Your project has done well, and somebody senior wants the leadership team to hear about it. Your manager tells you on Monday that you have ten minutes on their Thursday agenda. Directors, the chief technology officer, the head of finance. You will be the most junior person in the meeting by several levels.
Here is what most people get wrong, and it has nothing to do with nerves. They prepare the presentation they would give to engineers. Architecture, a clever detail, the story of how hard it was. Leadership teams rarely want any of that.
Find out what they want before you prepare anything. Ask your manager. Why are they asking for this, and what do they need to decide or understand afterwards? Often the answer is short. They want to know whether to fund the next phase. They want to know if it is safe to tell customers.
Put that answer in your first minute. What we did, what it changed, and what we need from you, if anything. The rest of the ten minutes is support for those three sentences.
Use numbers they recognise. Not requests per second, but orders, hours saved, customers affected, money. If the numbers are uncertain, say how uncertain. Senior people are used to imperfect figures. What bothers them is false precision.
Expect to be interrupted. In many leadership meetings, the ten minutes become two minutes of slides and eight of questions. That is not rudeness. It is interest. Answer briefly, and if you do not know, say so and promise a follow up by a specific day.
Rehearse once with your manager, and ask them to play the most difficult person in the room. What is the question you are afraid of? Prepare one honest sentence for it.
And remember why you are there. You were invited because you know this work better than anyone at that table. They are not testing whether you belong. They are trying to learn something from the person most likely to know it.
Afterwards, send a three line summary with the follow ups you promised. Plenty of people present well. Fewer of them follow up.
– Asael Shinder
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