πŸ“’ Presenting

Sharing information with people

Types of presentation

When presenting to people, it’s important to know what style of presentation you’re giving. Some common presentation styles are:

  • Demos: Presenting something you’ve done (maybe a working product, maybe a new feature, maybe just a mock-up).
  • Lectures: Teaching information that you know, that the people you’re presenting to don’t already know.

This page contains general advice for all presentations. There are also links to specific information for some of these kinds of presentation.

Time

Know how much time you have for your presentation. Make sure you stick to it. Practice your presentation to ensure you can do it within that time.

Make sure you know if any time for questions is included in your time, or if there is extra time afterwards for questions.

If you’re using slides, you should aim for about one slide per minute of your presentation. If you have more slides than this it will be hard for the audience to take in your presentation.

Audience

Make sure you know about your audience. Think about:

What do they already know?

  • Are there things you need to explain so that they can follow what you actually want to talk about?
  • Can you skip some things because everyone in the audience already knows them?
  • Do you need to check in your presentation to make sure they actually know what you think?

What do they want to know? What are they excited about? e.g. Talking about a cool way of achieving a code problem probably isn’t interesting to someone who doesn’t know how to code.

What do you want them to know? Do you want them to take some action based on your presentation? Do you want them to use something you’re explaining?

What do your audience care about? An audience of non-developers may be more interested in your UI. An audience of developers may be more interested in your code. Target your presentation to your audience.

Focus

Pick a focused message - one or two things you want people to take away.

If you just say everything that you know/did, it’s hard to pick out what was important.

Explain what as well as why. If you’re talking about something you did, explain why you did it the way you did it.

Ordering

Try to introduce things in the order they’re needed. Avoid needing to say “I’ll explain that later” or “You’ll understand this later”.

Guidance for specific presentation types

  1. Demos