Design a conference presentation in five easy steps
This is a guide to help overcome blockers or doubts when creating conference presentations.
Recently my colleague and I had the opportunity to present at a User Experience conference in Poland on Atlassian’s internal project management process, the Atlassian Way.
We designed the presentation using an online whiteboard, Keynote, and tons of sticky notes. We experimented with multiple story arcs, concepts, and subjects, involving our colleagues at every stage of the process, looking for feedback, and brainstorming new ideas.
This article is based on our experience and is not intended to cover the entire process of designing a presentation nor does it focus on developing a storyline or becoming a better writer or designer. There are enough articles about this already.
Designing a presentation for a conference or almost any presentation can be summarized in a few short bullet points:
- Create an action plan.
- Decide on the topic and your goals.
- Specify your audience and their needs.
- Design the presentation.
- Present the talk and have fun
Create an action plan
Starting is often a painful process — your brain will give you one hundred reasons why you should do something else.
The key is to realize this is perfectly fine and normal. Our brains are wired to protect us from working too hard or, in other words, everything that may harm us, including some extra cognitive load. Daniel Kahneman dives into this concept in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Overcome avoidance by splitting big tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks.
A realistic and actionable action plan contains:
Timeline
When creating an action plan, start from the event date and begin planning week by week, day by day. Don’t forget to leave a few days to practice presenting the talk.
Checkpoints
Create checkpoints such as draft 1, draft 2, incorporate feedback from the team, etc. Missing one of these will signal you’re falling behind and adjustments will have to be made.
Manageable action points
Create a detailed list of steps to deliver your talk. Be as clear as possible. Listing multiple minor tasks rather than one significant milestone is easier to manage, plus it’s more satisfying to tick “to do’s” along the way and see the progress. This will also work if you only have a few hours to complete your task. Decide how much you’re going to do each week/day, how many slides/paragraphs will you create — and then stick to it.
Frequent feedback
Include time for reviews and feedback. This is partially out of your control because you rely on others contributing their time to your work, but eventually, it will pay off.
Sticky notes
Write your ideas and your action plan on sticky notes — they are easy to rearrange as you build your presentation. After the initial ideation, start playing with the sticky notes and put together the action plan, main points, and storyline.
Presentation topic and goals
If you know the subject of your talk, you are halfway there. Sometimes defining the title of your talk is the hardest part. If you struggle, go back to square one and think about the goals of your presentation.
In my case, it was a mix of eagerness to share knowledge and a personal challenge to create and present at a conference of my peers.
No matter the reason for creating a presentation you must be clear on your goals and motivation. Do you want to change someone’s behaviors, raise awareness of some social issue, get buy-in for your project or present a financial report? There is always something more profound in there. Running the 5 Whys Analysis exercise will help to gain a better understanding of your goals.
When creating the subject of my presentation, I use one of the following methods:
Sticky notes
Start creating as many ideas as possible on sticky notes — focus on quantity, not quality. When you’re happy with the number of ideas you created, start rearranging them until you’re satisfied with the flow. You may need to add or remove some during this process. Eventually, you will see your ideas focus on a particular subject worth exploring.
Love and Hate method
The idea is to find something you are passionate about, then ask yourself, is this something your audience can relate to? Is this something they would be interested in?
From my perspective, deciding on a subject, even if you have one in mind, is one of the trickiest parts of the process apart from creating a storyline. You have to balance your goals, what you want to achieve, and your audience’s needs and goals. To determine the last one, you need to know your audience.
The audience and their needs
Once you’ve decided on the subject and goals for the presentation, now start thinking about how these correlate with your audience’s goals and needs. This will determine how your presentation is designed and how messages are highlighted.
Consider who your audience is
The audience can be determined by multiple factors:
- your workplace
- the type of event you are attending
- the subject of your presentation
It’s good practice to stop, take a deep breath and run the 5 Whys Analysis exercise again, to ensure you’re clear on:
- how you have defined your audience
- how you have defined your audience’s needs and goals
- why your audience would want to attend your talk at the conference
Creating the presentation
Once you know why you’re creating a presentation, who your audience is, and what their needs are — set aside some time to do the work. My favorite tip comes from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which she sums up in the 360 podcast on WNYC:
“Bird by Bird can probably be summed up in about three pages. Keep your butt in the chair. You do it at the same time every day. You never wait for inspiration — it’s ridiculous, it will never come. No one in your family is going to hope for you to be a writer… it’s not convenient for anybody for you to write, and you have to do it badly” says Lamott.
Presenting
No matter how much time or effort is spent creating the presentation, if it is delivered without passion and confidence, your effort is lost.
Reading content from slides is the ultimate presentation killer. Presenter notes are not to be read verbatim, they should serve as a loose guide if you lose track during your presentation.
Giving a presentation requires almost as much work as creating a presentation. I spent several hours practicing to make sure that the presentation sounded as natural as possible.
My preference is to record myself delivering the presentation. No one likes to listen to their own voice — but there are multiple benefits to this technique:
- You will know the presentation’s content so well that you will be able to deliver it using different words and entirely different sentences every time you present.
- Recording and listening to your voice helps to - improve your diction, highlight words that are used annoyingly frequently, and discover small linguistic habits that you are unaware of.
- Helps build confidence in the content you’re presenting and your presentation skills. It also allows you to deliver a presentation with passion and confidence.
When presenting to a small audience, make an effort to memorize names/titles, etc. Participants may ask a clarifying question during the presentation — knowing who you’re talking to can be a game-changer and help you get buy-in for your idea.
Summary
Designing a presentation and giving a talk is a skill in itself. There will be times when you won’t be happy with your presentation because you didn’t achieve your goals or the audience didn’t react as you had planned.
There is nothing wrong with that. The only way to get better is to practice and practice more. In fact, failing is one of the best things that can happen to you. It is an enormous opportunity to learn what went wrong and improve for the next presentation.
Just follow these fives steps to design a presentation for a conference:
- Create an action plan.
- Decide on the topic and your goals.
- Specify your audience and their needs.
- Design the presentation.
- Present the talk and have fun
