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Intro

Throughout my 10+ years in Product Design, I’ve witnessed or given too many presentations to count. Whether it was listening to leadership address the company, sitting through candidate interviews, or even pitching myself as a candidate during my job search, lots of presentations.

Over the years, I’ve become increasingly interested in the art of effective communication and am always working to improve my presentation skills. One driver of this interest is my experience sitting through what I label as inefficient meetings, presentations, interviews, etc.

Despite my slight obsession with logic and efficiency, I am not a master of the presentation. But, let me tell you what makes a great presentation.

What Makes a Great Presentation?

There is definitely such a thing as a bad communicator (think of your significant other, haha boom!) and a bad presentation; we’ve all experienced one or the other. Here are some things to keep in mind that make for great presentations.

Clear Structure

Structuring your presentation in the beginning will act as an outline for how you’ll walk through the content of your subject. Start with a hook (something that gets the audience paying attention), then organize your main points so that they flow naturally, and conclude your talk concisely to reinforce your key messaging.

Engaging Content

Not all content is engaging, so it’s up to you as the presenter to make it engaging. Keep in mind that hitting people with a bunch of numbers or data doesn’t stick without a good story behind it.

Find the sweet spot between not having enough detail and having too much. Not enough, and your audience will have more questions or might feel unfulfilled. Too much and your audience may turn their cameras off and pet their animals, or take a nap.

Effective Delivery

The way you deliver a presentation is unique to you, but here’s my million-dollar secret that I do that helps me speak more confidently and authentically. I write a script or a talk track.

That’s right, it’s nothing crazy, but this is the single best thing I’ve done that has helped me. One thing I notice with presentations is that people do not speak like they normally do. There’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes it can feel overly scripted and robotic, making it hard to listen to and engage with. I like to present the same way that I have a conversation.

I use the script and run through it a few times to help me figure out aspects like pacing, varied tone, strategic pauses or humor, and my body language and movement. This works so well for me.

Do I work for UPS? Because this is one hell of a delivery.

Visual Support

This isn’t unique to designers. In fact, I’m so happy that tools like Canva exist for non-designers, because damn, there are some ugly presentations out there in the world.

Clean, uncluttered slides with bullet points and a consistent design will work wonders. If you’re reading paragraphs off your slide, why couldn’t you have just sent it to your audience to read on their own time?

Audience Connection

Despite the fact that I get nervous before every presentation I give, this is my favorite part of presenting. If you’ve been reading The Un-Employer for a while, you know that I love connecting with others. So, I’ll jump at any opportunity to connect with my audience.

Whether it’s allowing them to interrupt as questions arise, looking at facial expressions to see if people are engaged or bored (adjusting my pacing/timing), or sprinkling some humor into my presentation, I love the conversations that come up.

In the Zoom age, where cameras are off some or most of the time, doing the prep work will help to keep your audience interested and engaged.

How AI Can Help Improve Your Presentations

While I’m not using AI to help with all aspects of my presentations, here are some things I do use it for:

Outlines

Put the topic of your talk into ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever else and ask for an outline. Maybe it’ll be spot on (less likely), maybe you’ll need to do some editing (more likely). This is a great starting point to wrap your head around what you need to talk about and start to think about how you want to talk about it.

Condensing Content

Struggling to get the content on your slides or in your talk track below a certain character or word count? There are a hundred tools for that, and most do a kick-ass job! In fact, I wish all people did this before presenting, because I believe that in this world, effective communication is hot, and run-on sentences are everywhere. Was that a run-on sentence?

Practicing Your Presentation

Spend 10,000 hours on your presentation and you’ll be a billionaire. False.

Side note, the word billionaire reminded me of leadership, and I wanted to share that I think a lot of leaders could benefit from communicating more effectively — death to buzz words!

There are tools like Yoodli and Orai that are AI tools that allow you to record your presentation and get feedback instantly. If you have friends, you can use them, but these tools will work, too!

My tech stack for practicing my presentations currently consists of QuickTime audio recording and the stopwatch on my iPhone. The older I get, the more I think I’m becoming Larry David.

How Not to Use It

Okay, okay, this isn’t the same as prepping for a presentation, but this is such a wild story that I couldn’t help but share it.

A former Columbia student created a tool that helps people cheat on coding interviews, and he landed jobs at Amazon, TikTok, Meta, and Capital One. Maybe I do need this 😈

Nick Cuda is a Senior Product Designer with over 10 years of experience working at early-stage startups and large companies with millions of customers. This is his story, duh duh. www.nickcuda.design

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