5 Tips To Make Better Data-Driven Presentations

How to make your presentations data-driven, precise, effective and customised to your audience

March 13, 2023

You’ve probably already done this a number of times for your presentations. But often the data you have used as supportive evidence hasn’t achieved quite the same amount of impact as you had hoped it would.

Its such a ubiquitous thing now to boost our slides or content with data. However, it also ends up being an aspect we very rarely think too deeply about. We think simply sharing the numbers in that slide should be enough.

But is your data emphasizing the message which you trying to convey?

Now we have heard that “the data often speaks for itself”, but often how we present the data determines whether it sounds like a good public speaker or stands shyly in a corner mumbling.

So this is what we are trying to tackle today.

How do we make sure that the data is presented in the most effective manner possible so the folks listening can get the message immediately?

Without having to re-explain the graphs / the data.

Now, these presentations could be both for technical audiences such as ones during your sprint updates or for more non-technical audiences such as ones where you present to product or business development teams.

With no further ado, let’s just dive right in.

1. Create a Base Template and Make Tailored Versions for Different Audiences

We all have done this in the past, where we primarily have one slide deck which gets re-used multiple times for various groups. A usual flow of this would be the index, followed by content, results and finally, the conclusion.

How about instead we try something different?

Let’s make one “base template” with the structure, the bullet points of the content, the slide descriptions which we want to cover etc.

Now, for each presentation, think about your audience and tailor it to their expectations, or rather fine tune the presentation for that audience.

For instance, if the audience is mostly product owners or product managers, don’t dive too deep into the technicalities / the algorithm but rather focus on the broader picture and punchlines or takeaways.

On the flip end, if you’re presenting to technical team members, go deeper. Because they don’t want you to simply brush over the topics but rather do a deeper dive into the nitty gritties of how you achieved these results, what kind of experiments you did, what are the different algorithms you tried, the different reliability and accuracy metrics chosen to validate the results, etc.

2. Do Not Bury The Lead

Now I’ve made this mistake quite often as well because when we think about presenting something, we think okay, there needs to be a good story around it. So we end up doing a long storyline with that then eventually builds into the final lesson of the story.

While this is great, for all audiences, always start with the lead.

Start with the overarching message / the main conclusions which you would like to convey, the punchline result for all your experiments.

For lack of a better term, this helps audiences “hook” on to your presentation quite early and they know exactly what to expect from the presentation.

Finally, the lead needs to be short, crisp and very clear. There should not be any confusion about what the presentation is about. So avoid those long paragraphs and keep it simple to about 1 or 2 sentences.

3. Explain It To a 5 Year Old

At this point, you’ve convinced the audience what the purpose of this presentation is and what exactly they should expect from it. Now you’re gingerly going into the technical aspects, the problem statement, the data, the algorithm, the pre and post processing steps you used and you start to notice you’re losing some folks, even if there are technical members in the audience.

Let’s change that approach, use an analogy or something that they can relate with a as a parallel.

Essentially, if you can explain it to a 5 year old, consider it a job well done.

For instance, when you talk about data organization, you could give an example of an unorganized closet, the pains associated with it and how there are different ways once can “organie” the data in their closet and gain immense value from it.

4. The “Oh I Get It” Effect

Next, when we show graphs or data summaries, make sure that they emphatically show the lead message you are trying to get across.

There’s a couple of things here, one, your graphs need to be more legible, so darker backgrounds with contrasting colours are always the way to go.

Then, the graph / data summary itself should be enough for the reader to go, “Oh I get it”.

If you have to re-explain the data or the graph to drive the point home, something is missing.

Here is an example. As you can see, not only do they do a great job of sharing the “main conclusion”, but they also go the extra mile by adding the logo and branding so that its much more intuitive and you “get it” right away.

5. Pause & Check For Engagement

This final one is quite critical because often we are so pulled into the flow of our presentation that we don’t pause to check in with the audience.

Key tip : Pause at the end of every section of your presentation before moving on to the next one. Ask questions about how folks feel about it so far, are there parts that they did not understand? Can we move on to the next section?

This ensures that the audience can ask questions / voice their doubts while being in the section of the presentation that they have doubts about.

Also, once you clear those doubts / questions, the audience’s headspace is in a much clearer place to grasp the next few bits of information you are about to throw at them.