Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…You should draw it. Unless it's such a powerful hand gesture, right? Yeah, you could do that because your body is visual. And the other thing we try to get our customers to do is, if Dr. King had slides that day of the I Have a Dream speech, it just wouldn't been as beautiful. His words painted the pictures in our mind's eye. And so when we can have the slides off so people are focused on the verbal stream and what's coming out of your mouth that is such a powerful moment is to not have any visuals supporting you. So, they're a hundred percent focused on your body, how you're showing up and on the words coming out of your mouth and they're verbally seeing what you're saying versus actually pictorially seeing what you're saying. It's good. I like the idea that people are not staring at me and I prefer them distracted with a slide and I want to talk about nerves and stuff presenting in a bit. But that's interesting. So, you were talking about very kind of some concrete tips for slides and something I've heard a lot is when you're sharing a deck internally or talking an internal meeting, it's really powerful to just have obviously just a quick image thing, but then also the title of the slide is the point you want them to get from that slide. Is that something you recommend? And then generally any just very tactical advice on how to make a slide effective? Yeah, the concept that each slide should make one point. So, your whole presentation should be grounded in what we call the audience journey, which is the big idea where you're trying to move them from where you're trying to move them to. Then a big idea is what is your point of view and what's at stake if they do or do not adopt it? That's the organizing mechanism for your whole deck. And then each slide itself that supports that one big, big idea, each slide itself should make one point in support of that big idea. People can't process too many things at one time, so depending on where you work, some people want something that's not the key insight at the top of the slide, some people do. So, some might want the action to be taken or some might want the dreamy future state to be clear. Some consulting firms where the slides are much denser because they were paid millions of dollars to make a big old deck. Some of them are like, "Oh, it always belongs in the lower right corner." So, it's kind of a little bit up to the brand and everyone believes it belongs somewhere else. If you're making what we call a slide doc, which I think your listenership would be interested in, presentations go from big staged event to in a meeting where you're trying to persuade your peers too. Can I make a presentation I can just circulate on email and everyone gets it? Well, that's called a slide doc. You put more words, you put stronger picture. You could have a hundred page appendix and maybe the front of it's only five slides, but everything they need to see your thinking, it follows behind it. And you could circulate those and people read it. You write full sentences, you write full pros. It's kind of like the six page memo that's so popular to Amazon, but we contend that the F words and pictures, the six page memo is better. So, how do you send a memo around without the help of a presenter? And that's on one extreme. And those are called slide docs that you build in presentation software. And then the other extreme is I'm on a massive stage somewhere and there's all kinds of usage in between. And so I think the one idea per slide is important. And then this guiding principle, don't make a single slide unless it supports the one big idea of your whole talk. That's another principle for slide making, because most people go back to some sort of repository in some data store somewhere and they dig through old crappy slides and see if they can assemble something super quickly. And that's a cop out. Most of the time if you really think empathetically about your audience, going to the repository might get you halfway there, but you should be modifying and mapping all of the content based on who you're talking to and especially if it's high stakes. And sometimes you're speaking to an audience that wants high density slides, because that's how they communicate in their culture. And if you showed up with cinematic stage ready slides, they'd laugh you out of the room.…

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