Professional Presentations

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the developer podcast where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our series of interviews and we're going to start a new interview today. We're going to speak with Don Coliver. We are going to get a really interesting two parter here for this episode and next episode. We're going to talk about professional presentations. Now we've had people talk about speakers and speaking and public speaking, but Don has a little bit different approach because it is very much a professional presentation, not so much a salesy type of presentation. These are the things that I think we see more often in our day to day work. This is the kind of stuff that sort of breaks the mold, I think, of some of the suggestions that we have in other situations where you're trying to sell somebody on something as opposed to inform them, which is really the focus that you're going to find from what Don's talking about. But let's go ahead and dive right into it. I think you're going to find out he's a very interesting person, got a great story and we cover a lot of ground. So get ready to take a lot of notes. Here we go. So today we are speaking with Don Coliver. He is, as you're going to find out, he is a clown. I mean, or maybe an ex-clown at any rate and has got a lot of interesting ideas from his background that are out of connect when you're doing your presentation, when you're talking to somebody and you need to get, you know, not even just a non-technical thing, but the hardest stuff to make interesting sometimes is that technical presentation. This guy is a master of it. And as we walk through some of his background, I think you're going to see why some of the things that he's, he has experienced and how you can take these, you know, his unique experience and apply it to some of the things that you're trying and hopefully kick your game up a notch. That being said, I'm going to throw it over to Don and let you, you know, give us a little bit of your background and tell us a little bit about yourself. Thanks Rob. Hello, developer audience. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah, what I do these days, I teach technical public speaking internally at Google and I speak primarily at cybersecurity conferences for different clients. So I'm kind of doing this stuff day to day. But prior to all this, I was, as Rob said, I was a clown. I was a touring clown for a company called Spiegel World, it's a contemporary circus company. I was the host clown for a North American tour. They have a show called Absinthe at Caesar's Palace in Vegas. So it's one of the most popular shows in Vegas. It's pretty racy, just a heads up. If anyone is easily offended, I'd avoid Absinthe. But I was basically the host clown of a version of that show. And I was also a blue man for a short time in New York. So and once I had gone through, I started in training in corporate training through a bunch of weird things. I ended up in comedy. And after my time and clown, I realized, wow, there's a lot of stuff that could really be helpful for technical folks and for people who need to deliver corporate messaging that they it can be a game changer. Some of these tools that I learned. And so that's kind of what I bring to the fore these days at Google and also when I train at other companies and helping technical people kind of convey their messaging in a persuasive way. Like I said, you already have not failed to bring some really interesting concepts. The first thing that I had not realized, you said you started in corporate training and then went over to working as a clown for a while and more of that entertainment side. And then you've come back, which is really interesting is as you were going, was that one of those things that that earlier experience in the training really was starting to like sort of like help you connect dots for better, you know, better example, I guess of it as you were going through these things and saying, hey, there's stuff I'm learning here as the, you know, as you said, so like as a head clown where you're trying to bring this audience in and entertain them, where you could tie those back to maybe some of the maybe some of the things that were challenges and maybe or failures that you'd had in the in the training world where you said, oh, hey, we can we can connect some dots and really bring the game up a level. Totally. I mean, I think the biggest takeaway was when I'd be in corporate training or I'd be watching facilitators train and they would focus so much on the content, you know, drill that content and at a loss of connection and engagement with their audiences or even being able to get into the point of view of the audience prior to coming in, like kind of barfing that information all over them. And the exact opposite of that is what you do as a clown. You are always in constant back and forth with the audience, even if it's not a dialogue, it's usually not a dialogue, but you're still always aware of your audience. And when I was in, I was like, there's so much that I can help folks with because they're focusing on the wrong thing. It's like when I'm at Google, these folks, they know their content. That's not a problem. It's the ability to be able to engage and connect and be aware of their audience. That's really what puts things over the edge of persuasion and gets people really on board with an idea. Well, that's actually a perfect segue into one of the things that you talk about is you've got, as always, it's important to have a list of things. So three questions that you say you should ask before creating any technical presentation. And I have a feeling that's a nice little segue into that. So how did what are maybe those three questions and how you how you came about those? For sure. Well, just to lay them out there, who's going to be in the room? What do you want them to do and why do they care? Those are the things you need to ask. And I say you ask those before you even start pulling your data together or anything, because there's this danger I've seen with technical folks, engineering managers. And I get it. There's a need to prove how much work they've done. And so they want to look at all this work we did. But you need to ask these questions first. Like, why does your audience care? You need to speak from their perspective. So I'll go through the three questions one at a time. So first, who's going to be in the room by that? I mean, what's their level of knowledge? Do you have to stay really high level? Can you get into the weeds? Do you need to give definitions? This is a big thing I do. I pitch to give presentations on how to give good conference technical talks. And this is a big thing because you have every everybody in that audience from executives who just want to know the bottom line to the engineers who are like, oh, get into the weeds with me. I want to know how you coded that. Show it to me on the screen. And you need to be able to balance that or figure out what you want to focus on by knowing who's going to be in the room. Secondly, come up with a call to action. Like, even if you don't like say it to the audience, there's got to be something you want them to do at the end of your talk. Do differently. What that does is it's not necessarily a thing that you can, you know, send them to my website or something like that. But what that does, it gives you a yardstick or a meter stick for your European listeners that you can hold up to everything you put in that presentation. And you can say, hey, is this moving my audience towards doing what I want them to do to downloading my app, to using my solution to handle too many error messages? And if it doesn't directly contribute to that, like it might be like, oh, I was just kind of had this to show how hard we worked. Get it out of that presentation. Most presentations are too long anyway. And then last question is. What's in it for them? And this is, I think, the most important thing for your audience. The biggest challenge with technical folks is they call it the curse of knowledge. There's that book made to stick. And I love that book. But I think they talk about the curse of knowledge in there kind of on a sidebar. And it's so easy to forget about the problem when you are presenting a solution because you live in that problem, you're working on it all the time. But when you're presenting it, you've got to spend time in the problem to get your audience familiar or re familiar with what you've been fixing or what your what solution that solution you're proposing. And the quick way to do that is five wise. You've probably heard it. Why is this important? Well, it'll mean less errors. Well, why is that important? Well, it means less time that our IT department has to spend fixing errors. Well, why is that important? Well, they're already overworked. Well, why is that important? And you keep going down and you're going to get to those primary human needs of like they want to go home and be with their family or we're running out of money or something like that. And that's the stuff you have to be really specific on when you're talking about the problem you're solving. Well, once again, there's like layers of an onion there. I think the first one is you you you touched on a little bit is the idea of a mixed audience. And that that happens, it feels like more often than not. I mean, sometimes you're lucky and it's like a team presentation or something where you like these are all people on the same, same level, same grouping, same knowledge. But it seems more often than not, you've got like, you know, you've got maybe some managers in there or, you know, and some very low level engineers or in a conference or something like that. Like you said, you've got a wide range. So how do you if that if you're walking into something like that or somebody that you know, you're counseling somebody that's going into that kind of environment, how do they tackle that? How do they how do they figure out how to work? Because I'm assuming you don't just throw the audience out of that case and just say, OK, now there's only two things to deal with. It's how do you how do you how do you look at that to approach that to answer sort of that question, I guess, in a specific enough way that it can impact your presentation? Yeah, well, at first, I think you need to be completely transparent and upfront of who you're speaking to. And we deal with this question because I deliver trade show booth presentations. These are like eight to 15 minute presentations. I deliver them all day long and they have to be built for everybody. And the way we handle it is we stay high level. We say it's high level at the top, but we give little like tidbits of stuff that, frankly, the nerds are going to nerd out on. And then we kind of encourage them, hey, talk to our essays. At the conclusion of our presentation, because that's exactly what we want. We want deeper discussions with people who are actually interested in the solution, because that's how you sell it, is when you're talking about their specific problems. I can't talk to their specific problems anyway. If I'm delivering a presentation to 20 people, I need to keep it high level. So I kind of I say it's going to be high level, but I also leave little tidbits in there and encourage people to come up after and either talk to me or some of our essays. So with that, is that now as I'm thinking about that, because that's sort of as your sounds like it's a little bit your call to action in a sense, is it's like, hey, you know, I want you. You I have enticed you enough with this with this high level and with a couple of these details. So the sort of call to action in that case would be, hey, you need to. I want you to go talk to our engineers or take that to the next step. Is that something where you would have? And again, because now we're talking, you know, multiple layers of audience. Is it a situation where maybe you would have more than one call to action that maybe is maybe you've got like, you know, tears of them or something like that that you're looking at? Or is there more like an overarching call to action? I may be simplifying it in that. Boy, now you're getting into marketing stuff and that's not my deal. But everything I know is like, keep it focused on one call to action. And you're not going to nail the Grand Slam home run with one presentation, it's multiple touches. So I think keeping your ask realistic and very, very specific is the best way to do it, because I think stuff gets sold, at least in my world. Stuff gets sold when engineers are talking to engineers and they're figuring it out. It's not from a webinar. Nobody's like, oh, that was a great, like inspirational talk. I'm going to buy this. You know, it needs there needs to be further conversation. That makes sense. And that was that's sort of my concern is because it's I know that if I get into anything and I've got more than one call to action, then that it dilutes the message, then it's hard to, you know, to really keep that focus down. And so this. When you're in a is this the same thing when you're looking at that last point of why do they care? Do you sort of keep it at a at a high level and then sort of allow it to be, I guess, sort of handed off to some future presentation? It's like, hey, here's why you need to care now, but then leave it in a way that, hey, if you're an executive, you're probably going to care in this way and you can go do something else. Or if you're an engineer, this is sort of what you're going to care about. Is it one of these things you're sort of trying to find? Maybe again, the I guess sort of like a better term, the lowest common denominator across your your audience. I would say so. I would say so. And then hopefully you can. If people are interested, you can divide them into buckets and get more and more specific with your conversations. And that so then I'm going to switch gears, step back a little bit, because this is also another one that is interesting, is the idea of presentation length is I've had lots of different conversations about that over the years. And there's some people are very, you know, fall in different categories and camps. And particularly where you mentioned the, you know, the trade show types of things, we've only got X amount of time. It's not quite an elevator pitch, but it's it's darn close to it. Have you found not just in obviously in certain situations, you're going to have a certain size, but have even found sort of that's like a. I would say almost like a universal type thing of like, hey, you want to keep it to this or you want to find a way to break it into bits that are, you know, of a certain size or range. Well, I mean, a technical conference trade show is a very specific environment because you aren't giving as much as we want. You're often not giving helpful takeaways of like somebody's going to sit down like, oh, this is a great thing. I'm going to try back at my office. It's more just here's what we do. Here's why you need it. Here's the problem we're solving. And those are like five to seven minutes max. Oftentimes they go longer just because that's the nature of marketing writing sometimes, but people are moving and grooving. They're like, give me the T-shirt, like whatever. Like they're just they're all on their phones anyway. But so that's that. But then you have your technical talks like a DEF CON and stuff like that. And those are like 45 minutes. And people are like completely mesmerized if it's a good a good presentation deep in the weeds of like, then I coded this and then I'll show you what next happened. And then that didn't work. So we did this. And so I think those are fine if. Again, it sounds dumb, but as long as you go back to those three questions, you know who's going to be in the audience and you're speaking directly to them and solving their problems, you'll have them like through the whole time. But if you start getting into here's what I want to present, I don't care about you, then you'll lose them. It's sort of in that what I want to present, because this is something you touch on that is in a sense near and dear to my heart, because it's always a struggle is particularly in technical type presentations, there's inevitably data, there's charts, graphs, something like that, that is not like pretty pictures or something that, you know, it's like it's one thing if you've got a presentation where you put out like a gorgeous sunrise and everybody goes, ooh, and ah, versus you put in a bunch of you've got a bunch of numbers that for whatever reason. And it and it's not just tech. I mean, it could be like a financial one where it's like, hey, you know, unless you have a like dollar signs along the way that's just saying, we're going to be all going to be rich or something. It tends to be dry. And so one of the things you mentioned is you maybe have some suggestions on how you can make those things spice them up or make them a little more interesting or something. So it doesn't feel like when like to me sometimes like this is a slide that I have to get past without people dying of boredom as I'm going through it. You want to like just push through it and be like, OK, everybody just like take a deep breath, get the resuscitators close just in case. But we're going to fly through this and then move on. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a couple of ways to answer that question. First of all, if you've got a lot of data in that you're presenting, especially on a deck, an easy way to break it up is simply give your personal reaction to slides like just like you said, but maybe not in a negative way. Like after you deliver the data, you can say, I was actually quite surprised when I first learned about this. I'll tell you, I was it was last winter and we we got the data back. And I it was exactly not what I thought it was going to be. That's an easy way to get it back present in the moment and not in everybody's head. But in terms of data visualization, I always recommend a book called Storytelling with Data. It's by a person by the name of NAFLIC, K-N-A-F-L-I-C. And it's kind of, I believe, the current way people are handling it. There's a couple other books out there these days, more Ted talky type deck books, which when I've tried to integrate them into my Google courses, it's just not applicable. Like having it, like you say, having a slide of a sunrise, it says believe. And then clicking to the next one, like Google executives are going to be like, why are you showing me this? Like this is a waste of my time. And so I think that's there's a place for those kind of slides, but not in business pitches or presentations. I think it's got to stay intentional up there. But there were four premises or four topics that NAFLIC gives. First, translate the data for your audience. Again, if you feel like we did all this work, don't throw all the work on the screen. Do the work for your audience and be like, we showed that there's a 10 percent increase when you use our product and put a big arrow that points to where it goes up 10 percent. Do the work for your audience. Don't make them look and try and figure out what you're talking about. That's called that's from McKinsey Consulting. I believe they even call it a McKinsey title. So you put the title 10 percent increase as the title of the slide. Secondly, like I said, targeted highlight, use those goofy animations and stuff in PowerPoint to animate, show where to look, make it completely where they don't have to have any cognitive load to see what your intent of that data slide is. Because you probably heard people can't look at something and listen to you at the same time. So as easy as you can make it to immediately kind of get the point, the better. Then logical order, if you can reorder your slides so it's not all jumbled, it's all in a nice up or to the right or down to the left. That's helpful. And lastly, intuitive labels. This is a challenge. Oftentimes, if you're I know for Google, Google slides, if I integrate Google Sheets and pull the graph or pull the data over from Google Sheets, it's a big mess. Like I need to go in and manually change the labels because it's not readable as is. So you'll probably if this is for an important presentation or a pitch presentation or something, you'll probably have to do some manual adjusting of colors and labels to make it more readable. And it's just sort of since you mentioned that, you know, sort of slid into talking about slides a little bit. How do you from especially from a business presentation? And it's obviously, you know, when you're the head clown there, you're not you're not whipping out slides and stuff like that, but particularly from business presentations and even the technical side, do you see a sort of like, I guess, a rule of thumb for leaning on versus talking about versus just having slides as maybe reference material or something like that, is it where where those because that always seems to be a challenge. Sometimes you get the guy or gal that's just like like throws the slide up and is reading text off of the slide and then you get others that the slides are up there and it's like the speaker has no idea the slides are there. They're just sort of talking through stuff. And it doesn't mean that that's not connected to what they're doing, but they're they're not referring really at all to the slides. Is there a somewhere that you see is like a the best maybe way to be effective in using leveraging that and talking in a business kind of a presentation? Well, it's a challenge we deal a lot with in my classes in that oftentimes the deck is used for executives that can't make it to the meeting. So it has to have everything in the presentation in the deck. And it's like, how do we handle that? Because there's, as you say, best practice, don't read from your slide. And this nobody can ever achieve this six words, six lines of six words each is kind of the holy grail. Nobody ever is able to keep it to that low. But it's good to know at least what we should try to do. So how do we do that and have a deck that's complete with all the information we need if that becomes a takeaway or people are using that to get the information of the meeting? A lot of times it's handled like you put detail into the appendix or put more detailed slide deeper into the deck. And just as a presenter, you're able to get to that very quickly. If someone has a question, you can know how to navigate to that quickly in your deck. But you can stay high level if nobody needs to go deep or into the weeds. That's a great way to handle it. I think there's a there's a book called The Pyramid Principle. Have you ever heard of that? It's by Barbara Minto. She was a McKinsey consultant. This is like an old book now. It's like 70s, but it's still kind of the scene is the one of the best ways to structure business presentations. And essentially, I don't know if you ever took journalism in school, but the idea of like a lead is you put all the most important information in the very first sentence and you progressively get more detailed. And the purpose of that is if you have limited time, you could just read the first sentence. You don't need any more information and you can continue. And you can stop at any time. And you're not lacking any information. You're just getting more detail. So that's like building your presentation like that is different because a lot of people are like, oh, I want to save the big boom for the end. Well, that's not what pyramid principle is. That's like, no, you start with the most important information and you just get into more detail. That way, busy executives can be like, I've heard enough. I'll sign the paper. You don't need to continue. I know everything I need to know. So or that's kind of if you're dealing with, again, asking the question of who's going to be in the audience, if it's a busy executive or a group of VPs or something, you may want to structure it that way because they don't want they don't want the hero's journey in their business presentation. You know what I mean? And that seems like a good place to pause for now. Don't worry, we're going to come back. As I told you, Don's a great guy. Great conversation. A lot of information. And it's honestly even I think it'll be more packed in part two. So, you know, don't want to give you too much of a cliffhanger. But yes, we will be coming back with a lot more information. You're going to need, you know, an extra page or two for your notes. We'll just continue on. Keep taking notes, keep checking out what he provides because it is some really good stuff. A lot of things that I was taking notes about as well and adjusting, you know, a little bit of my mind and then in retrospect afterwards, looking at that and saying, hmm, I wonder where I can make some changes when I do these sorts of professional types of presentations to make sure that I get to the point, do it in a way that respects the audience, much in the way that he talked about in those three questions. But I want to respect you as an audience and let you get out there to your day. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Hi, this is Rob from Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. We're excited to be on Alexa now. 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