#58 The slide deck isn't the presentation

I've been thinking about this since I got back from PMA Summit.

Someone came up to me after my talk and said: "I loved it. But I have a question. How do you actually get people to listen in a room full of people who are half checking Slack?"

Fair question. I've given a version of this answer a hundred times in my head but never wrote it down. So here it is.

The deck is not the presentation. You are.

This sounds obvious. It's not.

Most of us spend 80% of our prep time in slides. Obsessing over the right font, the right data, the right story arc. Then we walk into the room and read the slides at the audience.

The deck becomes a script. Scripts kill rooms.

Here's what I've noticed: the talks that stay with people don't have better slides. They have a person who is clearly thinking out loud. Who leaves space. Who says "actually, let me go back to something for a second." Who makes you feel like you're watching someone figure something out in real time, not recite something they memorized.

The best PMM presentations I've seen look a little unpolished on the outside. The energy is real because the person is actually in the room with you.

What does that mean practically?

A few things I've started doing:

• Write the talk before the deck. Draft it like an essay first. Figure out the one idea you're actually trying to land. Then build slides around it. Not the other way around.

• Cut your slides in half. Whatever number you have, cut it. Then cut it again. Fewer slides means more presence. More presence means more trust.

• Practice out loud, not in your head. There is no version of good presenting that happens silently. Say the words. Feel the weird parts. Fix them.

• Have one moment that isn't in the deck. One thing you only say if you feel it. For me at PMA it was something I added five minutes before I went on. It ended up being the line people quoted back to me most.

The thing about "being boring"

I talked about being boring at PMA because I think PMMs have overcorrected into performance mode.

We think being compelling means being loud, visual, animated. We think more is more. So we pack the deck and fill every silence and try to be interesting at every single moment.

But people don't need to be entertained. They need to feel understood.

The most memorable thing you can do in a room is say something true that nobody else has said yet. That doesn't require production value. It requires clarity.

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Worth your time

Elliott Rayner, who came on the podcast to talk storytelling, runs a 4-week cohort on Maven for PMMs who want to get sharper at this. Next one starts April 6! Sign up here