Ask HN: How to improve your presentation skills I'm an IT technician, system administrator, and sometimes developer. I regularly have to inform my colleagues or direct managers about various technical topics, such as problem descriptions or proposed solutions. These discussions usually involve relatively small groups, but I'm still not comfortable doing it. Does anyone have any resources or tips to help alleviate this problem? |
Hopefully you already know some/all of these, but if not, maybe they can be helpful:
* Presentations are largely about preparations. It's the UX of communications, basically, and the more time you spend preparing your message beforehand and catering it to your audience's needs, the more likely they will hear what you want to tell them.
* Come up with an overall theme for your topic, some take-home message you want your audience to leave the presentation with. Fifteen minutes after your talk, they'll probably forget 80% of it. But you really want them to remember that ONE thing. The message can be anything from "our sales are going down; here are three things we can do about it" or "our tech debt is costing us gabillions of dollahs, and we can save four zillion if we spend five weeks" or whatever.
* Tell them what you're going to say, say it, and then tell them what you just said. This means: 1) Provide a brief outline at the beginning. 2) Go through each section at a time, indicating when you've moved to a new section and telling them where they're at in the outline. 3) Summarize the major points briefly at the end, and conclude with a reminder of your overall take-home message. They will likely forget all the bullet points, but hopefully remember your take-home and have the feeling that it was well-supported – even if they can't recall exactly what the supporting data was.
* If you are going to use a Powerpoint (which isn't always necessary) make sure it doesn't compete with what you're saying. Don't just use it as a shared teleprompter and read off it. That will just make people fall asleep. You can put very simple bullet points on it (like 2-3 bullet points per slide) that helps your audience know what part of your talk they're at, but don't make them spend any significant time reading the slides instead of listening to you. Use it for wayfinding (helping the audience know where they are in the discussion) instead of heavy details.
* If you need to put some important data on a slide (like in a table or chart), make a super-streamlined version of it that's easy to understand at a quick scan from the back of the room. It needs to communicate some clear takeaway, even if that takeaway is "the data is ambiguous". Don't show every datapoint or time range, just highlight what is important and discuss it verbally. Save the details for appendices (either at the end of the presentation or in separate PDFs) that they can review on their own time, only if they want to. Most of the time they won't unless they're your direct supervisor or someone needing to enact some changes off that data directly.
* If you are the kind of person who is good at adapting on the fly, it's helpful to be able to read your audience at each checkpoint (like each new section) and try to gauge their reactions, modifying your outline as necessary. Do they seem engaged? Are they bored/overwhelmed? It's ok to ask questions like "How are we feeling? The next section is _____, but if we want, we can spend more time going over this again?". Or they get your overall point rather quickly and want to discuss it more together, instead of hearing you monologue every little detail. In that case it might be something like, "OK, I can see we're all eager to talk about this. Give me 3 more min just to go over a few really important points, and then we can skip the rest and jump right into the Q&A, OK?"
* So in summary, KISS (keep it simple, stupid). Expect your audience to forget most of what you tell them, but come up with a clear message that you want them to leave with. Make a clear outline, tell them what it is, and let them easily follow along. Don't let the Powerpoint compete with you, and save complex data for appendices. If possible, be adaptable to your audience's real-time needs. Prepare and practice beforehand. Time you spend preparing beforehand is time they don't have to spend on clarifications during the meeting.
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*By "training", I mean a combination of an undergrad in "environmental interpretation" (which is just jargon for "we talk about nature and science with regular people") and outside training from a professional group, the National Association of Interpreters (NAI).
Although the NAI is focused on natural & cultural resource interpretation (like national parks and museums), many of the communications skills are helpful in an everyday business context.
They offer webinars (https://nai-us.org/interp/nai/_prof_development/WebinarRecor...) and courses/workshops (https://nai-us.org/interp/nai/_prof_development/courses.aspx...) ranging from shorter targeted ones to a full-on 32-hour certified interpreter training.
It's probably overkill if you just need to give the occasional report, but if communications is an everyday part of your job (or you would like it to be), I found this stuff super helpful even in my tech career. It's helped me more than learning any one particular lib or framework ever has, since it's allowed me to effectively communicate across stakeholder groups (other devs, UX, marketing, managers, customers, vendors, etc.).