The lost art of story telling

How many times have we seen presentations that are just boring. We struggle to not open our laptops or avoid doodling on our notes. Too many words, too repetitive, too boring. This blog post is not designed to be another "5 key tips to make your presentations better" type of post, but rather to talk about how product managers (who create their fair share of presentations) can make them better. The key to me is to tell a story, folks like stories they don't like boring presentations :)

 By telling a story you accomplish the following:

1.  WIIFM - If you haven't heard of this, it stands for "What's in it for me?" The audience has to feel an emotion, a desire. You are taking up there time, what value are you providing in return. Are you asking them for something? If so, what are you providing them? Think about your audience, not about you or your slides. 
2. Connect the dots - Often times the audience may already have the story made up in their minds and are probably not receptive to your view. We have all had this happen. You are trying to convince a VC with your pitch, but they have already determined that there is no future for your product, business, market, etc. Our brains are wired to automatically fill in the gaps when presented with bits and pieces of a vision or story. Fr xmpl cn y rd ths sntnc? You see how your experience/knowledge allowed you to fill in the gaps? I can assure you my 5 year old, can not fill in those gaps! As you present your story, you have to connect disparate pieces of information together with data and emotion to fill in the gaps/assumptions that your audience may have.
3. Ability to Influence - So you have thought about your audience and helped connect the dots in order to fill in the gaps, what's next. The key to telling a great story isn't just the words...its the audio and visuals. As a product manager who loves data and wants to share it as quickly as possible, it takes time (and restraint) to sit down before you create the slides and think about how do you want to communicate your story. How do you present the conclusion in a way that will resonate with the audience? One thing that I always ask myself when I'm presenting to management is "If I wasn't there could the audience understand the story?" If we can provide them content that your management can understand and present themselves or share with their management, that will only serve to increase your sphere of influence. Data for the sake of data is not your goal, ability to influence is...

 I hope you found these ideas interesting and I'd love to hear your thoughts! Please share or retweet.