Boost your presentation
Right after a presentation, let’s say a PI System Demo at the «Inspect and Adapt», a lot of things that you should have mentioned come to your mind, but now it’s too late. You may think «next time we’ll start earlier and prepare better! But haven’t we set ourselves this goal many times before?» If this situation sounds familiar, you should read on.
How can we make sure that presentations in an agile context do not become an empty ritual that we all just do because SCRUM, SAFe or other frameworks say so?
How can we all contribute to keeping presentations a meaningful and informative experience for everyone involved?
With those questions we were approached by our strategic Partner Swisscom — with whom we already developed the Feature Writing Canvas and the Feature Slicing Guide. After having followed some Inspect & Adapt sessions, we co-created the so called Demo Booster: a set of three interactive mini-workshops and a very simple tool to go, the Presentation Building Kit.
This is some of what we’ve learned:
If you don’t understand the value of your work, neither will your audience
With every product increment, teams are solving problems and make things easier, faster, and safer for users. Why not frame it this way instead of focusing too much on technical aspects? Even the best demo is more valuable for your audience when you can clearly show what problem was solved.
Structure does not have to be a constraint
It can help you organize your thoughts in a way that other people can follow and understand your presentation.
Continuously gather information during the PI (or any other rhythm)
It will help you do something about the dreaded last minute preparation stress and your presentation will come out way better!
Ask continuously for structured peer-feedback
This can give you helpful insights on how to tell your story before working out all the details of your presentation. Do it early in the presentation writing-process, starting when you only have a basic structure/form of your presentation in mind.
To help structure possible inputs for the presentation, we developed the Presentation Building Kit as simple template that teams can put on their team room's wall (physically or digitally). Then we asked the teams to fill it with thoughts, observations and ideas. The important thing is to use it as a living document and update it regularly during the whole PI (or other working rhythm). The choice of content blocks was devised with the SAFe Inspect & Adapt in mind but the same template can be used for other project presentations as well.
What product managers using the Presentation Building Kit say:
“The Presentation Building Kit is a complete guide to creating a captivating presentation.” (Julia)
“The Presentation Building Kit helps to structure ideas in order to quickly prepare an interesting presentation.” (Yves)
“Thanks to the Presentation Building Kit we have now a template which follows us during the PI and which helps us to structure and formulate an attractive demo for our audience.” (Eric )
If you also want to use the Presentation Building Kit, please visit our website Product Manager Tools to download it.
