TL;DR: By focusing on a clear structure, big picture, storytelling, minimalistic design, and limiting technical details, I improved my lightning talks by making them more practical and engaging.
Context
In my previous projects, our team regularly organized lightning talks where we shared knowledge about tools, technologies, and projects we'd worked on.
Although I was eager to share my knowledge, my presentations were often overloaded with details, ran over time, and I was losing team's attention and interest.
Recognizing this, I decided to take a step back to find a better approach. Through experimentation, I found a few steps that helped me more effectively convey my thoughts and knowledge.
Solution
- I start by defining key points to share and structuring them to ensure the content is understandable and easy to follow.
- Next, I break down things into layers, processes, workflows, and systems, then showcase how they fit together, exchange information, and change their state. Even though I like jumping into details, I realized that in most cases focusing on the big picture is more helpful.
- When designing a presentation, I limit myself to simple elements like text or stickies and a few colors, like shades of grey, to ensure my focus is on the content, not the layout or fancy effects. I'm also a huge fan of whiteboards, so whenever possible, I use them as my go-to tool as they give me freedom and flexibility in my thinking and design processes.
- Once I have the content, I figure out how to turn it into a story, where I gradually reveal its details. It's meant to avoid cognitive murder, help absorb the content, understand the topic, and keep the team curious and engaged.
- Finally, while sharing technical details is essential, code examples are often unnecessary. But, if they are a must, I reduce them to the simplest possible version.
Final thoughts
Focusing on improving my lightning talks helped me in more ways than expected. Not only did my presentations improve, but these changes also made a difference in my daily work, in how I work on projects, but also in how I communicate with the team.
While these methods have been particularly helpful for me, it's important to remember that there are many ways to prepare and run presentations, and what works best can vary from person to person.
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