What we’ve learned from 100 Product Tank talks
Nov 5 · 3 min read

I am lucky enough to be part of the team that run ProductTank London.
It’s an amazing collection of people that care about digital products and how best to build them. We have had hundreds of speakers, the vast majority of whom are brilliant, talk about a huge range of topics. These are some of the reflections that we’ve had come to after seeing a pretty significant number of them:
- Think about the structure of your presentation. It should have a beginning, middle and an end. If you need a starter for 10, steal this from the incredible Martin Weigel:

- If you’re going to run through the story of your product or team — be sure to draw conclusions. Don’t just talk through what’s happened — tell us what you’ve learned.
- What hasn’t worked is the most valuable content for people by far.
- Unless it’s specifically relevant to your talk, don’t spend 5 minutes introducing you and your career history. Most people will have looked you up on Twitter or LinkedIn beforehand.
- Speak to your audience about what they want to hear about beforehand. Spend time researching the topic you’re talking on with people who will be at the session.
- Don’t assume the audience will know your industry specific terms. They have a good baseline knowledge of digital concepts (you don’t need to explain agile or UX) but probably aren’t so familiar with your FinTech acronyms as they come from a wide range of industries.
- Don’t feign surprise about how long your career is and how old that makes you feel. It comes across as a conceited humblebrag.
- Don’t lower expectations by saying things like ‘i’ve only just pulled this together’ or ‘I didn’t know about this until late on’ or ‘I had a heavy night last night’. The audience don’t care and will hold it against you as they’ve given up their night to see you.
- Don’t put lots of information on a slide — it’s really hard to read and you’ll lose people whilst they try to.
- Doing a presentation as a pair is twice as hard. If you’re going to do it, you’ve got to practice twice as much as you would do by yourself.
- Don’t play a video longer than 30 seconds — no one has come to see your ads. They’ve come to hear why and how you created them.
- If you show an ad / product / service / anything — make sure you give details about how it’s performed.
If you’re interested in presenting then do get in touch on Twitter / LinkedIn — we’d love to hear from you!

