Pragmatic Data Scientists
Make Data Useful
Pragmatic Data Scientists
How to make people care about your presentation?
Today I'm going to talk about one mindset that is change your insecurity and try to make the most impact out of your presentation. I came to this realization when I was working at Facebook and there was a famous Instagram data scientist director that gave us career coaching sessions. And in the session he asked us: how many of us know that presentations shouldn't be too technical? And all of us senior Facebook data scientists raise our hands. And then he asked: how many of us found our last presentation too technical? And all of us raised our hands. So we know that we shouldn't be too technical on our presentations because nobody else cares about those technical details. But as senior data scientists who have multiple years in our careers, why do we still do it? He then point out to us: because we tried to be defensive in our presentations. So here's my elaboration. I came to Amazon fresh out of my PhD and in my PhD during presentations, people sit in a room and they're forced to give us their full attention for half an hour. And they do with a lot of sharp questions. So I need to be well prepared, especially in the technical details because my audience would actually ask questions about details such as my identification, my method, and my robustness. Then I joined Amazon and I joined a scientific org. So the team kept the flavor of academic presentations. There are scientists who come to my presentation and they would actually care about the technical details. So there was a cultural shock when I left Amazon and joined Facebook for two things. The first the time I was given is, was much shorter. At Amazon or in my PhD, I was given half an hour to an hour to do my presentation at, but at Facebook I was given five to 15 minutes to do my presentation. And second, there are a lot of non data or non non-academic folks in my audience. There are PMs, engineers and leaders. They wouldn't ask question about my technicals, but they would ask question about the business. They just care about the business and my implication and my conclusions. Compounding those two factors. I have another discovery that is I need to earn my presentations. Yeah. I was given certain chance of doing presentation and if my audience do not care about my presentation I would be uninvited to certain meetings. But if they like my presentation and care about the funding, they want to ask more questions, I would get invited to more presentations and often more important presentations. Because making resonating presentations are so important, I start investing time to learn how to do it. At the beginning I learned a lot of skills, but with, without the right mindset the skills are not that useful. Then I had the session I mentioned at the beginning of this video, I finally found the right mindset. The right mindset is: you should play offense, not defense in your presentations. And you shouldn't fear so much. Fear is a mechanism that our brain used to protect us. For example, in the old times, if I ate something nice. I would be happy for five seconds, but if I ate something poisonous, I could die. So we exaggerate the consequence of bad outcomes. In work the consequence of bad outcomes are actually not that much. Think about the last bad conversations you had or the last bad presentations. I bet you couldn't remember. But if you have a very insightful conclusion that change the decision of a business, the impact is huge. So it's actually quite strange that you go to a presentation. You have this opportunity to change the decision and make the business much better. Instead, you just pay attention to if someone is going to challenge you, and if you can defend your technical details. So change the mindset to make impact instead of paying too much attention to being challenged. With this mindset, there is one action you can immediately take to make your presentation much more useful. That is set the tone of your presentation to invite conversations and even debate. We often go to a presentation hoping nobody asks us any question, and everyone keeps silence. And we went through the presentation, then it's done. But that is actually a signal of nobody cared about your presentation or the presentation shouldn't happen in the first place. Why do you want to have a presentation or a meeting because you want to present your finding, that is probably controversial, that is probably going to change the course of the business. The more impact you make, the more conversations or the more debates it should generate. In the future, we can publish more videos about how to make better presentations, more resonating presentations, how to settle debates, how to present in front of debates. But I think today's topic is actually the most important. It sets the direction, the right mindset of what is a good presentation and one action item, inviting conversations, even debates, to make our presentations better. All right, hope this video is helpful.