Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Communication Mechanics, a podcast for engineers, brought to you by the Web Communication Program and Georgia Tech's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. This season, we're talking with members of the Woodruff Young Alumni Community to explore how communication shapes their work. careers, and professional growth.
Speaker: Join us as some of our newest engineers share the lessons they've learned and the communication strategies that helped them succeed.
Speaker: Welcome back to communication mechanics. Today we're diving into how engineers can design presentations.
Speaker: What kinds of choices are available to engineering presentation designers and how to make the best decisions? Our guest is Jackie Bizet, a Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering alum with five years of consulting experience. guiding global companies through large -scale business and technology transformations. As a project manager, she bridges strategy and execution, leading cross -functional teams and partnering with IT to deliver enterprise -wide digital rollouts from design to scale.
Speaker: She also serves on the Woodruff Young Alumni Council, supporting the school's mission to foster an inclusive environment and empower the next generation of engineers. Welcome, Jackie. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker: Thank you so much for talking with me today and for wanting to talk about presentations because I have to say this is probably one of the most important genres to engineers. Yes, as a consultant, a lot of our job is making presentations, presenting our findings. So it's something that I've been working on the past five years and have really...
Speaker: tried to get better at. I think it's something attack. you know we learned but it was in a different way like you know you're trying to present to different audiences and at Tech it's very academic so I've had a lot of experience getting to do that kind of in the business corporate world. Yeah, it's great. And when we were preparing for the podcast today, you sent me this list of steps you go down to make.
Speaker: the communication decisions for your presentation. And I thought that list was amazing. So I actually set up today's interview with you around that list. So should we jump into step one? Let's do it. All right. Your step one was map your audience. You start your process by mapping your audience before you even PowerPoint. Why is this a critical step? Yeah, mapping your audience is essential. It's easy to jump in and want to just start in PowerPoint, start putting you know words on a slide. But it's really important to think about... what your audience needs to hear, not just what you want to say. If you skip this, you risk talking past them, not resonating with them and not really telling them information they need to hear. So like engineering, good design, it starts with empathy and design, not just, you know.
Speaker: jump into the build phase when you're building machine same things with presentations Can you walk us through these?
Speaker: audience types that you've talked about like an analyst, driver, explorer, skeptic, supporter and share how you'd adapt each to like an example. Yeah, absolutely. So the analyst, which I find a lot of engineers ah like myself are, you want data, precision, and clear logic. So for them, I would lead with structured arguments, include detail appendices, and make sure that every claim is backed with a chart, a metric, a data point. I also love to send a pre -read because I find that analyst type people always look at that. And usually I don't even like, I'll start presenting and they'll be like, you know what, actually I've already seen, I've seen everything you sent. I've got a question. question on slide seven figure two and that way they can guide the questions they know what they want to ask and they've had a chance to look at it so that's helped me a lot for analysts for drivers they value speed and clarity a lot of like high level executives so I'm for this i'd recommend front loading the conclusion keeping the deck really short and get to the recommendation early they want to get to the punchline right away they're quick on time and that's what they're looking for for the explorer they're curious they're big picture they kind of want to be
Speaker: guided but they want to make decisions for themselves so think about what if scenarios trend lines and then connecting you know ideas to like the longer term picture for a skeptic so similar to analysts you want a lot of evidence but also anticipate holes so like acknowledge any risks you know they don't just want all the pros they know that there's cons too and so if you tell them then it's they're gonna trust you more they're gonna feel like you know the full picture and you know what you're talking about right oftentimes not talking about risk actually makes you seem like you have less credibility exactly than if you were just to acknowledge them yeah so definitely i'd always list my assumptions and then
Speaker: Think about common objections. We can get the into this later, but when I'm practicing, I'll think about if I were them, what questions would I have and make sure my presentation is ready to answer those. And then lastly, the supporter. So they're your champions. So a lot of times in my line of work, you know, there's the people who are coming to you. they they want to hire you as consultants they want you to do a specific job they see the value in it but they need you to sell it to their stakeholders and so
Speaker: This is when I'd see this. kind of audience number come in. They're already bought in, but you need to give them something to stand behind. You need to focus on alignment values and then make them look good when they pass the message on. Because sometimes that's...
Speaker: it too i'm not just maybe presenting or creating a deck that i'm presenting i'm creating a deck for someone else to present so i need them to be able to stand behind it so you need to make sure it's resonating with them as well Do these audience types correspond to different roles in industry or could any role be one of these and how do you figure out who's what? yeah that's a good question i think any role can be.
Speaker: any yeah Any position in a company can be any of this. I think you tend to see certain people, for example, engineers like myself, gravitate towards being analysts. And that's maybe what drew them to be an engineer. But you also see, you know, sometimes.
Speaker: high level executives who are maybe like the chief strategy officer started as engineers. And so they're maybe have a little bit of analysts, but they're also in a position where they're more of a driver. And so
Speaker: With consulting, a lot of times you get to know your client pretty well. So you can kind of pick up on these based on how they react to presentations, based on the conversations you have, the kind of questions they ask. But sometimes you don't know because maybe you're doing a proposal or a pitch and you've never met the client. So you can't, you know, it's not as easy as like, oh, I'm presenting to an analyst. Like, perfect. I'll just kind of make it like this. It's good to know and it's good to think about if you know your audience. but you know sometimes you don't and so it's it can be helpful to just keep these in the back of your mind so you're prepared and when you start to get certain types of questions you can kind of tailor your presentation as you go
Speaker: Have you ever had a presentation flop because you didn't map the audience well? Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, during a proposal or potential new client like i you don't know what you're walking into. And so you can have beautiful slides that you've spent so much time formatting and bulletproof data, but it's not.
Speaker: If it's not solving the problem they have, it's going to fall flat. So I remember there was a project where we built a platform for a client and you know we were able to improve their operations greatly. And it just was a huge success to this client. And so I was presenting a pitch for a similar platform that we could build for a different client.
Speaker: And so I remember sharing like impressive statistics about how much we improve the operations at our previous client and partway through an executive in the audience raised their hand and said, you know, those numbers are great, but that's not what our problem is. Our problem is X. And so that experience taught me how critical it is to think about what the audience needs and not just assume you know or assume that what works somewhere else is going to work for them because every company is different. every
Speaker: person every company has different problems so you know when you walk into a presentation now I try one to get as much, you know, background research as we can and get like set up. a lot of times initial conversations and make sure we're not just presenting something that worked before, but something that's going to work again and that solves what they need, but also just.
Speaker: you know. asking questions up front validating priorities a lot of times we'll start with a slide that says like X company's problem or like problem statement. Like this is what we.
Speaker: have gathered based on conversations or based on your data this is what we think the problem is and then kind of like ask questions have them validate that for you before you start on a full path of explaining a solution to a problem they don't have That's great. I mean, it's just like an engineer with design. is You have to really think about what the client...
Speaker: <unk> needs are and what their constraints are and then you can design your communication for them exactly I remember a lot of engineering classes here at Georgia Tech they talk about that like you know you can I think there was like a cartoon they showed of someone a designer making designs and just throwing them over a wall and then like an in this case, the engineer is the user trying to build it. And they're like, what? I don't know what's going on. Like, you need to know what the problem is. You need to know who your user is. And so it takes a little bit of. time. and and thought.
Speaker: Okay, so that's step one. Matt, your audience, any last thoughts? The archetypes can help, I think. As engineers, it's, you know, we want to put things in like black and white buckets and, you know, it's okay to realize that. people may not fall exactly into these and you may not know but i think it can be helpful to
Speaker: help you frame how you're building your presentation. It can be helpful to know that they exist. Yes. And to know what you might do in... if one of these pops up yes so you're kind of prepared for the full range of of people and realizing that how you think is not how everyone thinks so don't build a presentation to how you would want to see it or how it would influence you i think just helps to like Think of who's actually receiving it. Same with engineering. How are they going to use your design or something that you build?
Speaker: So your next step is to define the one big thing. Why does starting with a single takeaway make presentations stronger?
Speaker: It gives you a north star to align to. I think, you know, with presentations, whether you're presenting to executives, whether you're presenting your findings in lab to your class, it can get, you know, overwhelming. You can get lost in the data and what you want to present. So it helps to have one thing to think about. Like what, when I finish this presentation, what do I want my audience to walk away from? If they had to say one thing. what is that one thing and so from there you can
Speaker: Build your case. build your data so it's supporting that and without it it just it's easy to get into like data dumping but with you know You've been a lot of times when you're, whether it's consulting or in lab, I mean, you are the expert in the data. You're deep in it. It's easy to like want to explain everything. And so it's helpful to just take a step back and think, okay, what is the main purpose of this? this And so that way, when your audience walks away, they're not confused about what it is. They know.
Speaker: That's what they want. Like, that's what my... presenter wanted to get across, and that's like what I understood. Yeah, I've heard someone explain this one time by likening it to
Speaker: a friend asking you what a movie was about is like they just want to know what the main idea of the movie is they don't want to know that during this scene he sat across from her and he was drinking a coca -cola and she was drinking a sparkling water and they were looking at Dogs on the playground are like, is what's what's the main point? Don't get that weighed down by extraneous data. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Can you share a time when having a crystal clear one big thing helped a decision get made quickly? Yeah, I was working at a client and we needed, let's see, we're doing an implementation and.
Speaker: for me to try to get my one big thing across. Basically we needed executives to decide on whether we were going to do a timeline extension or not. on this implementation. the kind of on the grounds client we were working with wanted it but it needed to come from higher needed you know ah an executive director decision and so we just very clearly laid out
Speaker: the costs implication, the risks of not doing it, just laid it all out very clearly. And we even, I think on the... first and last slide it was just very clearly printed current Deadline X. proposed or recommended deadline X.
Speaker: cost needed to get there act like just very all laid it out like this is the money we need this is the extension we need And then you know we have all the appendix and more data if they want it and quotes from end users and things like that. but that helped them be clear with.
Speaker: help the director making the decision be clear about what we were asking i think when i was first kind of making this presentation i was getting bogged down in like multiple data points and what if we did this and here and i remember my manager like looking at it and being like we need to be very very clear with them on what we're asking and not you know beat around the bush of like I think when I was first making it, I was trying to think about how could we maybe make it fit in this timeframe and just, you know, getting, getting bogged down and. extraneous data points when the real question was
Speaker: Can we get an extension or not? right And defining what that one big thing is really depends on that first step of mapping your audience. For sure. Okay, then step three, choose the decision. path.
Speaker: What do you mean by decision path? Can you define that real quick? Yeah, so think about your presentation of what the goal is. so You can - put it into kind of three main buckets. Either you want to inform persuade or inspire. So...
Speaker: if you're thinking about the outcome you want from your presentation. Okay, why is it powerful to be explicit about? The fact that this is the path either to inform, persuade, or inspire. Yeah, because it changes the way you would structure your...
Speaker: presentation and it also affects that one big thing so that example i gave about needing a decision For example, that would be a persuade. We're trying to persuade them to give us the extension. And even if, you know, I have no, if there's no right answer, it's just they need to make a decision. That would be persuade. Sometimes it's inform. Like if a client, you know. ass is wanting to get certain information or wanting you to kind of dig deep. on a certain issue, you're going to...
Speaker: use more data maybe, you're gonna you're going to show analysis versus persuade you're going to give them clear decisions like these are the decisions these are the actions you could take and then these are the outcomes for all of it so it's helpful to understand what like not only the type of person who's hearing it, but also what's the purpose of your presentation? What do they need to do at the end, basically? Are you inspiring action? Are you just giving an analysis? Things like that.
Speaker: Right, because I could see how it could be. really inappropriate in some instances to take one of these paths whenever they were expecting the other yes for sure if you know you're supposed to inform and then you're giving out actions and recommendations maybe that's not your job, or maybe that's not what they wanted from you. So yeah, it's definitely important to to think through this and make sure. you know, the audience is.
Speaker: on the same page with what they want out of the presentation. I could also see how what's possible, you know, inform. persuade, inspire. could align with where they are as an audience, like if they're super skeptic, then maybe you can't get to action yet. Maybe the best that you could do. is inform them or maybe persuade them to your side. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: And I think, you know... And just for examples, like I said, like inform could be. They just need more information. So you're giving that. Persuade could be they need to make a decision and they need help making that. So you're kind of building the case and helping them to that decision. And then inspire could be something like you're trying to sell a piece of work.
Speaker: Do you have an example of how the structure shifts between like an informed presentation versus a persuade one? yeah i think this is similar to like the types of people like you said so like inform might be very like straightforward linear so like here's the background here's the methodology these are the results very like a scientific paper or like an engineering paper persuade i
Speaker: probably start with like the conclusion so similar like when i'm presenting to a driver they need to make a decision so start with this is what we recommend like Here it is. And then this is why. So kind of give them your one big thing immediately. And then you can, you know, go into the evidence. And then for inspire, this one's probably the least straightforward to me. A lot of times when we're doing inspire, like I said, it could be maybe a pitch to a client on something you're trying to sell. A lot of times I've seen us doing videos or even sharing direct quotes from end users of like, this is how it impacted them. So it's a little more, I find these a little more creative, a little more empathy, emotion driven. But yeah, just, you know.
Speaker: leading with how can you really hit home with them and inspire them into action. Your step four is architect the deck. It's interesting. We're step four, halfway through your list, and it's just now that we're touching the slides. Why does waiting to build the deck save time in the long run yeah so we you think of the powerpoint i think when i first
Speaker: was in consulting, I always wanted to jump straight to the slides. But the slide, the work the real work shouldn't come in the slides. By the time you get to the slides, you should have a pretty good idea of... what you need to say and how you're going to say it the slides are a visual tool it's not the strategy itself so if you jump into powerpoint too early you're gonna waste time formatting slides that you may never use and i speak from a lot of experience with that But if you build the story first, the audience, the one big thing, the decision path, the deck builds itself. So a lot of times now I've learned to start with a quick summary where I'm literally just you know in PowerPoint, but I'm jotting these things down. What's the one big thing? i'm not This is ah a hidden slide that I never use, but it's helping me figure out the framework. And then when I go to build the deck, I'm able to just kind of...
Speaker: copy and paste those points onto slides and then build from there and it's a lot easier but it's it's difficult to do and it takes you know you have to kind of hold yourself back and really take the time to think about it before you jump into it. similar with like building if you were to build. a robot or something you wouldn't just start putting wood together you would sketch your design first you list out your materials otherwise you're going to be reworking a lot you would think about what this robot needs to do what kind of what is its purpose yes exactly
Speaker: One thing that I tell our students a lot is that You are the presentation. The slides are just the visual aid. And so... just thinking about the slides as the presentation can really lead you astray and into maybe a really boring presentation at times. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: How do you think about balancing main deck simplicity versus like a detailed appendices. Yeah. I...
Speaker: this does go back to the the purpose and the type of person you're presenting to if it's an analyst maybe you are going to have very detailed analysis slides for analytical people and maybe it's a research report so you need that you can't just you know skip all of that so it's okay your main deck can be more data heavy a lot of times for the presentations i'm doing if you're thinking of like a final project readout or a proposal for an exec you want to keep it main picture so i like to take advantage of the appendix for that and just think of like what are the questions like making sure your kind of main story your one big thing gets across in the main slides and then any kind of questions they may ask or back up you have that ready in the appendix but it's it's hard to be like every you know Every slide deck should be 10 made slides and 20 appendix. You know, it's going to depend on how much time you have. You know, what's the purpose of the presentation? What do you need to get out of it? So you need a goes back to mapping your audience, mapping the decision path. So you kind of know how to balance that.
Speaker: So we're halfway through now step one map your audience step to define the one big thing step three Choose the decision path and step four architect the deck what should be finished here at this point this halfway point you should have a
Speaker: very good outline of a deck. So you should have pretty much all of the slides. created not polished not necessarily perfectly formatted but you know you should know that on slide one we're gonna have our recommendation and then on slide two we're gonna have a specific data point you know one graph that's gonna show this message so you should have that
Speaker: mostly done mostly thought out and then after this would be into more of the formatting and kind of polishing part and something I've heard from a lot of mentors of mine is that
Speaker: 20 % takes 80%. So the, like up to this point, you know, you'll have like 80 % of your deck done, which, you know, feels great. You feel like you're almost there. But then I find the next part, that last 20 % takes 80 % of the time because you're, you're doing all the polishing, you're doing all the formatting. The concision. Yes. Yeah. And you're doing the, the reworks and showing it to your managers and showing it to, you know, you're asking. questions and making sure you know your data is getting across right and you're realizing it's not so you have to kind of rethink it but up to here i'd say through step four you should have 80 of your deck
Speaker: Structured. Structured, so that then you can start refining. Exactly. I really love Step 5 because it really ties into our web communication program main. tenant So your step five is designed for cognitive ease. And the tenet of the web program is that the technical communicator's job is to transfer information to their audience with the smallest cognitive load while remaining trustworthy and actionable. Exactly.
Speaker: So I feel like this really, like step five is where where we're really tying in a lot of those things because it's the audience who gets to define that the threshold for trustworthiness and actionability. How do you often think about cognitive ease? and how are you mapping that back onto the audience that you identified.
Speaker: beforehand. Yeah. So as a presenter, I think your job is to make ingesting and understanding the data easy for your audience if they're having to do a lot of analysis if they're having to convert units in their head then you didn't do your job
Speaker: So whenever I'm presenting data on a slide, I can always hear mentors questions ahead of time saying like, what is this slide trying to tell me? Because it's not clear. And sometimes it's easy for you as the presenter, as the person who did all the analysis, like it's easy for you to understand because you spent hours and hours in this data. But you have to, I try to take a step back and like look at it as if I've never seen the data and think how easy is this?
Speaker: to see and you need to still support it you can't just say you know the data says this you need to show them but that's that balance of helping them come to the right conclusion.
Speaker: and helping them understand it easily because at the end of the day that's That's your job. And I see this all the time, engineers overloading slides with too much data, which makes sense, right? They're in the lab, they're seeing it, they enjoy it, yeah they they want to talk about it, but...
Speaker: It's all about communicating it oftentimes to a person who doesn't have the same degree as you because we come to college to specialize so that we're paid well for our specialty so that we can talk to other people about it. Exactly. So what are your best tips for making slides easy to process?
Speaker: Yes, so I would say use um labels, use breadcrumbs. So if you're thinking about a slide kind of in the top right hand corner, it helps.
Speaker: your audience understand where they are in the presentation so if maybe there's four big things you wanted to cover you'll use a little indicator to show what part of that story you're presenting on also
Speaker: having your titles tell the conclusion so instead of like labeling a title like revenue for last year you'll say revenue grew 40 year over year you're telling them what the data is going to show them so they don't have to see okay revenue this is a revenue slide and then what is it saying they can see it laid out and then you have the data to support it and then also trying to put maybe one
Speaker: big idea up per slide it can be easy to do a lot of graphs a lot of data points but thinking what's like the best kind of graph to show. the data and again you can have your appendix if you need more data in the back if you know it helps to put that there but try to think about one thing per slide because that's really all someone can comprehend if they just if you flash the slide up what are they going to get immediately they shouldn't have to look at it for 15 minutes to come to a conclusion
Speaker: One of my other favorite podcasts is a podcast called The Visual Lounge. um And they have an episode called Graphics That Just Don't Work yeah that where they bring in um ah one of the founders of Million Dollar Graphics, I think. And his point is often do less. Yes. Do less, do less, do less.
Speaker: Reinvent nothing. Because... You want to make things intuitive. You want to lean into how people already use visuals to transfer those visuals into meaning and not have to teach them a new way to see things. Yes, I've seen this.
Speaker: other consultants maybe fall into this trap where they're really good at PowerPoint, they're really good at Excel, and they make these really beautiful but super complex
Speaker: graphs and you know they've put a lot of time into it and they really understand it but like you said the it's not intuitive like if it takes you that long to kind of create a graph like that it's probably not intuitive to understand so it takes more work honestly i think to make a simpler graph because you have to really understand what the most important thing is so that goes back to taking the time to understand it before you start just putting pen to paper
Speaker: You've talked about labeling insights in plain language and consistent units or even using breadcrumbs what difference does this make with the audience It helps. orient your audience to where you are it helps them structure the data and the message for themselves so i think you can you know visual like the reason some people use slides and powerpoints is visuals can be really powerful so it's just making sure that you're using them in a way that
Speaker: helps people structure your message and understand it and not complicate it further. And also, Again, all of this ties back to a previous step. and It helps them understand what they're being informed on, what they're supposed to be persuaded by, or what they should be able to do. like If you keep switching back between meters and millimeters throughout your presentation and you're showing a figure in meters and your client's like, well, we need to make a decision in millimeters, did they really even understand our problem? Exactly.
Speaker: So in your experience, have you ever seen a room like... click because your data became easier to read and understand. Yeah, absolutely. I remember presenting to a client's global head of data and AI And...
Speaker: I was presenting to him with my manager and he told me my analysis needed to be a level up, basically. That's good, but I need the bigger picture and so I I realized I had gone too deep into the details, which like I said, you're an engineer. I was on the ground. I was the one who was getting all the data points. So I was excited to show everything I had found, but I realized wasn't.
Speaker: presenting what he needed in order to make a decision. So with guidance from a manager, I restructured the presentation and focused on the key insights he actually needed. And then I remember, you know, when we shared the updated version the next week, he said, thank you. This is incredibly insightful. So I think it takes time, you know.
Speaker: listening and understanding what your audience needs. So I think moments like that, it's a powerful reminder of how much of an impact clear, digestible data could have. And something to note there, I think my first presentation was you know five slides and we didn't even get through all of it. And this updated one was two very specific slides with key data points. And there was a few graphs on it, but they were all the data points that he needed. And it was very clear. What?
Speaker: the analysis was pointing to and then how he can make a decision. given that. and
Speaker: Technology has come a long way to whenever it comes to slide design. Because I used to... never use animations because they were so cheesy and terrible. But now there are some... some options that are really good at controlling the viewer's eye and showing them exactly where to look in a particular figure or graph while you're talking about different points. Yeah, I found the same thing. I never use animations because it reminded me of like second grade like class that we were learning in PowerPoint, but I've recently had managers and... directors who
Speaker: suggested it and like you said point them to specific parts especially if you have a more complicated slide that you do want to show it all on one slide but it takes time to like you can walk them through it so they're not overwhelmed with the data All right, step six, tell the right kind of story.
Speaker: How is this different from Choose the decision path. Yeah, I think in consulting a lot of times. This is what... it comes down to with our slide like I've heard a lot of mentors say like, we're storytellers, which at first I was like, I would like, I'm a. data analyst or i'm a project like i'm not a storyteller i'm an engineer but when you're telling a story, you're bringing your audience.
Speaker: through a narrative.
Speaker: All right, so not all stories are the same. How do you adapt a narrative when speaking to executives versus end users versus judges or you know whoever is your audience and their role? yeah let me give an example we had i was presenting a platform we had built for another client and instead of just showing metrics and features we also included a slide with direct quotes from end users at the end of the presentation so these were the people closest to the problem we were solving and those voices really brought the story to life it shifted the conversation from abstract business value to real human impact. And it really showed how the platform that we had built had made their day -to -day work easier and more efficient. And you could really see the executives in the room lean in. That connection to the actual users is what ultimately bought their buy -in, not just the data and metrics of the percentages we had improved operations on. So we ended the presentation on that slide because it said more than any. one data point could say. And I think
Speaker: You know. especially as engineers, we go back to the data a lot, which is great, but I think we also need to realize that we're we're presenting to humans and we need to... bring them in and tell a story and it's much more interesting and engaging and you know data is important but sometimes it can be a little boring and so you need to really bring that to life to captivate your audience and make them interested because you could be presenting you know the most
Speaker: impactful data, but if your audience isn't interested, you're going to lose them and it doesn't really. matter what data you have. So have you come to have like a different kind of. definition or idea of what it means to present a story when as an engineer yeah i think you can think of stories you think of like Fiction and and it doesn't have to be like that. It's you can have a very real story grounded in data. You just have to.
Speaker: bring your audience along with you and, you know, set up the context right. and support. Your arguments. Oftentimes, I feel like when we ask students to, you know,
Speaker: write a report narrative or tell a story, they think of it in terms of
Speaker: maybe a little bit simplistic of like what you learn about story structure. Like you have an exposition, yeah rising action, and then climax, like a beginning, a middle, and end. And they just report chronologically, but that's not what this means. No. So like if I'm talking to, or if we're presenting to an executive on the impact we had at one of their plants, they. aren't in their plan like you know they may not be they're kind of overseeing could be a hundred plants. So we can tell a story of this is the problem these people are facing. So think of like your characters, think of who are the people. What is the problem they're facing? How did you solve it? And what was the impact? I think that's also a story. It's not just, you know, beginning, middle, end, like you said.
Speaker: Step 7. Build. a robust and ducks. Yes. It seems like almost counterintuitive for the work because like you're not sure if you're going to get there, but you want a robust one. Yes. And I think this is maybe where engineers can get on board.
Speaker: It's... You may not get there in your presentation, but a lot of times either you're sending a pre -read or you're sending this out after. So you want... any questions that come up for your audience members whether that's during your presentation before the presentation if you send over a pre -read or after you want them to have the answers because you're the expert in the data and what you're presenting so you should be able to
Speaker: understand what questions they could have and have answers ready for them so you know as a great presenter you want to anticipate the next question so this shows that you've done your homework it builds credibility and it keeps the conversation flowing i know i've seen some bad presentations and maybe i've been I've seen some bad presentations where a member asks a question and you can tell the presenter doesn't know and they say, you know what, I will get back to you. And that's an okay answer, but...
Speaker: a much better answer is yes i've already thought about that and let's click to you know slide 47 or when we send this out you'll have all that data it just shows that you really understand your audience, the questions they would have, and then the topic that you're speaking to.
Speaker: It seems like... This step seven, and and maybe that gets to a bit of what you're talking about with the 20 % becomes the 80%, takes a lot of time because you really have to think back on all of the steps that you've done yes and why you made those decisions yeah in order to get a better understanding of what that... next, next question is going to be. Yeah. And I've definitely had analysts that I've worked with under me who, you know, they're creating all the appendix slides and then, you know, we we never get to it during the presentation. They're like, oh, well, that was a waste of time. I was like, no, and even if you never get to it, the fact that you created it means you knew the answer and you were ready with it. And it means that we were prepared. So even if you never get there, it's still an important step. And it's.
Speaker: never a waste of time, even if you don't see it or your audience doesn't see it. What's your strategy for using these slides especially like smoothly or under pressure whenever the Q and &A starts and
Speaker: a slide might not be just the next slide that you wanted to show yeah i always create a table of conducts for my appendix so in powerpoint you can link the slides so if there's you know i'll label all of my slides in a table of contents. And then I can just click, you know, if we get to a Q and &A session, I will flip to that table of content.
Speaker: And then... whatever question i you know i know where the slides are i'll know which slide would answer the question, I can just click straight from there. And then I also... When we're doing rehearsals, if I'm rehearsing by myself, I'm thinking about what questions they may ask. And a lot of times managers will...
Speaker: go through and they'll kind of pressure test and they'll be on a certain slide and they'll ask a question and then I'll have to think okay where is that and I'll Go. to that slide in the appendix. Well, that brings us right to step eight, our final step, rehearse for timing and interaction.
Speaker: Do you stress? rehearsal. Why is rehearsal not optional, even if you've done this before? Rehearsing isn't just about memorizing. I think when I would give...
Speaker: presentations in school or even the start of my career I would try to memorize a script but it's not about memorizing what you're going to say. It's about internalizing and making sure you really understand the data so that you can talk without a script. And you may have like your one big thing rehearsed or certain lines, but it shouldn't.
Speaker: I think if you rehearse a script, it's gonna come off. scripted and it doesn't build credibility it's much more credible to have you stand there being you able to talk about this exactly so a lot of times you know I'll I'll write a few points down, maybe a one big thing for each slide as I'm
Speaker: presenters i'm practicing and so i know what i need to get across maybe what my closing line will be or my opening line and then what data points i need to hit but it's important so that you're not caught off guard so you're you know ready to answer and you're not can be easy to ramble especially you know when you're in that data and you know it all you have so many data points you want to think about it can help kind of ground you and what's the few things I need to get across with this slide. And it just makes your presentation come off very professional and much cleaner.
Speaker: What are your thoughts about timing especially like going over time yeah i think it's really important to respect your audience's time and you know there's certain times i mean most times your presentation and and professional world you're in a time box meeting. It's a 30 minute Teams call or it's a, if you're on a, you know, on a high level, a five minute pitch where they're listening to many
Speaker: possible vendors or consulting firms and You get a very specific time to present your case in to make it fair to everyone. And if you go over that, you are showing that. you didn't prepare enough. to get your pitch into that amount of time. and i think people start to, you know...
Speaker: think it's okay to go over because they have so much great things to say but if you if you really prepare you should be able to get your main point across and the amount of time that you're given i remember we had a Within my company, there is a competition for a...
Speaker: Like... project and so we were competing against other teams in our company and there was a very specific i think it was seven minute time frame and i wasn't actually presenting i was coordinating it was kind of a director executive level presentation so i helped create a lot of the slides with some other consultants but we did a lot of rehearsing and i even took our script and like spoke it out myself and timed it out and suggested like, you know, I'd
Speaker: the executives would send over what they wanted to say and I'd push back a little like okay can we tighten this a little bit like if unless you're going to speak really quickly we're not going to fit and we did a couple presentations where we were practicing the handoff so okay right after this slide then you know you know Sam is handing off to Julie so everyone felt comfortable there wasn't those awkward pauses of like okay and now who's next and at the end of the presentation we ended like right on time a few seconds to go and the judges actually made a comment like like wow thank you for ending on time we've had to cut a lot of people off and that's not a good look because then you didn't get you know your full whatever your closing statement was you didn't get there it's kind of like oh okay now you're done and it's a lot more powerful to like you own it and know when you're going to stop and be confident. and I know what my message was. I know how much time I had to get there and I did that.
Speaker: And yeah often, Talking faster is not ideal. No, it's not. That's like a last resort. Yes. If you just cannot cut something. And usually, if you take the time...
Speaker: you can really think about how things can be condensed in some area. Yeah, I think there's a quote my grandfather used to say of if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. Like if you had, you know, it's easy to just ramble and...
Speaker: stream of conscious talk, but what really shows that you took time and that you know what you're talking about is you're able to get your message across in fewer words. and that's the list it's a great list thank you for sharing it with us yeah absolutely from our conversation it sounds like you have done a lot of thinking about
Speaker: yourself as an engineering designer and and how that translates into designing communications and designing presentations. What's one mindset shift about presenting you would want every engineering student to take away from our conversation?
Speaker: I would say... Think of presenting not as reporting information, but as driving action. So your job isn't to show how much you know about something. It's to make it easy for others to understand, remember, and do something with that knowledge.
Speaker: so once you adopt that mindset. I think everything from your structure to your slides starts to change and make sense on the outcome and the impact of your presentation and i think that's really exciting to think about you know what others will do with that information versus just numbers on a slide.
Speaker: I think it's a lot... more hopeful. Yeah. like You're actually getting to share this with people who want to do something, who want to take some sort of action. And you're the person who gets to facilitate that. Yeah, for sure. it's It's a big responsibility.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having this conversation with me today. Yeah, absolutely. It was a lot of fun.
