Hacker News Reader

Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

I think of the (imo legendary) presentation Jobs gave when introducing the iPhone. A brand new product with features and usage patterns that most people never saw before in a mobile device.

It had very little of those highly detailed bullet point slides, but you didn’t feel like after watching that presentation you didn’t “get it”.

That’s the barometer I think about when it comes to presentations

View on HN

OK, fine, when I'm introducing a new cell phone model to the public, I'll do it Jobs's way. But that's not optimal for an in-depth technical presentation with actual content behind it. It will annoy the present audience and frustrate future readers.

The idea that one presentation style fits every audience, every product, every scenario is just weird. Nothing else on the planet works that way, so why should slide decks?

Completely agree. Ironically, by focusing on Jobs' presentations, people are admiring the type of presentation that they will probably never do, and they do not consider that it probably cost 100s of man-hours to prepare it. I think it is more important to develop more practical skills to communicate effectively whatever you need, while not spending too much time on the deck preparation.

I’m talking about the delivery. It’s not a lot of fluff, relies more on visuals / demos / examples than bullet points and is information dense and perhaps most importantly it’s well paced.

In my opinion this works well for technical presentations. I’ve given more than a few talks following the style and I’ve always been told it’s good stage presence and I’ve gotten a lot of compliments from the audience

In-depth technical presentations were identified as a contributing factor to the Challenge crash. That's why Amazon's meetings have memos.

https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com