I recently had the opportunity to participate in the Strategic Thinking and Communications training with Sarah Thrift of Insight Consultancy Solutions. I went into the training expecting a great refresher on how to design compelling slide decks, but soon realized this was going to fundamentally change the way I approached deck making, communication and presenting.
I have never had much formal training on creating decks. In college, PowerPoint slides were only used for certain Business Major courses and, since I spent the majority of my time reading Pablo Neruda and Don Quixote as a Spanish major, I didn't get much exposure to creating decks. I did however minor in Global Trade and Commerce Studies and it was in my Global Trade course that I first had to put together a PowerPoint deck. This was long before Google Slides even existed, so think really terrible design and too many gimmicky transitions.
Fast forward to my years at Pandora, where I learned by example from a robust sales driven organization. As I advanced in my career there, I was exposed to decks at all levels. Eventually Google collaboration tools became more prominent and I quickly ditched the PowerPoint days in favor of a faster, more nimble, real-time collaboration tool. I recall one training on how to create compelling presentations. It was a great primer on slide design with the use of icons and imagery. The consistent theme in this training, and further reiterated across the organization, was the idea that slides serve as a visual aid to your story telling. The substance of your presentation is you, not the slides. As Google Slides became more prolific across the business, our decks evolved to serve a variety of needs and convey different types of information. There were sales pitch decks, training decks, process decks, product status and roadmaps decks, as well as the common information update or alignment deck.
After growing up at Pandora, I made the move to Amazon and said good bye to decks
I later took a hiatus from any and all form of slide decks when I moved to Amazon, famously known for their anti-slide culture. It was in some ways a refreshing break from the obsession with every discussion requiring a deck. It also afforded me the opportunity to dive deep into writing in the form of PR/FAQs and six-pagers. The concept is that a presentation can often be a lot of fluff-and-stuff and that you can filter out the bullshit by forcing a written document. Additionally, as we are all often too busy (or poorly adept at properly prioritizing our focus) to pre-read content in advance of a meeting, the Amazon way is to start the meeting by reading the document together. If you've worked at Amazon, you are familiar with this concept. If this is new to you, imagine walking into a room, no computers open, just stacks of printed 6-pagers and red pens. Everyone quietly reads for 15 minutes, marking up their papers. As reading is completed, the group reviews the document line by line, page by page, discussing the content and addressing questions. The documents are meant to never exceed six pages to ensure they are focused and could be discussed in a 1-hour meeting. When six pages was insufficient there was certainly some creative license to the amount of content stuffed in the Appendix, the lack of margins and a tiny font size.
Stitch Fix and making my return to the world of decks
After my time at Amazon, I joined Stitch Fix and was eager to embrace the world of communication through slide decks, yet again. As useful as PR/FAQs and One-Pagers can be, I had sometimes found it limiting to not have decks in my repository for a variety of use cases. I fell back into my learned skillset of visually compelling decks that I was comfortable speaking to, but often times overlooked somewhat obvious key components, such as
The Audience
The So What
The Storyline
The ultimate objective of the deck/meeting/presentation
I specifically recall spending a late night, agonizing over a deck that fell far below expectations. When the STAC training opportunity landed in my inbox, I knew I had to act on it. As we dug into the training I found myself uncomfortable with several novel concepts:
Slide titles are pulled straight from the content - they aren't short or even pithy slide names.
My slides now had a whole lot more content - I feared the dreaded word wall
Colors were to be used sparingly - this I knew, but having come from Pandora, where the last rebrand resulted in a unicorn vomiting rainbow skittles onto most decks, I was resistant to such seemingly bland slides. Plus I have a fondness for color.
I didn't use any images from unsplash or slick icons from the noun project
I worked on a presentation deck for an upcoming Go to Market Strategy, one fraught with all the pivots and plot twists of a M. Night Shyamalan movie (as product launches can be), carefully crafting the storylines and honing in on the "so what message" that was key for my audience to understand. Sarah's training consists of group workshops to learn the concepts, asynchronous applying the concepts to a real topic, followed by 1-on-1 work directly with Sarah for ideating concepts and real-time feedback. Through these sessions, I carefully chipped away the remnants of my old presentation habits and came out of the first round of presenting with a solid new deck.
I went into my first presentation confident with my storyline, knew my goal, how to stay on track and ultimately where to focus the discussion. The presentation went well and was a great forum to get feedback that I could apply to my content and how I present it in the future. Since this is a regarded method across Stitch Fix for strategic thinking and aligning one's audience to their objectives, I'm now fully embracing this new way of approaching my slide decks and presentations. That said, I firmly believe that slides can still be an effective way to disseminate roadmaps and status updates across an organization.
Before and After
(I've removed some details from both slides, as this is not yet live!)
There’s much more to cover on this topic, such as the actual live presentation component, encouraging discussion and keeping the audience focused on your goals. of course there’s also the added variable of presenting virtually to an entirely remote audience, all of which I’ll save for another post.
I'm curious to know how others have used slide presentations for better or worse, as it may be. Does your organization have a particular framework in place that is widely adopted? Or is it up to each team or individual to leverage what works best for their needs? What do you think is the most effective type of slide presentation?
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