Have you ever agonized for days before giving a presentation, inevitably waiting until the 11th hour to throw it together? Have you ever been asked to give a talk at the last minute, sending you into a panic spiral? Afterwards, did you feel like the quality of the talk was meh?
I have been up to my eyeballs in full-attention tasks lately, so I’m trying something a little more short-and-sweet this week. My target audience are new(-ish) data team leaders, who are probably starting to realize that there are certain things they just don’t teach you how to do in any kind of formal way. In my own time spent accumulating management flight hours, I’ve picked up some random methods that have made my life easier and my capacity more scalable.
This is one such pro tip. While this post isn’t necessarily data-specific, if you are in a leadership position on a data team, you are going to be responsible for evangelizing your team’s work via talks to executive audiences as well as setting the bar on how your team presents their work to non-data-experts. Here’s a trick I’ve used to whip up presentations quickly. I call it the “superdeck method.”
When I launched this blog, my first post was about how to focus when creating written documents, and writing a talk is no less susceptible to distractions. For me, trying to get the visuals to look perfect ends up being a major distraction if I haven’t first worked out the flow of a presentation. To combat this, I start with a fresh deck of slides that I intentionally choose to share with no one, which takes away any inhibition about the content, whether it looks good, or if it’s in any realistic kind of order. This is the “superdeck.”
The secret to speed when writing actual talks is that a superdeck is not tied to any particular audience or presentation, it’s just a format-ready space to gather proto-content. Getting into the rhythm and practice of amassing content over time free of any short-term deadlines makes the actual presentations come together really fast. The trick is to anticipate what kinds of content you might need to present and have a space to collect ideas as you think of them, well before any imminent deadlines. It’s a little bit of a cheat, I know, but when you can seemingly pull a talk out of nowhere like a magician it will impress your friends and colleagues.
Here’s roughly how to do it:
Creating the “Superdeck”
Create a deck that will be shared with no one, unless they are also part of the creative process (for example, a collaborator who is also giving the talk with you). Give it a name like “SUPERDECK - [name of content I probably have to talk about]”
Start with a template that has a title slide and a template content slide. I usually put a generic title on the title slide and add “DO NOT SHARE” to remind myself not to accidentally share it.
I also usually give the first content slide a header like “My outline - To be deleted” and use it as a scratchpad for ideas of concepts or themes that I want to add to the slides.
Building up the content
There is only one rule, which is that there can only be one idea per slide. If you feel like there is more than one takeaway for the audience in one slide, make a new slide for each takeaway. Sometimes I find it helpful at this stage to write the takeaway I want for that slide in the speaker's notes.
Any idea that pops into my head gets written down on its own slide, without editing. Sometimes it’s words, sometimes it’s a little diagram or a screenshot of a picture I googled, and I don’t worry about editing until later in the process.
Slides can be in any order at this stage. Some ideas will flow from one slide to the next, but there will be slides that don’t fit the flow. You can leave them there, even if they are never used, because no one will ever see this deck.
Once I have a good amount of content, I start cleaning up the slides. Again, they can be in any order, and I never delete a slide.
If I get bored with one slide or can’t think of a new slide to create, I keep the momentum going by moving on to clean up another one.
Writing the actual talk
Once I have a superdeck that covers a large topic area, this is the part that usually comes together really fast. When I need to give a talk, I copy the slides that make the most sense for a particular audience into a new deck. To help me stay organized and find the talk at some point in the future, I often add the date of the talk and audience right into the name of the file.
Only once I’m happy with the bulk of the content in the actual talk, I focus more directly on the flow. I tweak things here and there, maybe adding in a transition slide, a summary of takeaways, etc. This is also a good time to start imagining what I am going to say to that particular audience and filling out the speaker's notes.
Cleaning it up and recycling content
If I edit slides for a particular audience, I always make sure to copy those edits back into the original superdeck for later. Any variations of a slide can be kept in the superdeck, but I never replace any slides (unless it’s a very minor change). I’ve kicked myself so many times for overwriting something that didn’t work for one talk, but would have been a better fit for a different audience months later.
Finally, be ready for a road show. Who else might care about the content you have? Imagine how your team can benefit from all of that evangelization opportunity. Having the superdeck handy makes it easy to create short 5 minute lightning talks or long 30 minute talks, depending on the audience and format needed. And each time you show the same or similar slides, you have a chance to edit yourself, and your presentation skills get better too!