Presenting to Engineering Leadership
A 5 slide formula with some advice.
At GitHub we have a weekly executive leadership operations review meeting for an hour. The meeting starts with a review of availability numbers from the previous week and then an engineer or engineering manager from the company gives a presentation about a hard availability problem.
Most weeks, every engineering VP is gathered in this room to listen to the presentation and it is a rare time that you will get every VP’s attention. For many of the presenting engineers it is the first time they have presented in one of these types of meetings.
I feel privileged that I have gotten to sit in on these meetings (and sometimes talk) for over a year. From that time I have seen some great presentations and others that ended with crickets.
Recently, I was advising someone about how to do one of these presentations and it made me think I should write down my own thoughts on how to give a good engineering LT focused presentation about an availability problem.
Below are some concrete rules and then a framework for how you can write slides for this type of presentation.
Don’t go over 15 minutes.
It’s easy to forget how busy engineering executives are. The thing you are focused on for your entire day, most days, is a blip on the radar for them. It may be the 10th most important thing they need to address that day and even if it is number one, it is likely to be competing with a few other things.
An executive focused presentation should be focused on giving them enough detail to understand what is needed at the company and then the rest of the time should be for them to discuss the problem and what action they want to take (Q&A).
If you can’t fit your presentation into 15 minutes you probably haven’t simplified the problem enough.
Present a solution, not just a problem.
I would apply this to almost every conversation with management you have in your career, but it is especially important at an executive focused presentation.
In the absence of a proposed solution, the natural tendency of most engineering executives is to solve. If you don’t want them to solve the problem then you need to be sure you present your solution front and center.
Show that you did the homework, but don’t show the homework itself.
I see this mistake happen most often with engineers. They love detail and especially in front of executives it can be tempting to “show off” how much work you have done and how interesting the problem is.
Unfortunately, as I said above, executives have a lot of other problems to deal with and if you dive into a “look what we did” presentation you will lose the room pretty quickly.
Instead, write up a document with all of the detail and provide it in advance of the meeting. You can even offer to spend X minutes having everyone preread the document during the meeting itself. Although I wouldn’t generally recommend that approach, it is still better than trying to cram detail into a verbal presentation (which will lose your audience).
A 5 Slide Presentation Formula
You can stray from this formula and you might be successful, but I have seen this particular talk structure be successful a number of times and it is one I would choose for this type of presentation. Here is the list of slides:
What is the problem? Ideally this is one sentence or an eye catching graphic. You describe the problem in two minutes or less.
A table/graph with concrete data on the problem. Here is where you show “we did the homework” without actually showing all of your work. If you have any surprising data now is the time to show it off.
If you don’t have any data I would suggest delaying the presentation and figuring out how you can collect some. It is almost guaranteed the “solution” to a problem you bring without data will start with “collect some data”.
Impact of the problem. Once you have shown the problem and the data you can add a slide with some fuzzy information about the problem. Maybe there are some areas you don’t have tons of data but you have quotes from people, or you have additional impact you want to highlight. Here is your chance to riff on things.
Suggested solution to the problem. What do we need to do to solve this problem? This slide can expand into two or three slides depending on how much information you are presenting. The solution itself should still only be one very simple slide, but you may have two other slides in this section:
What is the cost of the proposed solution? It is nice to have this estimated up front so it’s clear the magnitude of any potential asks from these leaders. If you don’t include a cost they will ask in Q&A anyway (so I would include it here).
What are the alternative solutions? Even if they are bad, you should present alternatives. Executives will want to make up their own minds about high level solutions and “trust me” isn’t a great way to show that your proposed solution is best or well researched. Show what the suboptimal solutions are too.
What are we already doing? If things are already in progress this is the time to highlight steps that are already being taken. It is important to remember that this isn’t time to “brag” but time to inform, so keep the information high level and specific.
What do we specifically want leadership to do to help with this problem? This slide is so often missing from these LT focused presentations, but it is also most important.
Ideally, you are giving this presentation with the intent to ask for an action from the leadership team. Having a specific ask (communicate X to your teams, agree that we can roll out training in the next 6 months, etc) will help focus discussion in the Q&A and allow you to leave this meeting understanding whether or not you got what you needed to proceed.
If you have an ask for a specific engineering team as part of this list, make sure you have already communicated it to the relevant engineering leaders in that organization and they have seen your slides in advance. There is nothing worse than surprising a VP or lower level engineering leader with an ask for work without talking to them in advance.
Further Reading
There are lots of things written on this topic that you can go further with. Will Larson has written two excellent blog posts on presenting to executives (presenting to executives and present to executives). These have great narratives and some frameworks for thinking about presentations.