Simple -- but not easy -- tips for Better Presentations

A checklist to help you think through slide design

I'm one of the editors of Rootconf 2024. This post comes from conversations in feedback sessions with potential speakers. If you are on the fence about submitting your systems engineering story, go ahead and submit! We'll workshop the talk with you!

My first public presentation was a terrible disaster! Elasticsearch was new and I was one of two speakers at the first Elastic-organised meetup in Bangalore. I decided I needed to impress folks with how much I knew. Everyone went to sleep by minute 5.

If you've submitted a talk or been invited to speak -- Congratulations!

Congratulations on getting over the fear of public speaking! You've submitted a talk proposal. You've already won half the battle. In this post, I want to help you with the other half.

The Summary

My treacherous brain firmly believes that the best time to create slides is last-minute. It is not. If your brain is like mine and you are panicking right now, here's the gist, in order of priority:

1. What's the story? Channel that one friend of yours who tells great stories!

2. Start the story when the bear is just about to eat you! People + problems = Pavlovian response.

3. What is your audience's need? When they retell the story, what will they gush about?

4. Less is more, bigger is better. Double the font size! Avoid information dumping.

5. Don't just read out what the slide says. We can read faster than you can speak.

6. Use a timeline as a forcing function.

7. Repeating yourself is important to drive the point home. To drive the point home, Repetition is key!

Okay. Go get those slides done!

Or dive into the details. If time permits.

What's the story?

As engineers, our instinct is to define everything and share all the information in our head. But dumping information is completely unhelpful. Think back to the last talk you loved. Why did you remember it? I bet it connected with you!

Telling a story helps people connect with you and remember your insights. Say outrageous things! Use interesting visuals! Let your story take surprising and unexpected turns!

AT has the ability to hook the company on slide 2 and keep them hooked for however long he wants. Not a single dull All-Hands.

KK plans his presentations meticulously, down to the last detail he wants to hammer home. He'll rework and pare down those slides until only the essential remains.

What they both have in common is that the story is always so interesting!

~ a note from a journal entry I wrote long ago.

Audiences want to be entertained and intrigued. They want to feel like they are with you on every step of a hero's journey. What are you doing to make your presentation a movie-like experience?

Start the story when the bear is just about to eat you!

Don't bother with introductions, definitions, background. These can come later in the presentation. Start the story when the bear is just about to eat you! Introduce the problem, the mystery first! Make it a question that your audience is trying to solve ahead of you.

From Kent Beck¹

Programmers have a Pavlovian engineering response.

Pose them a problem and they'll start trying to solve it.

Give them a chance to co-engineer along with your presentation by making sure the first bite gets their saliva flowing. Then you can explain the rest of the problem and your brilliant solution knowing that they are there along with you.

~ Kent Beck

What is your audience's need?

What people really want when they attend a conference is to be able to look cool later. They want to share the cool things they saw and learnt. A great presentation is something they can gush about to all those who missed the conference.

Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. Ask:

• Am I speaking at a complexity level that works for 80% of the audience?

• What are the takeaways from my talk? Can I say them in a clever and surprising way?

• What is a non-obvious trade-off my solution makes?

Try and answer each and every one of these.

Less is more

You need to go slower than you think, because fast and good is really tough to get right.

"Go Slower" should also be interpreted as "Cover less ground". Yes, you know many wonderful things about this topic. But you'll have chances to speak on the topic again². Don't cram everything you know into your allotted time slot. Zoom into one particular thing and weave a story around it.

The less the content on your slide, the better. Put only the most important nugget on the slide.

Don't just read out what the slide says.

This is the most common presentation advice, and yet it's amazing how often it's completely ignored.

YOUR.SLIDES.ARE.NOT.YOUR.TELEPROMPTER

From Wikipedia, with minor edits and emphasis:³

The term "PowerPoint karaoke" is... derisively used to refer to presenters who face the screen where their PowerPoint slides are being projected and proceed to read them, boring and effectively ignoring their audience.

If you put everything on the slide, your audience will just read the content and stop listening to you altogether. And since humans can read much faster than we can speak, your audience will be zoned out and bored.

Instead, your slide should have something interesting on it, which helps the audience pay closer attention to what you are saying.

Use a timeline

A timeline is an incredibly powerful device to help you plan your presentation. Writing a timeline automatically shows you which parts are tight and which are weak. It also gives you a framework to practice in.

Geoffrey was prepping for a 10-minute talk, and look at how he has planned those 10 minutes:⁴

Here’s another good timeline, submitted by Geoffrey Litt as part of his proposal for "ENHANCE! Upscaling Images with Neural Networks"

• (1min) Introduction

  • We can now “enhance” photos!!

  • Show examples from CSI and from a 2016 research paper

• (2min) A very brief neural networks crash course

  • A taxonomy of neural networks: Treating a single neural network as a black box, what are the different types of inputs and outputs that are possible?

  • Training a neural network: How does a neural network learn?

• (2min) GANs: inspired by art forgery

  • Human art forgers are in a constant battle with the police. As the detection techniques get better, so do the forgers.

  • By creating multiple neural networks (a “forger” and a “detector”) and pitting them against each other, we end up with a really good forger!

• (2min) Training a GAN

  • Explain how the GAN training process works using visuals

  • Show examples of the output getting better as the network trains

• (3min) Cool applications of GANs

  • Converting text to images!

  • Converting line drawings to photographs!

  • Converting images to 3D models!

Like Tara’s timeline, Geoffrey’s is detailed enough to make it clear that he’s comfortable with his topic of choice and has thought about how to use the time effectively, and it sticks to the facts (while still conveying his excitement about the topic).

Repeating yourself is important to drive the point home.

Repeat yourself. Repetition is key!

From Zach Holman:⁵

Humans love repetition. It’s one of the tricks used in lots of disciplines.

The best jazz soloists are capable of starting a melody, repeating it, and then playing with it after the audience has identified with the repetition.

The best storytellers will repeat the same line throughout a story to build a sense of familiarity, of excitement.

Slides are no different.

~ Zach Holman

Repeat yourself. Repetition is key!

Repetition is the shizz. Those important bits? Say them again and again.

Pro-tip: Artificial constraints make you better

Identify the constraint that really tickles your mind!

One of my favourite constraints is -- "Spend only 20 seconds per slide". It comes from the super fun PechaKucha style of presentations⁶, where speakers have to make only 20 slides, and spend only 20 seconds on each slide (slides are auto-forwarded!)

I am a big fan of constraints. Think how Twitter's 140 char constraint helped you create superb content.

Remember that this is a pro-tip. Use it once you've worked through everything else in this post.

My own improvement path: Use your body, look at everyone.

When I look at great speakers, here is what they do consistently: "be loose" on stage.

Being able to ad-lib on stage and be present for everyone, without losing the rhythm of the talk or forgetting where you are requires a tremendous amount of practice. I’m not there yet, but no reason why you can’t crack it you smart cookie!

Closing note: Practice, practice, practice

Here is my practice schedule right now:

1. Get the slides to a point where they are reasonably complete. Follow the tips I've written above.

2. Say them out loud. Change them because they are so bad.

3. Do this 2-3 times.

4. Present them to some friends. Change them because friends point out how bad they are.

5. Repeat step 4 at least one more time!

Extra steps: I practice by recording myself speaking, but the next time I am going to practice by recording myself moving. I fidget on stage, and I need to fix it. I wish I'd recorded myself moving earlier!

Best of luck! I know you are going to crush it!

---

This post is the result of a series of conversations with my fellow editors: Shraddha Agrawal and Saurabh Hirani. Many thanks to them for crystallizing these ideas.

As always, my friends Prajwalit, Kiran and Kapil gave me feedback on initial drafts of the post. Thank you!

1. Kent Beck's full post is totally worth reading: Start presentations on the second slide

2. The irony of saying this as part of a 2000 word essay is not lost on me. Do you want help or not?

3. This quote comes from the Wikipedia article on Powerpoint Karaoke, which is actually a fun game where presenters present slides they have never seen before.

4. For more examples and a detailed explanation, read Lindsey Kuper's blogpost: How to write a timeline for a BangBangCon talk proposal

5. Zach also covers useful points on Slide design his post: Slide Design for Developers

6. Read more about PechaKucha on Wikipedia