7 Tips for Killer Presentations
Presentation tips that helped me go from an average presenter to a good one
Have you ever sat through a presentation that felt like watching paint dry? Or worse, delivered one that put your audience to sleep? Ouch!
Many engineers think presentations are only for managers. So, they don't work on getting better at creating presentations. This makes it hard for them to explain their work clearly to others. As a result, they lose out on leadership opportunities.
I used to have the same problem until someone taught me these tricks that transformed how I approached building & delivering presentations. Over the years, I have also helped other engineers adopt these strategies, so it works!
WorkOS makes selling easy (Sponsor)
With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides flexible and easy-to-use APIs to ship user management, SSO, SCIM, and other enterprise features in minutes instead of months.
Some of the hottest startups in the world are powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.
Let’s dive in.
🏗️ 1. Build The Content First, Slides Last
A common trap: you fire up PowerPoint and start creating slides right away. Suddenly, you're stuck, unsure what to put on the next slide. It is hard to have clarity of thought when distracted trying to make those slides look good.
Instead, it would help if you focused on getting the story right first. When creating content, I scribble down the details as if I were verbally explaining the topic to my audience. Then, I restructure those raw notes into an outline.
Think of it like building a house. You must have a blueprint before you lay down the bricks.
🎯 2. Build a Specific Message
Many years ago, I was tasked with giving an all-hands presentation about a new project. However, once I started creating slides, I struggled to create content. My framing was pretty generic — talk about project X. I was stuck because I didn’t address key questions like — Talk about what? Why should people care? What aspects should I focus on more?
My director helped me reframe the presentation to a specific problem we had encountered in the project. So I went from “talk about project X” to “talk about how this new component could not run in environment X and how we solved it.”
Ask the following questions to frame your talk better:
What specific problem is this presentation solving?
Why is this worth talking about now?
What is the takeaway for the audience?
Why should the audience care?
👥 3. Know Your Audience
The same topic can be presented in N ways depending on who you are presenting to. One size does not fit all!
When I present to my team vs. leadership vs. in an all-hands, the audience will have different backgrounds and levels of interest.
For example, a presentation to leadership should focus on high-level strategy and ROI. For a team of engineers, it can deep dive into the technical specifics.
A common mistake is when we present to a diverse group of people, we make one slide for person A and others for person B, C, etc. This can be jarring for everyone. Instead, pick a person representing the critical mass as the target audience. For example, if I present a technical topic to 100s of people in an org, I would think of one person we don’t regularly work with who would be interested in listening.
✂️ 4. Keep it Simple!
It can be tempting to create fancy presentations and out-of-the-world animations. However, congested slides can add to your audience’s cognitive load, and they may lose interest. This is true for documents and articles too. So, I strive to keep this cognitive load low for all my articles even when I don’t have great content.
Tips that always work for me:
Avoid crowding the slides and leave a lot of white space.
Keep a uniform appearance/font for all your slides.
Use less busy themes that keep the focus on the content.
📝 5. One Slide, One Message
This was one of the best advice I got!
Previously, when I was unstructured in creating my presentations, I would cram in a lot of details on a single slide.
For example, a single slide that shared the API design, SLAs, and bottlenecks. The audience had to work harder to remember all of it. Instead, breaking them into individual slides lets the audience absorb the API design details before a deep dive into the bottlenecks or the SLAs.
Note that you don’t always need new slides to follow this rule. You could animate your architectural diagram or your bullet points to give a perception of one slide, one message.
Think of each slide as a billboard on a highway. The message should be that one thing you want the audience to remember.
🎤 6. Delivery Matters
Even the best content can fall flat with poor delivery. Think about the last time you dozed off in a presentation:
Was the presenter reading off the slides?
Did they have a monotonous tone throughout?
Were they using complex sentences that made it hard to follow?
Perhaps, it seemed like they just didn’t care. When that happens, it is hard for the audience to stay engaged.
Here are some tricks I use to keep my audience engaged:
Vary my tone to emphasize the important stuff.
Short and simpler sentences.
A positive body language that shows I am interested in the topic.
A joke if I can pull it off.
Slow down the pace when explaining complex ideas.
🕒 7. Practice!
Don't wing it! Even the most seasoned speakers rehearse. It helps understand how long the presentation takes, weak areas that don’t flow well, and gain confidence.
For the important ones, record yourself practicing. It might feel awkward, but you'll catch things you never noticed before. Are you using too many filler words? Is your posture showing confidence? Is your tone monotonous?
If you find out you are going over time, cut down the content instead of speeding up.
If you are nervous about forgetting things, note some index words in your speaker notes to help you remember the flow. If you still forget during the talk, don’t panic. Pause for a bit and refer to those notes.
🎬 Parting Note
Figure out the message you want to deliver to your target audience and build the right story before building your slides. Slides are just a visual aid to tell that story. Don’t fall into the trap of creating shiny slides that don’t tell the right story. That will put the audience to sleep. 🙂
Shoutouts
Big Tech vs. Mid Tech: Which One’s Right for You? by
&Latest Innovations in Recommendation systems with LLMs by
The 3 Big Mistakes That Almost Cost Me My Promotion by
&
Some of you have me asked how I create the images on my newsletter. I had taken this course that taught me how to explain ideas visually. (Discount code - RA10)
If you enjoyed this article, then hit the ❤️ button. It helps!
If you think someone else will benefit from this, then make sure to 🔁 share this post.
Great set of tips, Raviraj and definitely love tip #2 on building a specific message.
A failure-mode would be to just say, "I want to talk about this so I'm going to." Instead, it should be, "What would provide the most value to the specific audience I'm presenting to." That switch tunes it directly to your audience and makes your talk have a clear purpose behind it, which also drives the outcome you want.
By the way, thanks for the article shout-out from the collab with Steve Huynh too!
Excellent article, thanks for sharing 👏.
I just started to have some habits of recording my self when I am presenting something 😅