Back to school is a special time of year. Traffic gets bad. Everyone gets sick. The usual, you know? Now that we have put that particular piece of calendar indigestion behind us, let’s get back to telling stories.
I have thinned out my list of subjects to write about, and a few of them are the kinds of articles that I have let breathe for a while.
While those are maturing in the things-to-write barrels, let’s bang out an easy one.
Let’s talk about presentations.
When you go beyond basic software engineering as an individual, the communication of ideas becomes important. It doesn’t matter if you are becoming an architect, or a manager, or side-grading into product management; eventually, stuff has to come out of your mouth that makes sense when it slithers into someone else’s ears. If you can match it up to stuff that also hits their eyeballs, bonus points are awarded.
I was afflicted with this early on in my career with a little side quest into enterprise sales. I had to take a 1999-era laptop and build presentations and customer website mockups, often on the plane en route to visiting companies.
Sometime after that, I was blessed with a few speaker opportunities, both domestic and international. Nothing quite prepares you for the moment you are in a standing-room-only room with 2000+ people, and two simultaneous translators into another language, giving a technical talk.
So you should take some time now, before one of these things gets dropped into your hands, to prepare.
Pick a topic at work, or at home, really, and put it into a PowerPoint presentation and practice delivering it to your webcam.
You might think this is silly, but this is a very valuable skill. You will learn how well you can entertain, inform, or persuade a group of people. These are valuable skills to have in a world where sitting and writing code all day long is slowly disappearing. Having built a few decks and business plans with LLM tools, I also assure you that the human origination value is very high in constructing a deck or document.
So how do you get started?
If you are making a basic presentation, I recommend the outline-to-title approach. It takes advantage of one of the oldest communication adages out there.
Tell them what you are going to tell them.
Tell them.
Then tell them what you told them.
Apparently, this bit of wisdom goes back to Aristotle himself.
I leverage this to make my introduction slide, and then I put each line of the introduction slide into its own slide.
As I come to each slide, I will put a few lines of text that prompt what I am going to say; or else, if I am going to be doing something in front of a very fancy audience, I will put a single picture.
I would recommend starting with 3 to 12 lines of text for your first presentations. A 20-page slide deck that has 20 titled images is a masterclass presentation, and it will be a few years before you have refined your skills enough to deliver that.
I will confess that I have stuffed some gimmicks into some of my presentations. If you are looking for an easy crowd pleaser, give away some money. I did a presentation on smartphone games once and I used a series of questions to find the person with the oldest mobile phone in the room. I then took out 100 bucks and asked this person, on behalf of everyone in the mobile games industry and all of the attendees of the show/presentation, to go and upgrade their phone.
I did the same thing a year later and gave a reward to the person with the most mobile games installed on their device for being a shining beacon for us all.
I was poor in year three of presenting, so audiences were simply disappointed that the free money train ended. It was good while it lasted, though.
If you are looking for an easy example of how to throw together a fast presentation, here is an example presentation I gave to a CTO group on how to do creative fractional CTO discounting.
Putting together a presentation like this at 20+ years into your career can be an exercise in about 1 minute per slide if you have gotten good at it. Because it was for an internet group, there are some liberties with the quality level that work for an internal organization but probably will not hold up when you are faced with a Fortune 100 customer.
Happy presenting!
