Lately I had to do more presentations ranging from technical ones about various technologies to other presentation about projects that I work on or even tools that I made for developers and testers.
I didn't learn a big list of things from them but rather a couple of really important things to keep in mind when doing a presentation.
To begin with, as a presenter your purpose is to make people understand what you are explaining first and foremost. I have seen all too many experienced developers trying to impress the audience when presenting something. They use a lot of pompous language, terms and jargon to make things seem more complicated than they really are. This is just to feed their own ego, to send a subliminal message to the crowd over the lines of: "Look at me how good I am, I managed to understand and apply these things which sound really complicated when I tell them".
Imagine if they used a more simple language and a language which is less scary and intimidating to people. Then maybe more people would have actually understood what he said. But hey, if he took this approach then his great achievement for understanding the things in that presentation wouldn't have looked so great in the eyes of his audience. Remember, 60% of the reasons he is presenting those things is to make himself look smart and amazing. Forget about the audience and to actually make them understand the stuff he is presenting. Additionally, why stop there? You can add even more useless unrelated details that you know to further leave your audience in the dust.
To be honest, sometimes I still do this mistake myself. But to counteract this, I have learned to use simpler, "dummer" terms that people can relate to. Heck, now I even criticize other sources on the internet for offering too many useless details about the things that I am presenting, missing the point.
Sometimes I even see bad advice and practices about the things I am presenting on the internet which I will tell the audience about and explain why it's a bad idea to do those things even if in theory it sounds cool, things that hosting a database in a Kubernetes cluster which you should not do, it's terribly bad.
So as a general rule of thumb, you should make the audience more welcome and less scared/intimidated of the things that you are presenting. The better you do this, the more they will actually will start to process and absorb what you are saying.
Furthermore, you are there to guide the audience towards understanding what you are presenting. You need to have a plan with a logical order in which you will present your subject. It's important to make your audience aware of your plan, how you will present various aspects of your subject and in what order. This will set the right expectations for your audience. It will also avoid premature questions for things that need to be explained later in the presentation anyway. And finally, it will keep the presentation on track. Sometimes, a presentation can derail sideways if it doesn't have a good plan behind it that is followed accordingly during the presentation.
A presentation should have a good and logical continuity to make it more digestible by your audience. This way they won't lose track of the presentation. When someone loses track of the presentation it is really bad for them because without additional explanations, they won't understand anything from the moment they lost track to the end of the presentation sometimes.
This is yet another reason why you must have a good plan and roadmap for the presentation.
Furthermore, I talked a bit above about this, but it's important to set the right expectations to the audience about your presentation. You know the subject better than the audience, the important aspects about it and how much of it can be presented in the given amount of time. You should make these aspects clear to your audience. If you want to explain more advanced things, then you should label your presentation as an "advanced" presentation about the subject and make the people aware that in order to understand those things, then they need some prior knowledge of the subject which can't be explained in the current presentation due to various objective reasons.
And finally, if possible, a presentation should have a practical side to it. Nothing is more satisfying and more eye opening for people than to see an actual working, non-trivial example. It also gives much more credibility to what you said in the theoretical part of the presentation. Additionally, it gives the impression that you really put effort into the presentation and to make people understand your subject.
It's perfectly fine if the practical side runs into some issues with the demo application. There will always be bugs and issues in software. If you manage to fix the problem during the presentation it's even better. Now the audience knows some pitfalls about your subject.
In the end, making a presentation is about being emphatic which your audience, being happy to see them easily understand what you are saying and knowing that you helped people, rather than being about yourself and making yourself seem smart to other people. Honestly, there are still of lot of things that I need to learn.
I didn't learn a big list of things from them but rather a couple of really important things to keep in mind when doing a presentation.
To begin with, as a presenter your purpose is to make people understand what you are explaining first and foremost. I have seen all too many experienced developers trying to impress the audience when presenting something. They use a lot of pompous language, terms and jargon to make things seem more complicated than they really are. This is just to feed their own ego, to send a subliminal message to the crowd over the lines of: "Look at me how good I am, I managed to understand and apply these things which sound really complicated when I tell them".
Imagine if they used a more simple language and a language which is less scary and intimidating to people. Then maybe more people would have actually understood what he said. But hey, if he took this approach then his great achievement for understanding the things in that presentation wouldn't have looked so great in the eyes of his audience. Remember, 60% of the reasons he is presenting those things is to make himself look smart and amazing. Forget about the audience and to actually make them understand the stuff he is presenting. Additionally, why stop there? You can add even more useless unrelated details that you know to further leave your audience in the dust.
To be honest, sometimes I still do this mistake myself. But to counteract this, I have learned to use simpler, "dummer" terms that people can relate to. Heck, now I even criticize other sources on the internet for offering too many useless details about the things that I am presenting, missing the point.
Sometimes I even see bad advice and practices about the things I am presenting on the internet which I will tell the audience about and explain why it's a bad idea to do those things even if in theory it sounds cool, things that hosting a database in a Kubernetes cluster which you should not do, it's terribly bad.
So as a general rule of thumb, you should make the audience more welcome and less scared/intimidated of the things that you are presenting. The better you do this, the more they will actually will start to process and absorb what you are saying.
Furthermore, you are there to guide the audience towards understanding what you are presenting. You need to have a plan with a logical order in which you will present your subject. It's important to make your audience aware of your plan, how you will present various aspects of your subject and in what order. This will set the right expectations for your audience. It will also avoid premature questions for things that need to be explained later in the presentation anyway. And finally, it will keep the presentation on track. Sometimes, a presentation can derail sideways if it doesn't have a good plan behind it that is followed accordingly during the presentation.
A presentation should have a good and logical continuity to make it more digestible by your audience. This way they won't lose track of the presentation. When someone loses track of the presentation it is really bad for them because without additional explanations, they won't understand anything from the moment they lost track to the end of the presentation sometimes.
This is yet another reason why you must have a good plan and roadmap for the presentation.
Furthermore, I talked a bit above about this, but it's important to set the right expectations to the audience about your presentation. You know the subject better than the audience, the important aspects about it and how much of it can be presented in the given amount of time. You should make these aspects clear to your audience. If you want to explain more advanced things, then you should label your presentation as an "advanced" presentation about the subject and make the people aware that in order to understand those things, then they need some prior knowledge of the subject which can't be explained in the current presentation due to various objective reasons.
And finally, if possible, a presentation should have a practical side to it. Nothing is more satisfying and more eye opening for people than to see an actual working, non-trivial example. It also gives much more credibility to what you said in the theoretical part of the presentation. Additionally, it gives the impression that you really put effort into the presentation and to make people understand your subject.
It's perfectly fine if the practical side runs into some issues with the demo application. There will always be bugs and issues in software. If you manage to fix the problem during the presentation it's even better. Now the audience knows some pitfalls about your subject.
In the end, making a presentation is about being emphatic which your audience, being happy to see them easily understand what you are saying and knowing that you helped people, rather than being about yourself and making yourself seem smart to other people. Honestly, there are still of lot of things that I need to learn.
👍
ReplyDelete