When you work for a tech company, you’re going to do many presentations. The problem is that most people have three versions of the same presentation where the only variable is duration: short, long, or painfully long.
The challenge is that we’re considering the wrong variable: It’s NOT duration.
When someone wants a 10 minute version of your 45 minute talk, the usual move is to cut slides. You keep the same goal and rush it. When they ask for 90 minutes, you add slides and pad it. Either way, you’re giving the same talk at a different speed.
The real variable is the Goal. If you understand the goal – regardless of the duration – now you can make it work. So before you open the slide deck, answer one question: what should the audience do or believe when you’re done?
Once you answer that, you’ll find that most presentations fit into one of three shapes.
Pitches: The Cooking Show
For Pitches, a cooking show where you are in total control from beginning to end and want to show the perfect outcome.
Think about any cooking show. The onions are already chopped. The spices are pre-measured in little glass bowls. When the host puts the dish in the oven, they turn around and pull out the finished one. Nobody tunes in to watch 45 minutes of baking.
A pitch works the same way. Funding pitch, keynote, or sales pitch, the goal is to show what the world looks like with your thing in it. No surprises and no live debugging.
In the early days at Twilio, we had the 5 minute demo. Each of us would walk on stage with a browser, an empty text editor, and a phone, and by the end of it, we had a phone number that could accept text messages and prank the audience. Internally, we practiced this relentlessly because it had to be perfect every time. It was also the presentation I gave the most, sometimes 3-5 times per week. I even had the chance to do it for Werner Vogels at SXSW and for an entrepreneurial class Bob Metcalfe taught.
Note: If you don’t recognize those names, one of them is the CTO of Amazon, the other co-created Ethernet and created the idea of “the network effect.”
Ever time, it was live code, but nothing about it was improvised. Every keystroke was rehearsed. That’s a cooking show.
Workshops: The Magic Show
For Workshops, a magic show where you show something compelling and then take the participants behind the curtain to show how it works.
The trick gets their attention. The reveal teaches. If you only do the trick, the room is entertained and can’t do anything afterwards. If you only do the reveal, you’ve lost them before you get to the good part.
Early in my career, I approached workshops as an engineer would. I wanted to show off all the cool things we’d built and how awesome they were. While there was plenty of material, it lacked anything concrete or actionable on the way out. That’s why the Magic Show is better.
The goal of a workshop is that people leave able to do it themselves. So show the finished thing in the first five minutes. Then spend the rest of the time taking it apart piece by piece until everyone in the room has built their own.
For bonus points, leave the last step for them. A magician never explains the final trick, but a good workshop lets the audience perform it.
Product Demos: The Tour Guide
For Product Demos, a tour guide is where you can show a breadth of things but really only expect people to remember a few things they care about.
A good tour guide in Rome walks you past dozens of buildings and fountains. You remember the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the gelato. A good guide knows that and plans the route around it.
In a product demo, everyone on the call has a different problem. The developer cares about the API and the docs. The security lead cares about SSO and audit logs. The manager cares about price and how long it takes to roll out. As I wrote in “Selling to Developers,” developers have two goals in life: build something useful and go home. Your demo should show each person the part that gets them there.
So ask up front what they care about, and spend your time there. If someone asks about a stop that wasn’t on the route, detour and go there. The tour exists for them, not for you to show off how cool you are.
Which One Do People Get Wrong?
Product demos, most often. Teams run them as cooking shows: scripted, polished, and no room for questions. The demo looks perfect and the prospect still doesn’t know if it solves their specific problem.
The second most common miss is a workshop run as a tour guide. You make a dozen stops, everyone sees a lot, and nobody has learned anything when they leave. I know because my early workshops looked exactly like that.
So What Should You Do?
First, write down the goal in one sentence before you build a single slide. If you can’t, you’re not ready to build the deck.
Next, pick the show: cooking show, magic show, or tour guide.
Next, cut anything that doesn’t serve the goal. That favorite slide with the architecture diagram? If it doesn’t help this audience do or believe the thing, it goes.
Finally, rehearse. Rehearse the opening and the close until you can deliver them on a bad day, and rehearse the demo until you know what breaks and how to recover.
Decide what the audience should do when you’re done. Then pick the show.