How to Present Like Steve Jobs

Do you create a lot of presentations at work? Do you have to persuade your management team frequently? Are you in a leadership position where you have to influence your team members?

This blog will discuss the Framework I use to create presentations. It is a result of dozens of presentations done in the last few years internally, presentations done to and for several CXOs, research on presentations at Apple, Google, etc., and several books.

Presentation Canvas

Framework / Presentation Canvas:

Audience

1. Audience — who is the audience for the presentation?
2. Goals — why are you preparing this presentation? What is the audience looking for?
3. Pain points — what is the pain of the audience you are addressing?
4. Gain creators — what gain are you creating for the audience through this presentation?
5. Expectations — what expectations do the audience have from the presentation?

Presentation structure

This section of the canvas discusses how you will narrate the story to persuade your audience. Freytag’s pyramid, a popular storytelling framework, is very useful in this step. Your narration should have a problem, the current way people are solving the problem with its limitations, solution, and how the solution makes the end-users a superhero.

1. Brainstorm — Using the Freytag method, list your story with each point on a post-it note. We use post-its to force your ideas to be simple in narration. At this point, diverge into as many post-its as required without judging any of the ideas you are getting, as it is essential to let your mind operate in the flow state.
2. Storyboard — Go through the post-its created in the earlier step and rearrange them as a coherent story. Feel free to discard or add more ideas at this time.
3. Visual narration — A picture is worth a thousand words. How can you narrate your statement through a visual? Refer to some infographics on Instagram, Dribbble, or Pinterest to get your creative juices flowing .E.g., the same Freytag’s method is visually represented here in a simple way.

Diffused mode — Do you get ideas while showering or walking, or doing something unrelated to the task at hand? The brain works best in diffused mode. Keep taking breaks while you are doing these steps to get more ideas.

Articulation structure

This section of the canvas helps you with the articulation part of the presentation.

1. Practice the presentation in whatever mode works for you — in isolation or in front of a mirror
2. Do a dry run of the presentation to a friend or colleague. Time this to see if you are staying within the time limits expected.
3. Ask for feedback and repeat as required.

Do’s and Don’ts

1. Do NOT use bullet points in your slides. The audience will focus on reading the text instead of paying attention to you while you are narrating.
2. Limit your sentences to very few words. Use visual narration to reduce the word clutter.
3. Ensure there is only one key takeaway or idea per slide.
4. Maintain eye contact with your audience.
5. As you might have practiced the presentation multiple times, you might end up talking very fast during your final presentation. Watch the pace.

Some good presentations to learn from

1. Steve Job’s presentation of iPad
2. Google I/O presentations
3. Presenting design work at Apple

In further blogs, I will discuss:

1. Visual storytelling — how to convert a long sentence into a simple visual
2. Walkthrough of some of the good presentations and key takeaways

References

1. slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte
2. Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
3. Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten by Stephen Few
4. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience
5. Google slides template by Made to stick authors Chip & Dan Heath