3 Ways to improve your technical presentation

How to amp up your efficacy when communicating technical concepts to an audience

So, you’re all ready to deliver your 60+ slide (1 a minute, right?!), highly technical deep dive to your customers or managers. You’ve done the research, understand all of the minutiae, and can answer almost any question that comes up. You’re going to look like a BOSS! A very nerdy boss, but a BOSS all the same. Until you DON’T, because everyone is either asleep or buried in their email. What went wrong? How could they ignore what is clearly the work of a modern day wizard?

In this article I’ve come up with some pointers to help your technical presentation dazzle and delight. I’ve bombed my fair share of presentations and I’ve dropped the mic to resounding applause. I’ve learned a thing or two on how to tip the scales in your favor. So, let me save you some time!

Tell a story

Stories are fundamental to how we learn and understand each other. Telling a story in your presentation will ease the processing load for your audience. Everyone’s brain loves a good story. Fundamentally, people are emotional and tapping into their emotions with a story can help your audience understand your presentation and retell it. When developing your story, build tension with conflict. An example like talking, demonstrating, or asking discussion questions about how a technical process works today. Expose the pain and problems. After the conflict is understood by your audience resolve the conflict with your technology or process. Show your technology saving the day and the audience will be more likely to remember it!

Less is more

You don’t have 1 hour, you have 15-20 minutes. Maybe. I’ve heard and experienced that people’s attention span is roughly equal to their age, up to age 15. At age 15, it stops growing. So, you’ve got about 15 minutes to drive home whatever it is you came to talk about.

Take what you think is the number of slides you should have and divide by 2. Then divide by 2 again. If you’re looking at your material and don’t think you can deliver it in 15-20 minutes and about 10-15 slides, reduce the scope of the presentation. Technical content is tough for people to digest. A dense technical presentation will cause your audience to lose interest quickly. This isn’t a hard and fast rule as sometimes an audience is invested in your content, but if you’re presenting executives, managers, customers, and not fellow engineers, better to play it safe.

To enhance your chances of delivering the message, develop 2-3 ideas you want your audience to understand when they walk out of the presentation. Of course, there are more than 2-3 ideas in your material, but no one is going to walk out with more than 2-3.

Technical content seems like it requires lots of words and diagrams to convey. If the slides are too busy, you’re going to lose folks. Pictures, diagrams, and few words evoke more response from an audience than a paragraph, list, or diagram with five text callouts. You want your audience to focus on what you’re saying and not reading your slide. Every time I see a list on a slide in a presentation I die a little inside. Even in my own presentations! I feel bad I didn’t put the work in to synthesize the material down to understandable chunks. Don’t do this. Put the work in and make your content digestible.

Mastery brings confidence

Scared to talk in front of people? Worried someone will ask a question you can’t answer? Not sure which aspects of your material to emphasize?

Mastery over your material will solve many of these common issues. If you know the material well, the resulting confidence will take care of most of these issues. You’ll be more likely to know answers to questions. If you don’t, you’ll feel more confident saying, “I don’t know, but I’ll do some research and get back to you.” Because you’ve already done your homework and you know it’s an edge case or out of scope.

You got this!

I hope this is helpful for folks that have to do technical presentations. These tips have helped me put together some decent presentations. There’s also plenty of other things you can do to be successful. If you have some secret method or tip for presenting technical material please share it!