How To Help Project Teams Embrace And Ace Project Presentations

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Galen Low: It's presentation day. Things are underway, and everything's going pretty well. Well, it's going okay. Okay, actually, it's going about as well as a car crash in slow motion.

Ravin is reading off the slides again. Florence looks like they're murmuring to their toes more than they're demoing the new personalization feature. And you — you forgot your notes somewhere on the train, and you've been winging it. 

On the receiving end, the general mood of the stakeholder audience is... confused. Impatient. Disengaged. The good news is that it will all be over soon, and we can all forget it ever happened. 

Except that's not the case at all. The project continues, the next sprint review is in two weeks, and even if you jump ship right now, there are still many business presentations ahead of you. 

If you've been throwing up your hands and accepting the fact that project presentations with your team are fated to be painful and unavoidable blips between project work, keep listening.

We're going to be talking about how to get your team's acing project presentations while having less time wasted in preparation.

Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with The Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you want to hear more about that, head on over to thedpm.com/membership.

Okay, today we are talking about the dark art of presenting project work, and how project managers can support their project teams to frame their work in a way that executive stakeholders understand, all without wasting heaps of time preparing in advance. 

With me today is Renaud Taburiaux, a former agency PM, an author, and a respected presentation coach for professionals at all levels of an organization — from technical architects to the C-suite. 

Renaud, thanks so much for being with me today. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Well, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to talk to your community, your audience about this tricky topic that is making a lot of us really stressed. 

Galen Low: And I'm glad you mentioned that because this is an episode where you and I, we got together, we're like, here are some hot topics around presentation.

And we took that to our community and we got some of the questions from our community, things that they're struggling with when it comes to presenting project work, presentations in general, public speaking in general, business and professional communications in general. So thank you for prepping with me in advance to get some of these in here.

And then we got like an ocean of other questions as well, which we will answer within our community. So I'm excited about that. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah, they're really good question. And we can see that a lot of people are struggling with this topic. So it's fine that people are not afraid to go and ask for help, when they don't know how to do that. That's really encouraging. 

Galen Low: Absolutely. The power of community. 

All right. I want to dive in with like my big question. So my big one hot question that kind of like encapsulates all of this for me is this. Why is presenting so important in project management and if it is so important, then why isn't it taught?

Renaud Taburiaux: Okay, so why is it important? I think for your community, project manager, but also any type of manager, we a lot of time have to lead without authority. That's something that we've been doing for years. We know about it. And to lead without authority, you need to influence, you need to convince people, especially nowadays.

It's more and more participative. You don't force people into doing their job or, following the backlog or things like that. You have to convince them to do that, to show them the value behind it. So it's more participative. It's more at scale. We often have huge team. We might talk about safe, safe methodology where you have hundreds of people working on the same application.

So you have to convince not one to one. It has to be at scale. And it's often remote. It's not surprising now to work with people in India, in Canada, in Brazil. So convincing and influencing is really core to your job. And presentation is one of the key to do that. Again, not one to one, but one to many. So that's really why it's important to nail this presentation, but it's not always your only task.

You have other things to do. So it's good to not waste time to be as efficient as possible when we prepare these presentations. 

Galen Low: I love that you took it there because in my head, I was like, I think of a presentation, right? Or presenting my I framed the question as why is presenting so important? And in my head, I'm like, stand and deliver in, in a boardroom.

You're talking to your executive sponsor or a group of stakeholders. But it's not just that, right. Presenting is actually the act of sharing an idea and getting people on board with it. And folks who are like, Oh yeah, I hate standing in front of a room and presenting, actually as PMs, we're presenting every day.

We're presenting ideas to our team. We're getting, we're using that sort of managing through influence and showing leadership to collaborate, right? Present ideas to one another. I love that you took it there. I was not even thinking that.

Renaud Taburiaux: You have to get them closer to the goal, what you're trying to achieve, but not everyone knows about it.

Not everyone has the same knowledge overview as a project manager or people manager, you have a real overview of what everyone is doing. They need to have the shared vision in order to be efficient in their job. So yeah, we are presenting every day. It doesn't have to be slide. I didn't mention slide at all when I talk about presentation.

It's really sharing an idea, sharing messages, telling a story. It can take many forms, but we're doing every day this type of presenting. 

Galen Low: I love that. It also takes the edge off the like, "formal" presentation. Exactly. It's just like all the other presenting you're doing, every other day it uses the same skills.

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah. And at the end of the day, it's just a presentation. Even if you have to present to the C-suite, it's just a presentation. Your slide and how you present will not really make or break what you're trying to accomplish. You can always get back on your feet through the discussion with more, interaction, one to one and so on.

Don't overstress about presentation. As you say, we're making it really official. We often write buzzwords in our script and so on. It doesn't have to be like that. It has to be human to human. Slides don't convince people. People convince people. So keep perspective here. It's just a presentation.

Galen Low: I love that. 

I want to come back to the skill even. And this is a topic that was a hot topic in our community. Like it really struck a nerve and you and I in the green room, we were talking about the training aspect of things and I find at least in my journey, very few people sat me down and trained me to present ideas well, and yet I think all along the way, it was an expectation.

I'm just like, why is it that way? 

Renaud Taburiaux: There's many reasons, but it's fair when you say that. It's an expectation. And, I often say it's like writing an email. We assume that people know how to write email, but no, we know we can see it every day that people don't know how to write short and straight to the point email, not a wall of text with key messages lost somewhere because they don't even know what they want to ask.

So we assume, I would say that it's taught in the university, but It's not really they don't know much about presentation for business. So in university, you're taught how to do academic presentation. It's also taught in some company, but it's badly thought I will not make a lot of friends here, but you know, when the teacher is a comedian, that's fine for the delivery, for the confidence, for how to, have your voice, what manage it well, the stress and everything that, that, but it's not a presentation for business, they will not tell you how to structure your message, the different cognitive bias that you should avoid or leverage, but We are taught about it in the bad way.

And one last thing I want to say is that it's not always your fault. There's also a lot of bad example. When you look at what your leadership, your C-suite is presenting, their all hands and stuff like that, or what the internet communication or HR presenting, they're supposed to know better. And they don't usually it's terrible.

They read what is already on the slide. They do some kind of karaoke. They don't really know what they want to say. So, you know what I mean? It's, we should look up to them in terms of communication. They shouldn't expect us project manager or so on to be better than them. It is their job to communicate against, to convince, to influence.

And yet, because they are also not trained or they assume they know, we end up with this. I would say it's not often taught and when it's taught, it's badly taught. 

Galen Low: I love that. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Again, I will not make a lot of friends here, but. 

Galen Low: Well, no, what I love is like the passion that's coming out. I thought maybe we could zoom out a bit because this is clearly something that you have a lot of experience with, that you have an opinion about, that you're fiery about, that actually it doesn't have to be this way.

But like, how did you get so interested in presenting and communicating in a business context? What was that moment that made you realize that more teams need to focus on this skill and need more support? 

Renaud Taburiaux: It was quite based on an event because I start my career in agencies in 2010, I think I was in a communication agencies in New York or Paris.

And there, everything we're doing was perfect. It was clever. It was, funny. It was clear. We had designer. Everyone knew what they were supposed to say or do. And then after five years, I think something like that, I moved to corporate. And that was a shock. Because I realized that in corporate, communication is almost a dirty word.

People don't like to do it, when they say, Oh, he's handling communication. Ah, okay. We see this politic or, people who don't know how to do, they will just do the communication of it. So I found that a lot of people didn't even try to do good communication. They were avoiding it.

And I'm not talking only about presentation here, I'm talking communication in general. But what was really bothering me is that some people retried and they failed miserably. They were spending countless of hours preparing the slide and the script. And it was awful. It was awful for them. They were stressed.

They didn't know what to say. It was awful for the audience. It was really not a good way of anyone's time. So when I came to corporate, I took everything I knew from agency, from project management, from, different UX design, different area that I've been working on. And I tried to apply it to my own presentation.

And that's how I created my framework that I'm using now that is called a "Presentation Sprint" that allows me to really prepare quickly impactful presentation. If I get back to your question, why am I so, passionate about it is because it's frustrating. It's frustrating that people waste time doing presentations that are not needed, are too long.

We have better things to do than to spend hours on our slides. To be honest, that's just a waste of time. We would be way more happier if all the presentations we're doing were short, clear, and quick to prepare. So that's why it's really bothering me every day I see Presentation, because I'm doing coaching on communication in general.

So not only presentation. So I'm confronted on a lot of projects, real business projects. And it's killing me to see this type of waste, this type of bad communication. We can do better easily. We don't have to waste that. So that's why I'm passionate about it. I'm sorry if it's too much. 

Galen Low: Oh, no, no, that's great. Like that use case is so insightful because, we started with, yeah, some people don't care.

Communication is a dirty word, but when you're that person who does care and you're trying and you don't have the guidance and you're sinking hours into it and you're failing and then other people are also not enjoying themselves. It is such a frustration. And like I come from agency world as well. And I guess in a way.

I was spoiled, like I said, no one trained me, but I did get a lot of guidance from mentors along the way because we take storytelling really seriously, right? It's about sort of presenting the value of your work because you're getting paid by this client to do it. So it was taken quite seriously, but that notion that most communication in an organization is actually bad, there's no sort of good bar or standards.

And then even if you did want to get better, it's hard because you're basically just the blind leading the blind, or you're just left alone in the woods to try and, make your presentations better or make your communication better without any guidance. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah. And people, a lot of people might not see the effort you are doing.

So if you don't know exactly, if you're not equipped to do short presentation clearly, quickly, you get demotivated quickly. Oh, we're talking about the Toastmaster in the green room. Oh, I attend Toastmaster and yet my presentation are still confusing. And yes, it's still, a wall of text on the slide.

I don't know how to do that. So, the small step you do, don't bring much value if you don't know which step to take, in which direction to go. So it can be easily fixed if you are doing one step after the other, but we don't know how to do it. As you said earlier, no one told us how to do it. So yeah, there is a real frustration there.

It's really annoying. 

Galen Low: That was like an enlightening thing in the green room. So I want to bring it here too, because you mentioned about Toastmasters, and I was saying, I'm like, a lot of people in my community, they are interested in Toastmasters and they're becoming better presenters.

And you had mentioned that idea that it's like, it teaches you how to present yourself, but not necessarily how to structure your message, not necessarily, how to navigate bias in your audience or your own bias. It was just like one piece of the puzzle. It's great, but it's not everything. 

Renaud Taburiaux: It's important. It's really, it gives you, as I was saying, it gives you reps. Because if you, in your job, you don't have the opportunity to present, officially on the stage or in front of people, you can get rusty and you don't have the opportunity to fail and learn. Fail safely, I would say. 

So it's good, but it's only the last part is the deliveries, the how you present, it's not the why, like the message, it's not the what, like your slides, it's really just speaking in front of the audience about anything that's really important, but I doubt that's what most People, professional needs right now to get better, at least in the beginning.

Galen Low: Let's dive in. You teased the presentation sprint. I'm intrigued. Can you tell us a little bit about your approach to presentations, project presentations? I don't know. Maybe we could do a project management example. What is an example of a project presentation that might matter? And like, how would you use your framework, the presentation sprint, like what steps would you take to make these presentations as impactful as possible?

Renaud Taburiaux: Okay, sure. Let's take a couple of presentations as a project manager. It's all about the audience and your impact, your objective, how you want to impact them. So there's a lot of presentation that you do for approval. You need to approve a budget, a roadmap, or a new project. You might want to motivate. And in that case, we were talking about all hands VIP.

It's a bit different. You go a bit less into details, more into, aspirational vision and mission and things like that. We can also want to reassure your stakeholder by showing what you did during the sprint or the business review. So there's a lot of type of presentation that we do. And the way to do it for me is simple.

There's three steps and three steps that we all know. You think, you build, and you deliver. You think it's the why. Why are you presenting? What are your message? Who is your audience? What are your message? You need to think before you build. That's important rule that we all forget. We tend to rush into PowerPoint and, Google slide and start drafting a slide without knowing what we want to say.

We're focusing on making slide instead of making sense. So you won't doing the thing to really focus on that 'why'. Once you know why you have a basic structure, roughly the content that you would share, you build. And the build is the scripts, the contents, the slides. This is really the what I'm going to present.

And finally, you have the deliver. We talked about it through, the Toastmaster. This is how you will present, the public speaking, but also the interaction, how to manage the stress, how to manage the body, because it's a physical activity to speak, to, walk, to move around. So all this, you need to learn.

And what is funny for me, going back to, coming from agency PM in agency to corporate. We know how to do this type of three step well, we talk about agility. We talk about, UX design with their workflow, and yet we prepare a presentation in waterfall. We spend, hours on it.

And then at the end, once everything is perfect, we will share it with somebody else. That's not how it works. You're supposed to do iterative and incremental to, okay. I think now I build, I would do the outline. Then I would share it with my customer or sponsor. I will come again, I will do the, the content and at the end I will do the design.

So this is the framework I want people to do. You think before you build slowly and you ask for feedback early and you prepare how do you deliver. You prepare how you will interact, you prepare how you will manage your stress, you prepare how you will manage the question. Lots of things like that you need to think about.

So, think, build, deliver, we all do it. You just have to apply what you already know to Presentation Sprint. 

Galen Low: I like that. 

Just to play the devil's advocate though, at the top, we started talking about how to spend less time preparing. And some folks listening might be like, yeah, that makes sense right now. But that sounds like more time than I'm spending right now, or as much time. How does the sprint format sort of save time? 

Renaud Taburiaux: That's a really fair point because it can be scary to say, Oh, that's a lot of time. No, it's not because you don't have to spend a lot of time. The think phase, if you know your message, if you know your audience, you don't need three hours of workshop for that.

In a minute, you can answer this question. There's roughly eight to nine questions to answer before opening PowerPoint. It can take 10 minutes if but the problem is we don't know, and yet we rush to the build phase. And that's where we waste a lot of time because we don't know what we want to say.

So if you do all these steps quickly, you have more impact than if you don't. Because the building will be really easy once you already know what you want to say. If you have the structure of a presentation on a piece of paper, on a clackstone or, a mirror board or something like that. The building of the slide will take an hour, maybe two, if you want to be fancy.

But you will quickly have some kind of, minimum viable presentation. Something that you can start presenting and getting feedback on. So you will spend way less time. You will avoid sunk costs. If you spend time working on a presentation to perfect it, and then it ended up not fitting the whole story or your, your manager say, no, this one is bad.

You spend two hours on it for what it can feel like a lot of steps. It's only three. And you don't have to spend a lot of time for each of them, but if you rush to the build, that's it, you will waste a lot of time. If you don't prepare the deliver, you will waste the impact you can have because you will not know what to say.

You will be stressed. You will not know how to handle some question that might be difficult that you could have prepared before. So, yes, I understand. It can be scary when I say it like that, but it's only three steps; think, build, deliver. Just do all of them, even fast, you will be better off. 

Galen Low: That's actually really relatable, because as you were talking, I was thinking about I wonder if I had a nickel for every slide that I created and then got thrown away, I would be so rich right now.

There's something to it though. I mean, I think we like slideware because it feels like thinking in some cases, definitely like agency folks, right? Mostly punchy messages. You see the corporate slide, like the PowerPoint, like my wife's corporate PowerPoint slides from some of her peers. It's like a novel crushed into one slide and it's, as many words, eight point font.

And it took a long time to put together. And then at some point someone's going to be like, yeah, we don't need that slide. And it goes to the appendix and then it gets thrown away. 

Renaud Taburiaux: What is worse that somebody say, we don't need that slide, remove it. Oh, that nobody say anything and you end up presenting that slide. You know what I mean? 

Galen Low: Yeah. And then you run out of time for the important stuff like ahead of it. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Exactly. If you want to spend time on your presentation, spend time rehearsing. To be honest, that's where you have the most impact, but we don't do that. As you say, we write everything because maybe, people send a template and say, Oh, you have to present you this template.

There's a text field. Okay. I will write everything I will say. And again, do a karaoke. So it's reassuring, it feels like real work, but it's a way, I don't want to say lazy because I don't want to be too judgy, but it's a way to avoid doing the hard work of slowing down and thinking what you want to say.

That's really hard, if you don't know, if you've never done it, so it's easier to say, ah, let's just copy paste some slide from different deck that I've seen, I've used, it will be fine. Maybe, probably not. You know what I mean? 

Galen Low: Yeah, I absolutely agree. 

Renaud Taburiaux: I've never seen, a presentation that was not well prepared who went well. Usually, it's always terrible. Whether for the speaker or for the audience. That shouldn't be a win lose situation, it should be a win. 

Galen Low: Yeah, absolutely. 

I wonder if we can dive in there. That third step, deliver. It's easy to focus on okay, then show up and do the thing, but actually deliver for you means think about how you are going to deliver this, practice, rehearse, I was wondering if we could take that into a team situation, because some of the presentations you mentioned, it's not a solo mission usually there's a number of presenters, On a number of topics and you need to prepare together.

And I think a lot of people probably heard the word rehearse and I love to rehearse. I prioritize it. But I know that Danny and I, but you're right. I was like, I don't think that's a popular opinion. 

Renaud Taburiaux: No.

Galen Low: It's painful. It takes a lot of time. And I think a lot of people listening would say, OK, but if I'm trying to spend less time preparing, that sounds like I just added more time rehearsing with my team. How do you approach that deliver step with your team to feel prepared, but not spend 36 hours locked in a room? 

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah, definitely. Okay. So I will answer in two ways. The first one about the preparation of the delivery itself. And the second one is when it's a team, how can we help other prepare for the delivery?

Because it's really a different aspect of it. If you spend a lot of time rehearsing, it's probably because you don't do it right. What I like to do is a full rehearsal. You begin at the beginning and you go all the way to the end without stopping. Usually, as soon as you don't know, oh, okay, wait, let me start again.

And you end up never, rehearsing the second part. So it's easier to say, okay, the script is not finished. I have an idea of what I want to say. I go, I do everything. I tie myself. Usually in the presentation is like 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes maximum. If it's above that, you're losing your audience anyway.

So let's say 20 minutes. 20 minute presentation, you rehearse it once. And at the end, you ask the question to yourself and also to the contributor, people who are here in the test audience, what I did, right? What can I improve for the next time? The next time being maybe the next rehearsal, or maybe the next time, the real presentation in front of the audience.

If you do that, you need 20 minutes plus 10, 20 minutes of feedback, discussion after that, and that's it. But the thing is, we don't do rehearsal. A lot of people, if they have to prepare how they deliver, they do what I call a read through. They go slide by slide and they say, okay, on this one, I will say that, on this one, I will say that, but they never say it out loud.

And when you say it out loud, it's bad, it's normal because it's really, you don't know which word to say, you don't know your transition. You don't know on which word to, put the emphasize, when to put a pause. To show that it's an important message that they should think about. We don't do that.

So you have to do a rehearsal, fail in private, so you can succeed in front of the audience. So that's for my first, about the delivery part. Do a full rehearsal, beginning to the end. If you get lost, if you don't know what to say, that's your problem. Improvise, like you would on the day. You will instantly see what works and what doesn't.

And then you will spend the rest of the time adjusting it. If you can do another rehearsal, maybe the next day, avoid doing too many rehearsals in the same, the same time, because it's really tiring. And you will see that it gets easier, the more you rehearse and it gets better. So you feel more confident.

You know exactly which word to use, which one don't feel right, or too, written. We don't write like we speak. So if you write your script, some sentence will not, they will feel off. So by rehearsal out loud, you will know. Until you rehearse, everything is a hypothesis. How long you will take, what you would say, how it will, fit together.

You don't know until you rehearse. So it's better to rehearse in private or with contributor, than in front of the audience. 

Galen Low: I really like the keep going end to end thing because I've definitely been in those prep sessions where we never got past section one because we kept rewriting and iterating and going again and then we didn't know how it was all going to go and the other bit that I really like transitions.

In a pinch, my agency days, if we didn't have time to rehearse for whatever reason, we would just practice the transitions because everyone has their time slot and transitions, because that's really where we things got super awkward. And now my colleague is going to come on stage and present about something.

And you're like, I don't know how to handle the baton. 

Renaud Taburiaux: It's worse than that, because this is a transition between two speaker, but a lot of people have problem transition between two slides. Or to message, and they do, instead of having one story with 10 chapters, 10 slides. They have 10 individual stories, so they show a slide, they talk about it, then that's it, they think they are done, they show the next slide, and they talk about it.

Okay, so here I want to say that's the best way to lose your audience. 

Galen Low: Yes. 

Renaud Taburiaux: You should tease what's going on. So you talk about this slide. Okay. And that's what leads us to, and you move to the next slide. These small transitions are really, they're simple to do, but they change the whole atmosphere, the whole feeling of your presentation.

You feel like, Oh, it's a cohesive, story that you're trying to tell me. I understand why you're telling me that now and not three slides before, because it has a logic to it. 

Galen Low: Even just circling back to what we started with, like that notion of bringing people along to move something forward. Like when you really distill it down that's the purpose.

Just not to Read a slide and try and remember what words go with it, but actually bringing people along towards like a goal. It's a motivated thing, not a read aloud. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah, that's too often the case, but you know, it's, I like to say that the presentation, the business presentation is not here for, to inform that it's here to transform, you don't want to just, it's not a training. Oh, this is all the, the backlog that we have for next sprint. No, tell me how it fit together. Why are we doing that? Why is it important? What would be the impact for the user or the customer? You have to go from one point to the other with them.

Indeed, if it's just to say, Oh, this is the backlog. This is my priority. Send an email. You don't need a presentation. You're wasting your time. You're wasting the audience time, their attention, their energy. Everyone is drained after that. They don't know what you said, just send an email. That's way better.

Galen Low: I like what you said though, that like the time together is valuable, almost like sacred, right? Like it's not, it might be seen as a chore and it might be really awkward and intimidating, but you know, that time spent together is, it's valuable, especially in a project context. 

Renaud Taburiaux: So it's, again, I'm passionate about it.

So calm me down or stop me if I go too long on this one. We have to see presentation as something of value. It's not a selfish act to go present it's a, I want to say it's a servant, it's a selfless one. You're there because you're trying to solve one of your audience problem. Maybe you need an approval for your budget, fine.

But what do the people who need to approve would get from it? Think it from this perspective, and then you will always see that the presentation is here to bring value. And once it brings value, you will be less stressed to do it. You probably will frame your presentation from their point of view, the audience point of view, instead of yours.

So it will resonate, it will have more impact. I like when you say that it's valuable, the time. A presentation is at the same time priceless and really expensive it's priceless because, you take from the audience, their time, their attention, their energy thing that you cannot give back in any way you can give back this.

So it's really, it's priceless. And at the same time, if you have 10 people for one hour in your presentation, you didn't lose one hour, you lost 10 hours, that's, that's expensive in our, in our company today. Do shorter presentations, do fewer presentations if you can. Again, not everything needs to be a presentation.

Go straight to the point, focus from the audience perspective, and that's how you would bring value. That's how you would feel more confident doing it. It will solve a lot of problems. 

Galen Low: I like that a lot. 

Renaud Taburiaux: I think I didn't answer your question about how to help. Do you want to go there or do you want to do something else?

Galen Low:  Actually, you know what? I thought maybe we could zero in a little bit on a team situation where some folks don't have the same level of comfort might actually be very intimidated to present because at the end of the day, not everyone feels comfortable presenting. Not everyone has an agency background, like you and I were storytelling was paramount, but I know a lot of project managers in my community, they get put in the situation where they're presenting as a team and someone on their team just doesn't feel comfortable presenting. 

And the question we got actually from the community was like, what's the best way to prep and coach team members who just might not feel that presenting is their strength? They might actually be a very skilled technician, specialist, analyst, developer, but they might still be just finding their voice as an expert.

And the question I guess is, how can a project manager or a team leader help to make their co-presenters shine?

Renaud Taburiaux: That's a good point. And it's right that, as a project manager or again, a product manager or people manager, you often help other people do their presentation. What I would say here is that first, you cannot help if they don't want to help.

That's, that's basic in coaching. Somebody doesn't care about it, doesn't want your opinion. Don't give it. You will not convince them anyway. So that's safe time for everyone. Then if you have to help someone, don't give feedback. That would be my, my main comment here, my main advice, don't give feedback, ask questions, because you're probably not seen as a presentation expert.

Maybe you're also bad at it. However, your point of view is crucial. It's really important for them not to tell them what to do, but to help them figure out what to do. So you have to have this coaching posture. You ask questions, when somebody says, Oh, I want to share my presentation with you. Ask them, okay, before you show me the slide, who is the audience?

What are you trying to do with this presentation? Oh, it's for the leadership to do this. Okay, fine. Let's go through it. And then regularly try to link back. Okay. You say that, but how does it support the message that you gave me? A minute ago, it's not a rhetorical question.

It's a real question. Maybe there is a link there that you don't see. Let them tell you this link. Oftentimes they will say, Oh yeah, you're right. That's not really what I want to say. Maybe it's too much. Let me remove that. You didn't say anything. You just ask question. It's the same if you want to put them, in the audience perspective, audience choose say, okay, that's really interesting.

Do they know this acronym? What do you want them to remember? So that's always asking questions, helping them sometime. What I like to do, I shouldn't say that now when something is really messy, doesn't make any sense, a lot of leverage, aI will will leverage AI to empower developer do their job efficiently.

You just, okay, fine. What are you trying to say? And often they will say something like, oh, we're just using ChatGPT to correct our code. 

Galen Low: Right. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Say that. That's what you should be saying. Again, you're talking to human. You don't have to use fancy words that you don't understand most of the time, because the audience doesn't understand also.

Say it simply. Just say the way you would say to a colleague or, a friend. That's really helpful. Just ask them, okay, what do you want to say? Again, ask a question. 

Galen Low: I was going to say, I like the pendulum swing because, like in this scenario, right, we're talking about a lot of the teams that my folks work with are quite technical people.

So their jargon is on one side of the pendulum and they're like, okay, I'm presenting to people who don't get this. And then they swing all the way the other way to be like, oh, presentation and salesy speak, I'll use those, big adjectives and then it will be good. And yet they still sometimes the linkage that you mentioned, I thought was really important because.

Sometimes if you don't ask, how is this connected to the other thing? It might be just obvious to that individual. Cause it's their day to day. They're like, of course this is connected to the release. Like it's the mechanism for it. You're like, okay. Yeah. And then begs that like, Oh, you didn't know that?

I really like them getting into what their audience like knows and doesn't know. And where to sort of simplify. 

Renaud Taburiaux: It's really hard. That's the curse of knowledge. We know that you're so much in the way that for you, it's obvious. Of course, everyone, I see it often with CEO who, when they present in all hands, of course, it's obvious that we're doing that for the shareholder price and the strategy.

We talked about it for three years. It's so beautiful for you because you spend your day working on it. A developer who is doing Python or a technical architect who is doing, his model. They don't know much about it, but we don't know until we have this external point of view, this coaching role, somebody who is asking this question.

And as you say, sometimes it's really obvious, the link. They just have to explain it and explain it simply, but they don't know until we ask them. 

Galen Low: I like that. I also like the questions up front. All too often I find it's okay, yeah, present it to me and then I'll provide feedback, right? That's the kind of like the common approach, but I do like that.

Okay. Before you start telling me who's this for, what are we trying to do? Right. Because it almost creates the, like the brief for everyone to go. Okay. Yeah. Like it puts it all into context and then it gives a framework to ask questions and to build empathy. 

Renaud Taburiaux: When I coach, I'm doing coaching obviously.

When I coach people during the rehearsal and we invite test audience. Usually, I want to have somebody who knows the project, somebody who doesn't know anything. I try to get a test audience as close as possible as the final audience. I want to do the rehearsal in front of the developer. But I tell them at the beginning, this is a full rehearsal.

You don't interrupt. We go from the beginning to the end. And I say, put yourself in the shoes of the audience. Today, you are not the head of sourcing. No, today you are the customer from this company. Largely you have, you're busy. You don't know much about this project or you know a lot about this technology and it helps you frame your feedback.

Again, I'm talking about feedback here before I say ask question, but the ask question is more for the coaching aspect of it. But sometimes they want you to give me feedback. Okay, what worked, what can be improved for next time? And to answer this question, you need to know who the presentation is for, what it is for.

And we often skip that as you say, okay, let me show my slide, go through it. Okay, fine. That's not how it works. 

Galen Low: And fine is is the right word, right? Yeah, it's fine. 

Renaud Taburiaux: It's good. It's good. It's good. No, but okay. Okay. That's a good point. Let me stop on that because we need to remember that it's progress over perfection.

You cannot say to somebody who's terrible, who is stressed. It's a lot of text, tell them, Oh, that's terrible, redo it from scratch. That's demotivating. That doesn't help them know what to improve. Give them something small. We do plenty of presentation, way too much, if you ask me. So they will have opportunity to, to improve in the next one.

Just start now with one thing. Oh, this one, a lot of texts. Do they need all of these texts? No. Okay. Okay. And let them think, okay, I will remove that. Okay. That's good. That's good enough for this presentation. You will not, save humanity with one presentation at the time, but you can get better with one presentation at a time.

And at the end, the small steps, the small, 1 percent will add up. To being comfortable, being, confident, being impactful, not wasting time. But that's really important to that's fine. Sometimes fine is good. Sometimes fine is good. You don't need to perfect slides sometimes.

Amateurish slides feel better because they're more authentic to the speaker. That doesn't make sense here. 

Galen Low: Yeah, no, absolutely. And actually I was going to say what I really like about it is that, we were talking about if you have a team member who doesn't really feel comfortable and you're like, well, like perfection or throw it out and make it perfect is actually the most demotivating thing, but actually the essence of presenting well is not perfection is what are we trying to do here when you boil it back down to the message and the audience, then even if you get all the words wrong, that you were in the script, but you still get the idea across.

It's moving the ball forward for the project and to your point, like it's incremental improvement for the presenter too, who won't overnight become the best orator, of all time. They won't. That's for sure. But it's like getting better and better. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah. On the, on this part, for the think phase, the first phase, remember think, build, deliver.

For the think, I created a canvas with 10 questions basically to answer before you open on it. And one of the few questions at the beginning, of course, who is the audience? What is the objective? What are the message that you want to say by just doing this? Even if the projector, the, we don't use projector anymore, but the, the TV stopped working.

You can still deliver your message because you know what you want to say. The same three messages you can say in the elevator pitch. You can say, at lunch, you can say in a half an hour presentation. But if you don't know, At the beginning, what you want to say, the key messages, the story you're trying to tell, if something goes wrong, you'll be lost.

Oh, I don't remember this part of the script. In theory, you should have them already, memorized or internalized. Okay, so this doesn't work. What I want to say here is, That's really important. And we don't do it because we don't think before we start building it. It's going back to this simple step, always think before you build.

Galen Low: I like that word, not memorize, internalize. Yes. And I'm someone who like, there are songs that I've been listening to since I was a kid. I still don't know any of the lyrics. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah. Which one? Let's put you on the spot. 

Galen Low: Oh my gosh. Okay. The Weezer (Blue Album). I've listened to that since like whenever it was released, I was in high school, I've listened to it regularly.

For however many decades, I won't date myself too much, but you asked me to memorize something. I shut down. I don't memorize, but I do internalize. So when I actually present, I will usually write a script and then I'll boil it back down into bullet points. And then I'll try and internalize those bullet points.

So I know what they mean, not all the words of what they say. And you and I, even in the green room, we were talking about, yeah, like backup plans for when technology fails. And actually when I was working at a consultancy and they were giving the managing directors there some training on no slide presentations, right?

Getting back to the idea that, do you need slideware? What if you could present without slideware? Does that make it better? It was an interesting concept to me. Because as an agency guy, I dream in slides. You know what I mean? 

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah, of course. But you know, to be honest, a slide is always often, not always, often useful to visualize.

When you see numbers, if you're presenting the result of, a sprint or a financial quarter or something like that, you need slide because it's really hard to follow. Okay. 3000, 3000. Okay. If you have, okay, I have three points. You put the three points on one slide, the title of it.

That's enough, because it's visual, it creates redundancy in the mind. You have to both remember what you hear and what you see. So slide is important, but that's not what the presentation is about. As you say, you need to internalize the message. And then with or without slides, you will be able to deliver these messages.

Galen Low: I like it's as a reference for the audience, not as a reference for you as a presenter. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah, definitely. You shouldn't need that to know what to say. To be fair, if it helps you to know what you will have to say, to not forget, to be more comfortable because you're not stressed that you will Miss half your point for me, that's fine.

Again, it's just a business presentation. I don't want it to show it as a final exam where you need to know everything to answer all questions. It's just a business presentation. You can get back to the audience later. You can come later to deeper in some topics. It's fine if you use it for yourself. 

Galen Low: I like that. It's not Broadway. It's not a Senate hearing. 

Renaud Taburiaux: No, exactly. 

Galen Low: It's your business presentation and yeah, it moves things forward. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Let's answer your second part of your question. If somebody is not comfortable, just remind them that it's just a presentation. Lower the, I don't know how to say that, the expectation.

If you can do that, talk to a human, share your message, that's fine. It's fine. If you forget some points, remember that you know what you want to say, the audience doesn't know what you want to say. So if skip a point, that's fine. That's no big deal. If you have this mindset and the, you keep in mind that you're here to help the audience, usually the stress goes dramatically low.

And if on top of that, you rehearse once or twice out loud fully, that's it. I've coached, a lot of technical people in it, especially they are terrible at presenting, but after the normal presentation sprints, they are fine. They're thriving. They're really happy. They're excited to be here. It's not, stress anymore.

It's all, I'm looking forward to share that because. Usually they have good feedback and because, I will be able to have a purpose to bring value to help the people I'm trying to help here who I'm talking to. 

Galen Low: I literally like that. Actually, even just circling back to the beginning, right? What you said is, I asked you why is presenting so important and why isn't it taught?

You actually took it to a spot where we're presenting all the time when you're interacting with your colleagues, you're presenting ideas and actually the one where you have to stand up in front of the room with the, slides on the wall is just another version of that conversation and kind of just like bringing depressurizing it. I think we over, over pressurize the presentation. 

I wondered, like for folks listening, nodding their heads, they're like, yeah, okay, my team, we need to be better at business communications at presentations. Some folks, are in communications at their organization or their team leads, what's the best first step that they can take to just like level up their culture of business communications? 

Renaud Taburiaux: I'm highly biased. Of course, I would say apply the three step of the framework. You don't have to buy anything. Just think before you build. Build slowly and ask for feedback early and prepare how you will deliver.

If you do that for all your communication, even email, video that you have to shoot. If you always think before you build slowly and you get feedback. You don't wait, the last minute to get feedback. And you prepare how you will deliver, how you would send it, how you, no matter what. If you just do that, you're way ahead.

You would save countless of hours designing, refining what is not useful. So I would say that apply these three rules, follow the three steps. Remember that you have to show the example. Don't ask your team to do it if you don't do it on your own. And start small. Again, progress over perfection. Try once, maybe the next presentation, just try to write down, it's important to write down, make it concrete.

Write down the, the three messages that you want the audience to remember and to repeat after your presentation. What did he say? Well, he said that no. Okay, if you just do that, the rest of your preparation would be so much easier. And then the next time, you will check how to, you can do better slides.

Maybe less words, maybe, more, less visual clutter, anything. Just start small, but start now. 

Galen Low: I like that. It's iterative. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Definitely. I think it is something that we do in our projects. We do sprints, it's one at a time. We get feedback, we get user review, we get. We test, we do discovery, and we don't do that for presentation.

So just apply what you already do well to your presentation. 

Galen Low: I was going to say, now it clicks, right? Presentation Sprint, name of your book. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Yeah, it is actually. It is because at the end of the sprint, I say sprint because it has to be, really short and, focused. We don't want to waste time.

It's a couple of hours maximum present preparation. You are mindful about which step you take. You do one step at a time. So that's why it's a sprint, but it's also a sprint because it's start again. At the end, I don't talk about it a lot because people are a bit triggered by that. At the end of your presentation, after the delivery, actually, you go back to the think and you debrief.

What can I do better for next time? You write it down. And the next time you have a presentation, check that again. What did I say I would do better? We don't do that because debrief, retrospective, we don't really see the point. But it's important to take, a couple of minutes after you present with your team, relax, de stress.

Okay. How was it? How did you feel? Do we have any metrics to assess how good it was or so on? What can we do better next time? If we had to do it again, the preparation and the presentation. What should we do differently? So that's why it's a sprint again. You come back to it and it goes back to the sprint of agility, where at the end of, your session, your sprint, your iteration, you just, okay, what do we do next sprints?

Galen Low: Love that. 

Renaud Taburiaux: And you keep, yes, let's stop now. 

Galen Low: No. I have a whole bunch of questions from my community. We're going to answer them in the community because I don't think we have time today. But folks who are listening who aren't in our community where can they learn more about the book and what you do?

Renaud Taburiaux: Yes. Okay. So the book, I don't know for those who have the camera, so the book is here. It's available on Amazon. You can find it on presentation-sprint.com. The tools that are inside, the canvas, the workflow, the checklist, you can download them on presentation-sprint.com. Everything is free.

You don't have to buy the book to start. Please try to improve your presentation. Eventually you say, okay, I want to go a bit deeper about structure, how to structure my presentation. I talk about it, some tips, how to manage stress, and you will get more in details. But at the beginning, just download the tools, the checklist, you can download the first chapter on presentation-sprint.com. 

Contact me if you want me to, maybe I can come to do a short presentation to your team. I will be happy. I want to really spread the word about this this methodology, this framework. So contact me, you will have my LinkedIn and my email on the website. And just again, start small, start now. 

Galen Low: Love that. I'll include all the links in the show notes below. 

Renaud, thank you so much for joining me today. This was a lot of fun. 

Renaud Taburiaux: Thank you very much for having me. I think we are really aligned because of our background on Project Manager. I think we're sharing a lot of frustration, bad habit here. So I'm really glad we can help your audience doing better here. 

Galen Low: Yeah, it's been cathartic. Thank you.

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