6 Tips For Better Slide Preparation

As a Product Manager, you're bound to be asked to prepare a slide deck at some point.

This could be for a product strategy overview to leadership, pre-sales presentations to prospects, a townhall for the entire organization & so on.

They aren't easy though. It's hard to inspire action when an audience can't resonate with the message.

I used to suck at this for the longest time & even today, I feel challenged to get it spot on. Ruthless feedback helped me improve over the years.

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Some tips:

1. Customize to the occasion

One-size-fits-all doesn't work.

You may be tempted to extend a gorgeous template you found online. That's fine as long as it doesn't start governing the intended storyline.

Broadly speaking, there are 3 types of needs:

A. Present & Read

Decks used to present to a live audience & then shared with them later on for further reading e.g. sales presentation.

B. Read-only

Those that will be sent over email for consumption as a digital document with no narrator e.g. dense e-book or research summary.

C. Present-only

Primarily intended to serve as a complementary tool to a talk e.g. motivational speech.

Each of these have their own nuances.

Ex: for a Present & Read deck, use visible headlines with smaller sub-text.

For a present-only deck, you can keep it highly visual with stock imagery, graphs, block quotes etc.

For a read-only deck, you can shape it as a scannable document but focus on structure/hierarchy. Slide density or count becomes lesser of a worry there.

2. Storyboarding

I use a pen & paper to first sketch my "plot".

I anchor the final endgame (call-to-action or main take-aways) & then work the story backwards.

The top-level structure needs to adapt to the use case e.g.

Case Study: Problem > Solution > Results

Sales Deck: Inspiration > Problem Set > Solution Story > Next Steps

Strategy: Where we are > Where want to be > The What/How/Who/When

etc.

3. Dial up fidelity in iterations

Sweep 1:

- Add a basic start & end slide.

- Stick in the transition #slides (e.g. chapters, sections, topics)

- Add in placeholder slides with headlines

Sweep 2:

- Work on supporting visuals and throw them in.

Sweep 3:

- Polish the copy

- Improve design of intermediate slides. Every design doesn't need to be unique. Duplicate slides or even copy over from past work.

- Add brand watermarks

- CTA on the final slide (e.g. link, email, social handle)

4. Copy matters a LOT

Make it relatable & jargon free e.g.

"Train our staff to be leaders" vs. "Increase L&D spend"

5. Check navigational elements

Show your draft to someone and get feedback. Unable to follow the bigger plot? Consider adding a progress bar or a breadcrumb.

6. Dress (your slides) to impress

- Using a bullet list that's too bland? Use Icons8 or Flaticon to add some supporting icons.

- When adding text on an image, tweak contrast to improve readability.

- Let it breathe with whitespace.