On Product Management

On PowerPoint

I just got back from vmworld 2011 in Vegas.  Sustaining interest in speaker sessions at technology conferences is a challenge for most people.  As soon as the slides start rolling, you see people walk out, start checking emails/surfing on their iPads and generally get disengaged.  Some try to hop to other sessions and repeat the same actions.

Part of the reason why these presentations fail is, the speaker pays little attention to the preparation needed before flying in to the conference – for example on the logistics of how big the room is, how the seating arrangement is going to be and what kind of visuals and presentation aids they need to bring and engage the audience, how big/small the fonts on the slides need to be, will a slide accomplish the job of conveying the message to the person sitting in the last row of the room.  This is why I prefer panel discussions over presentations because panels typically don’t have slides and you can actually learn more when the smart people on the panel start having a conversation.  All you have to do is just listen.

So what was attending PowerPoint driven speaker sessions at vmworld like?  It was something like the story line in the first two videos below.  Back in summer 2010 I presented a session “My PowerPoint Sucks! Now what?”, that was well received in the Austin ProductCamp community.  I made a few short videos using xtranormal to tell the story of bad powerpointing then.  Here they are:  Situation – Complication – Resolution.

How much freedom do you have to say no to PowerPoints, like in video#3 above?

If you work where PowerPoint is the lingua franca of your organization  there is not much to say.  I believe most of PowerPoint usage is driven by organizational culture.  It is a crutch that executives, managers, and employees alike use to support other people’s stories, if they can tell one at all.  When you don’t know the subject it is always easy to throw up a slide and divert the attention.  And once the executives in an organization push that practice down, the idea get institutionalized across the entire organization. So we have meeting agenda in PowerPoint,  meeting minutes in PowerPoint, discussion items in PowerPoint, meeting outcomes/action items in PowerPoint.  Practically every message becomes PowerPoint – a low resolution, cognitively dissonant method to convey useful information.  Like the famous futurist Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message.  PowerPoint usage describes that aptly.

How can we make this experience better?  There are a number of options.  One easy, cheap option is to use a whiteboard.  Check this one out:

The way of the whiteboard – Persuading with pictures – by Dan Roam on Mix09

- Prabhakar

This post is cross posted at http://prabhakar.me

Related posts:

1. Why I hate PowerPoint
2. Please delete your first three slides (or move them)
3. Curious people can change the world: +1 for ProductCamp Austin