Structure your design presentation to put your team’s work on the roadmap
It’s Thursday afternoon. You’re a Content Designer, standing in front of a panel of leaders. Your deck is ready, and the conference line is dialed in. The blue glow of the title slide fills the screen behind you. You survey the room as directors and above hasten in from their previous meetings to find a seat.
At companies like Intuit, product reviews are a biweekly occurrence. They’re also an essential part of user experience design. Put simply: Designers who can successfully present rationale see their strategies prioritized and brought to light.
While storytelling certainly plays a key part in presenting, it takes more than a great story to get your preferred track of work out of a deck and onto the roadmap for next quarter (especially in the face of difficult trade-offs). Prioritization inherently means some projects fall below the line. If you’ve done the research to identify an opportunity worthy of a scrum team’s valuable time, you want to ensure you’re surfacing it in a compelling way to the stakeholders with the most influence. When it’s all said and done, you want your project to be viewed as a “go-do” — an obvious, easy choice for the business.
At Intuit, there are a few ways to go about this, but the most important thing to keep in mind is that it all comes back to the customer. We pride ourselves on being a design driven company, which means we put the customer first in everything we do — including design presentations. Here’s how.
1. “Having an agenda” is not a bad thing
You should have a reason why you’re presenting your story in a particular light. It’s your point of view, and if it’s a good one, it’ll be backed by customer feedback.
Each time you hit one of your points, substantiate it with clear, straightforward research. Embrace total transparency. You want your smaller points to build in a way that makes people say “That makes sense,” so by the time you deliver your proposed direction of work, heads are already nodding. To structure this narrative, start by defining your meeting objective or goal (“This meeting will be successful if…”). Then clarify what kind of feedback will be most valuable moving forward.
2. Find the right altitude
A problem may seem obvious to you, but that’s likely because you’ve just spent the past several weeks interviewing customers and poring over their feedback.
Don’t assume people are already familiar with the details of your design challenge. Framing your topic well is crucial: If you jump straight in at a level that’s too granular, you risk losing those who are unfamiliar with the scope of work. Start off too broad, and you’ll find yourself caught between teams trying to solve a litany of problems outside of your control.
To find the right altitude, try approaching your ideas from big to small. Start with the broad, overall strategy — then narrow it down to the execution of the work you’re sharing. Connecting those dots will help your audience take a critical look at the problem you are trying to solve.
3. Set expectations: Open with an honest problem statement
I would argue that most presentations fall flat because the presenter failed to set expectations at the beginning. That means opening with a crisp problem statement and articulating why this audience should care.
Don’t reach, stretch your argument, hinge your entire case on a sample size of one, or otherwise attempt to lead the witness. Present an unbiased problem statement, and back it up with research straight from the customer’s mouth.
Stanford’s d.school, founded by the same guy who founded the design firm IDEO, has a format for framing problem statements (below). The d.school is widely regarded as the foremost leader in design thinking methodology, and this way of thinking is so ingrained in Intuit’s culture that you can still occasionally find founder Scott Cook on campus coaching designers and employees on how to frame the customer problem statement succinctly.
If you’re feeling anti-authoritarian, know that I don’t adhere to this doctrine (and the beloved sticky-note-cluster-murals that come with it) a perfect percentage of the time — but it’s generally a helpful way to start on familiar ground. It’s a language most user experience designers and product managers already speak, which gives you an easy head start on achieving alignment around what’s at stake.
Interested in learning more about design thinking at Intuit? Here’s a full rundown of how Intuit implements design thinking.
Plus a few other resources, if you want to take it a step further:
You can see in the problem statement template how it might be tempting to insert your agenda into the “Desired outcome” space. That might look something like:
“I am a user, I am trying to get a message served to me immediately, in context, in the form of a tooltip, page message, coach mark, or modal, upon first sign in… sort of like a first use experience, but, you know… not trying to be prescriptive.”
This won’t yield a good solution. (And it’s actually really easy to do this unintentionally.) You can avoid this by striving to be exact when you’re crafting your problem statement.
The bottom line is, there’s no substitute for listening to customers. Uncover their real pain points and find out what motivates them by asking “Why?” a lot. You are an advocate for their biggest challenges, and you owe it to them to get it right.
4. Use data to tell us why we should care
Ok, so you’ve set expectations with a problem statement, and it’s airtight. Now it’s time to introduce the facts. As CEO Sasan Goodarzi says, “At Intuit, data wins the argument, not opinions.”
Dive deeper into why your audience should care. How does this impact the business? What are the stakes? Can you quantify (or ballpark) what the business stands to gain or lose by prioritizing or not prioritizing this track of work? Will this project help a team scale their operations, address an attrition problem, or something else?
Try to anticipate the downstream consequences, weigh possible outcomes, and illustrate the pros and cons of taking action versus staying the course. Paint a picture of the world as it could be — politicians call this deliberative rhetoric.
But also, get to the point. Don’t spend a ton of time on lofty promises. And remember, you’re building a case, one block at a time. Don’t reveal too much. To quote one of my favorite movies: The secret impresses no one… the trick you use it for is everything.
5. Have a personality
If you find yourself presenting to people staring at their phones, nodding off, or otherwise indisposed, you’ve lost the room. Remember, they’ve likely just spent the entire day/week/year in back-to-back meetings and presentations, and their attention span is deteriorating. (Frankly, I’m convinced making it to the executive level is, in some part, a test of meeting endurance.)
Which brings me to my next point: Delivery matters.
You don’t have to be Winston Churchill to connect with people’s emotions, but you shouldn’t be afraid to have some personality. I came across this article in Inc. when I was researching what makes great rhetoric, and couldn’t have said it better myself:
“A personality is what makes a person distinct. We all get one at birth, and many of us lose ours when we set foot on a stage. It doesn’t have to be a warm personality, although warmth is an attractive quality. It just needs to be real, determined, and accessible… you don’t have to tell jokes, but it’s nice if you can come across as having a sense of ease.”
If the idea of entertaining your audience makes you feel anything but a sense of ease, imagine being in their shoes. It’s hard to feel energized when a presenter is trembling with fear. The energy in the room shifts away from the material toward sympathy for the presenter.
In my experience, authenticity, purpose, and passion go a long way. Focus on what you want to communicate, and deliver it with conviction. If people are only going to take one thing away from your presentation, what do you want it to be?
Also, give yourself a break. You’re going to say the wrong thing sometimes, and that’s ok.
6. Tell the right story with case studies
“Listeners live on an island of their own interests. Great speakers build a bridge to that island: They can make the conflict in Ukraine rattle the dishes in your cupboard.”
Inc. 14 Must-Haves to Be a Great Public Speaker
Now we get to the storytelling piece. Of course great speakers are sublime storytellers, capable of reeling in their audience and transporting them to faraway places. I believe storytelling is a gift. And honestly, for as much fiction as I read, it’s a gift I don’t really possess. Luckily, when it comes to presenting the facts, there’s another way.
Use case studies to bring your problem statement to life. Talk to the Customer Success team, or the team that’s close to customers. Find a scenario in their day-to-day that demonstrates the pain points your customers describe in your problem statement, and illustrate your point with your user’s words. It doesn’t have to be a big, business-altering case study. Outline a specific instance where something did or did not happen, and why. Your goal is to emphasize your problem statement with a real-world scenario, and contrast a cause and a solution.
7. Point/counterpoint
Once you’ve presented your problem statement, data, research, and case studies, cross examine yourself. Say what everyone’s thinking. Poke holes in your own argument. Provide their rebuttal for them, and try to anticipate their questions. This is the quickest way to an honest, constructive discussion, and it shows that you’ve considered all the angles.
If someone can point to a flaw in your logic, that’s helpful — you can go back and re-evaluate your case with new information. And if you thought of all of the possibilities (so far), that’s even better. It’s easier to come to an agreement when everyone’s cards are on the table.
8. Backchannel
At Intuit, small diverse teams drive our work, and we strive to always assume good intent. We call it “Win together,” and it’s one of our six operating values. When it comes to presenting creative work, winning together means bringing people along. Get coffee with different stakeholders before you present, and find out what they care about. Try to get the full story, and check your facts. No one likes surprises — in your effort to highlight an area of opportunity, don’t inadvertently make another team look like they failed to deliver.
If you want to lead change, you need as many people in the organization behind you as you can recruit. Bringing people along allows a “backchannel” approach to be both positive and inclusive. Plus, you’ll gain a lot of empathy for people on other teams. In an organization Intuit’s size, there are a lot of tough jobs and no easy fixes. It really takes a village.
Verdict
Those are just a few things to consider when shaping a presentation with the goal of getting a project or track of work prioritized on the roadmap. There are always going to be priorities that you don’t have visibility into, and that’s the tough job of the product managers to sort out. But when it comes to outlining and framing a case, structure and preparation is everything: Have an agenda, introduce it at the right altitude, set expectations with your problem statement, back it up with data, have a personality, use case studies to bring it to life, provide the rebuttal, and check in with key stakeholders before you present, and you’ll be more than ready for that next product review. And remember, the customer always comes first.
Visual design by Wendy Whatley
