 2 in the morning. (I forgive you.  I’ve done it too, coffee-powered, in the hotel room.  Sometimes that’s where the best presentation ideas come from.)  But then you failed to take ten minutes in the morning to read through it again and make sure that it all made sense.  Oof.

You should know, at a glance, what the one key idea of each slide is.  If you wake up in the morning and slide 14 doesn’t make sense, please rewrite it or ditch it.  Don’t subject us to projector improv.

“Looks like we’re running low on time, so I’ll just speed through these last slides…”

By all means, race through forty more bullet points without stopping to breathe.  No one needed to take notes or understand what you were saying anyways.

Yeah, it stinks to run out of time on a presentation.  But people have short attention spans.  They remember if you started off strong, and they remember if you ended strong.   They won’t remember that you skipped the last ten slides but they might remember your concise recap of the top 3 takeaways.

Some more good presentation “don’ts”:

Stop Your Presentation Before It Kills Again

8 Bonehead Ways to Blow a Presentation

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Tags: Best practices, Communication, preparation, Presenting

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