In this series of blog posts, we’ll be talking about the skills and giving tips, tricks, and feedback on planning, creating, and presenting a talk. This comes from our experience as tech conference speakers, but most of the advice can be applied in a wide variety of settings and talk topics.

In this first part, we’re looking at the initial stage of preparing a presentation: planning it out, choosing your format, building out the structure, and then building your slide deck.

Planning your Talk

Know your Audience

It sounds simple, but the first thing you need to do is work out who your audience is and what they expect from you.

Are they developers or is this more applicable for everyone?
Do they want a higher level talk or a technical deep dive?
Are they juniors, managers, or somewhere in between?
Do they work for a large corporate, a startup, or themselves?
Maybe you’re specifically targeting people who’ve changed careers later in life?

Have a think about who you’re expecting at the event, and who you want to come to your talk. Are there any other talks on at the same time that you might be competing with? This includes having a think about people who might also benefit from your talk, you could be targeting designers but some front end developers might be interested in it as well and managers may benefit from knowing some of what the designers do?

Most people will be in your talk because they know a bit about what you’re talking about, you’re expecting prior knowledge. But have a think about who else might also wander into your talk, is there anything you can briefly explain that helps them understand what you’re talking about and why it’s important.

How do you want to change them?

As much as we love our audiences, we come into our talks wanting to change them. This could be something as simple as teaching them something new or you could be teaching them to have a different outlook. The audience is giving up their time to watch you and your talk, so work out what you want them to take away, and what goals you have for your talk.

Are you teaching them something new? Or about something new?
Do you want to change their mind?
Do you want to inspire them?

Have a think about the people you might not expect to be as well, is there someone whose mind you can change? Someone who might see a different way of thinking or who can learn something they weren’t expecting?

Know your topic

Now this sounds like an obvious one, but make sure you know what you’re talking about, and while you should know a bit more than specifically just what you’re talking about, you don’t have to know everything. In fact it’s just as important to know what you don’t know, as it is to know what you do know.

Know what you don’t know

In the leadup to a talk, take notes whenever you’re left wondering something, as the audience will likely wonder as well. Try and build something other than just a slide deck, maybe it’s a demo or working example, writing a blog post, and reading blog posts on similar topics to see how other people have covered the content.

The most important thing about knowing your topic though is not pretending to know more than you don’t. Your audience doesn’t expect you to be an expert, if you’ve only used the technology for a month then you still have a month more experience than they do, and as someone who is newer to the topic you’re in a prime position to take the audience on the journey, a journey that you have literally just been on. People who are experts in a subject matter are amazing at what they do, but sometimes they’ve forgotten what it was like when they were first learning, what they didn’t already know and how lost they were to get started. So don’t pretend you know more than you do, if someone asks you a question that you don’t know the answer to (we’ll cover this more in the next post as well), don’t be afraid to say I don’t know otherwise you risk giving incorrect information and having someone call you out.

Build your Points

These points will form the backbone of your talk, and when you get lost you can continually refer back to them. Have a think about what you’re really wanting to tell the audience, what do you want them to learn? The points you use tie into your main goal and support your whole presentation, as they’re the evidence you provide to the audience.

Choosing a Format

You’ve likely already chosen the best format to present your talk in, but there are a few different formats you can present in. Not all formats will work for your talk (eg. live demos don’t work as well for core skills talks), and some may provide logistical challenges or not fit well with the event you’re presenting at. It’s worth keeping these formats in mind any time you come up with a new presentation idea, especially at the start when you first write the talk proposal.

Traditional Presentation

This is the most common format, and typically involves standing and talking to a bunch of slides. There are slight variations on this though, perhaps you don’t have slides, or perhaps you’d like to risk it all and live draw your slides (if you’ve ever seen Jeff Patton (opens in a new tab) present, he has a tendency to live draw his presentations, each and every time).

Live Demo

Particularly popular for deep technical talks, live demos allow you to show the audience what you’re talking about, with no tricks, just good solid live coding (and hoping that everything will work). We’ll cover the logistics of live demos a bit more in the next post, but when done well these can be a great way to showcase to the audience what the tech does and how to do it.

Panels or Audience Q&A

While not seen as often, having a panel of speakers and/or having questions from the audience can give a really powerful and interesting presentation. This is often great for core skills and culture related presentations where people may have specific questions they want answered that relate to the overall topic. This also ensure the audience maintains their attention and the content is relevant because they’re the ones driving the show!

Choosing a Structure

There are many different structures your presentation can take on, depending on the content of your talk it may lend better to a certain structure. There are also a number of other structures that you can choose, so find what works best for your presentation.

Numeric

This is a really good one that helps the audience to know what they’re getting out of it, eg. 10 tips to be a better conference speaker or 5 reasons why vanilla CSS is better than Tailwind. This structure is also much easier to build your presentation out as you know what your points are and what content to include but make sure you number things properly because the audience will notice.

Chronological or Hero’s Journey

Using a chronological order can be fairly easy to do as well, take the audience on the same journey you went on. This is often similar to the Hero’s Journey, throughout the talk you tell the story of how you started, the bumps and challenges along the road, and how you ended up where you did. For this structure, don’t be afraid to ease into the story telling side of things as well, play up your role as the narrator, and take the audience on an adventure.

Diagram of the Hero’s Journey which is a circle that follows from Call to Adventure through various bumps and challenges along the way, then atonement and success at the end of the journey which brings them back to the beginning

Problem & Solution

A bit simpler than the chronological option, this structure takes a more simplified look at the journey. Rather than taking the audience through each twist and turn, start off with the problem you faced (the problem is likely generic enough that the audience can easily relate to it), and then present the solution you came up with, and how it was best able to solve your problem.

Narrative Journey

The narrative journey tells a story, and if it works for your talk, this is one of the best structures to use (if it works). Some of the other structures follow a similar format, but will only use a couple of the different steps.

Landscape: Set the scene
Analysis: What you’re going to highlight
Problem: Core issue you’ve found
Options: What could fix the problem
Solution: Best option and how it works
Bigger Idea: Why does this matter and why should the audience care

Forming an Outline

Once you’ve got your points and your structure, you can begin building the outline of your presentation. This can just be something that you use to help plan or it could be something you share as part of your presentation.

Even without sharing it, a good outline should help the audience to follow your presentation (it gives you a good logical order to follow), and supports your main points. Now this could be just shared in a simpler version to give the basic outline of your presentation, and the rest of the outline will be built out to form your slide deck.

Write a blog post, build a flow chart, sketch it out, find the outline method that works best for you, your methods and your presentation

How you plan the outline is up to you and how you work best. Perhaps you could write a blog post on the topic (this is useful as it gives you a resource to share at the end of the presentation), or a flow chart of even sketch noting your ideas and topic. When writing a new presentation, I often start to build the outline out on a Kanban board, because I can visualise all the sections as columns with a different card for each slide and planning out my notes and what resources I want to share at each point.

Building your Deck

Once you’ve formed the outline, that can then be built out to become your slide deck or the full presentation. At a minimum your presentation will include:

Introduction: should be welcoming and let the audience know what to expect
Body: Your main points, presented in a coherent and logical sequence
Conclusion: Purposeful conclusion to summarise the main points and provide resources

Introduction

We often spend so much time working on our presentation, we don’t actually work out how we’re going to start off. Do we begin with a bad joke? Is this mic on? Hi, my name is {name} and today I’m going to talk about…?

Have a think about what you’re going to say to start off, try asking the audience a question to ease into it. It’s also a good way to gauge who you’ve got in the audience, get a show of hands on what level they’re at, how familiar they are with the content you’re talking about. Or start off with a fact, Did you know…, get their attention at the start and go from there.

Sections

Depending on the length of your talk, you’ll want to break the main body of your talk up into a few different sections. Sections help the audience follow your presentation, and should line up with the outline that you’ve developed.

Sections don’t have to have a separate title page and you don’t have to announce that you’re moving sections, transitions can be a little more subtle and will get easier with time. For example, you could use different feature colour for each section, or have a small heading a the top of each slide.

Even when not obvious to the audience, sections help to break your talk up into smaller chunks, without them your talk can feel like one big long speech. By adding sections to your talk, it adds breaks to let the audience reconcile their thoughts.

When you first start presenting, transitions between sections can feel a bit awkward and hard to get used to, but it does get easier with time.

Now that we’ve explored {x}….
Moving away from a focus on…

These transitions help show the audience that you’re moving through the talk, and help them navigate the various points that you’re covering during your presentation. They can be non-verbal as well, perhaps you even just move to a different part of the stage or make eye contact with a different part of the room

Conclusion

Once the main body of your talk is done, your conclusion is your chance to sum up your main points and recap the presentation for the audience. It gives the audience a chance to remember what you talked about, and provides them with a list of resources and references to find more information after you’re done.

A good conclusion also lets the audience know that you’re done, rather than awkwardly stopping at the end of a sentence, pausing awkwardly and them wondering if that’s it. This is also your chance to ask for questions (if you’re taking them) and let people where they can find the slides, how they can get in touch with you or anything else that you want to share with them (like a #ShamelessPlug).

It helps at this point to share a link to your slides, so the audience can recap on what you talked about or so they can easily find the resources you recommended. There are a few different services that you can use to do this, like Notist (opens in a new tab) or even just a Dropbox or Google Drive link. Sharing your slides also means the audience can focus on the presentation without having to worry about taking a bunch of notes or writing down URLs. Remember your slides should only support your presentation, so they’re still not a huge benefit to anyone who wasn’t in the room.

Timing

When it comes to presentations, timing really is everything and there are multiple areas you need to think about timing. Think about how long it takes you to tune out to a presentation, your audience is probably going to be the same. Try not to spend more than 10min on a section without moving on to another section or taking a break, if you’ve got a lot of content without a break try throwing in some demos, anecdotes, activities, or questions to the audience.

Utilising Anecdotes

Remembering a memory (especially one of our own), is much easier than content than we’ve rehearsed, especially when you’re stressed (like when you’re standing on stage in front of a bunch of people). They’re also more engaging to the audience and can help them to relate to you as the speaker, and why your experiences are similar to theirs.

When presenting, anecdotes are a useful tool to break up heavy sections of content and can keep the audience engaged. They’re also a good way to start up, warming up both yourself and the audience, it’s much easier to relax and feel comfortable on stage when you’re telling a story you’re familiar with.

Anecdotes are also great for helping to keep you talk to time, because you know the content you don’t need to include it in your slides, so you can add it in if you’re running a little fast and you can skip over it if you’re running behind.

About Me

When you present, most of the time you’ll be introduced (not always though, so check first), but either way you’ll likely have one or two slides to tell the audience a bit of information about yourself. How much information you include depends on if you’re being introduced (you don’t want to double up), the event and where it is, there’s a scale from too much to not enough info so make sure you find the sweet spot.

If you give too much information, you risk coming off as thinking a bit too much of yourself, but not enough and people might wonder why they should listen to you. So work out what the audience needs to know to know you’re speaking from a position of authority, and how much they’ll want to know.

Slides

If you’re using slides, remember that they’re not everything, slides are there to support your presentation and the structure, but they’re not the whole story. There are a number of slides you’ll likely include in the presentation (like a title slide, or some conferences will ask you to include a sponsor slide), but for the most part the rest is up to you.

Don’t worry about having too many slides either, some speakers will flick through a slide every 10 seconds, it’s better to go through them faster rather than speaking to a slide for an extended period of time, that runs the risk of the audience zoning out.

Your slides support your presentation, so for the most part they’ll use visuals over text, large fonts and not many words. Try and keep your slides to simple, soundbites, tweetable snippets to support what you’re saying and for people to take away. Your slides will need to be visible from the back of a large room, so this isn’t the time to cram as many words as possible onto the screen, that also distracts your audience and they end up trying to read what’s on the screen rather than listening to what you’re saying.

If you’re on social media like Twitter, it’s worth making sure that you have your handle on each of the slides, or if you have a hashtag you want the audience to use include that as well. Remember you’re going to do an amazing talk, so make it easy for them to tell the world about it!

Slide Design

When it comes to the design of your slides, don’t overthink it too much, simple is better. Some of the best advice I’ve heard is to rank your design skills on a scale of 1 to 5, that’s how many colours you’re allowed to use on your slides. Keep the design consistent, are the fonts colours and layout the same across the whole presentation? Or does it look like you’ve thrown a few different things together.

If you’re not sure what to do with your slides, try just changing the background colour to something that isn’t quite white and the text colour to not quite black. This shows that you’ve changed to something other than the default and the colours are a bit easier on the eyes. If you’re showing code samples try inverting the colours, as it’s generally easier to read code on a black slide background.

A lot of the time, you may find that your slides tend towards visual rather than text content, which is totally fine. Depending on the event (and your speaking style), you may even lead heavily into gifs or memes (tech conferences are pretty good on this front). Where possible, make sure you’re using high resolution images, that are the full size of the screen. If you can’t make it the full size, try making the slide background plain black; this will draw attention to the image and make the slides look clean. If you’re planning to share the slides, make sure you have permission to use the images as well, sites like Unsplash (opens in a new tab) are great for free high definition images to use for your presentation.

Levelling Up

Once the base of your slides are built, there are a few things you can do to level up your presentation and wow the audience with how fantastic a speaker you are (other than your stellar content of course).

Diversity and Inclusion

There are often a lot of small changes you can make to your presentation to make sure you’re being inclusive to everyone in the audience (and making sure you’re abiding by the event’s Code of Conduct).

Make sure there’s enough contrast between the text and background colour, as the difference will get even worse when on an older projector or if the lighting in the room is bright. Similar to having large text, you want to make sure that there’s enough of a difference between the colours you’re using so that people at the back of the room or people with vision impairments are able to see it clearly. When using multiple colours, the best combination is deep blue, cyan, red and yellow as 99.999% of the population can tell the difference between them.

When choosing images, have a look at the people in them as well. Are there people that are different from you? Are you showing people doing different things? Are you actively trying to challenge our stereotypes and biases? Are you slides full of images of white middle-aged men in suits shaking hands?

This extends to your examples that you use as well, are you continually referring to male people in your examples? Are you referring to women as non-tech savvy people, eg. So easy a mum could do it. Most of the time you may find that you don’t actually need to assign a gender to your hypothetical people. This may seem like a little thing, but it can go a long way to ensuring that everyone in the audience feels included and that they’re not being singled out as the noob in your case studies.

Other Speakers

Depending on the event, you’re probably going to have other speakers talking before or after you, likely on similar or tangential topics. Each time you present at an event, have a look to see if anyone else is talking on similar topics, and if they’re scheduled before or after you. It’s worth reaching out to see what they’re covering, and it’s a good chance to make sure you’re not doubling up on the same content, and perhaps an opportunity to refer to one another.

If the speaker is presenting after you, maybe you’re touching on what they’re talking about, so throw in a slide or tell the audience to check out their talk to hear more about that particular topic. If you’re presenting after them, see if you’re able to pop in to their session and find a few points to refer to throughout your presentation. Even just a couple of notes, eg. As {name} has spoken about this morning…, it shows that you’ve attended other presentations at the event and helps to show how the content can interrelate with other topics.

So now that you’ve heard the tips and tricks from the experts, you can put them to the test for your own presentation and wow the audience with your new found skills.

Resources

This information has been collated from a number of existing resources including but not limited to the below. This includes further recommended reading.

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Speaker Skills Part 1 — Planning, Format, Structure, and Slides