Comments on: How Product Managers Can Get Better At Creating Powerpoint Slides

By: Dr. Jim Anderson

Dr. Jim Anderson — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 18:15:26 +0000

David: you bring up an interesting idea – should PowerPoint slides stand by themselves? I know that I’ve tried to create many “decks” that could be read through without actually seeing the presentation. I think that we like PowerPoint because it allows us to quickly draw a lot of pictures. However, if our audience is not sitting in a presentations it sure seems like it’s not the best way to get our message across. Perhaps this is why it has become so quick & easy to create videos – PowerPoint plus video may be the best answer to effective communications…

By: David Locke

David Locke — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:36:05 +0000

A conceptualization is a collection of concepts, maybe a network of concept. Differentiation has us including some concepts and their networks, and excluding others.

Terminology management has to embody those concepts in keywords. Those keywords turn up on the UI as labels. And, they are all you say. The user is supposed to know what they mean without reading the manual, but then again, there may be too many users with different backgrounds.

Slides are the best place to put this stuff, share this stuff, and debate them. If you need more than one slide, then the word on the slide isn’t good enough. If you need a sequence, you still need to summarize that sequence. Boil it down to one word, maybe two, but boil it down.

These slides might not communicate with investors, but somehow we expect these same words to the the job on the interface. Maybe the problem is broader than Powerpoint.

By: Product Management Reader: 19Mar09 | The Productologist: Exploring the Depths of Product Management

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:27:17 +0000

[...] How Product Managers Can Get Better At Creating Powerpoint Slides [Accidental Product Manager] [...]

By: Lena

Lena — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:19:14 +0000

Training: School

Personally I really like PPs which uses the new glossy buttons etc in the Drawing Tools section. It makes all the difference to the boring blue 90′s styled standard boxes.

PowerPoint is a great tool to use when visualizing early product ideas.
Some prefer to draw up ideas with pen and paper, some photoshop and some PowerPoint. I think it’s good to use PowerPoint when creating quick mockup if photoshop isn’t on your pc… not just for presentations and meetings.

By: Dr. Jim Anderson

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:38:24 +0000

Lou: you missed my point here (but don’t feel bad, it’s kinda subtle). Yes, of course, the focus should be on the entire presentation. However, with that being said, how do the individual slides look? Too few of us are artists and so often our individual slides take away from the overall message of the presentation. We all need to become better artists. The question that I was trying to answer was “how do we do that”.

By: Dr. Jim Anderson

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:35:49 +0000

Kim: good point. I love what the folks over at slide:ology do. My only struggle is that the slides that they produce look so good that it’s kinda hard to use them in internal planning meetings!

By: Dr. Jim Anderson

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:31:01 +0000

Ed: you’ve hit the nail on the head. Where I see PowerPoint being used (incorrectly?) is for weekly status reports. It sure seems like we need a different way of communicating information – one that would allow the use of images but would also make it easy to embed additional detailed information. Hmm, looks like a product opportunity for someone!

By: Lou

Lou — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:30:56 +0000

Jim,

I have to disagree with your approach. The focus should be on the presentation as a whole, not the PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint is but a tool, not the presentation. When designing PowerPoint slides make sure they do not become the presentation–your idea is the presentation. Otherwise, why do I need to listen to you or your presentation when all I have to do is read your PowerPoint slides?

By: Kim

Kim — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:31:30 +0000

You might also want to look at what Nancy Duarte is doing (her team created the slides for Al Gore). She blogs at http://blog.duarte.com/.

By: Ed Cawthorne

Ed Cawthorne — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:15:58 +0000

The difficulty I have with powerpoint is the eventual use of the slides.

If the slides are soley to be used as a framework for a presentation, (what powerpoint was designed to do in the first place) then I love nice simple slides with lots of pictures and keywords – just as Garr discusses on Presentation Zen.

However, Powerpoint is increasingly used as a format to distribute information in its own right – without the presenter providing the accompanying narrative of those slides.

In this case – pictures and few keywords are not enough for the viewer to get an understanding of the important points the presentation was trying to convey. As a result, very wordy slides are the norm so they can be understood by themselves.

Why are powerpoint slides used as an way of distributing information? – well I think it is much easier to read short chunks of information spread across different slides than a couple of pages of A4 full of text.

Ultimately Product Managers need to spend more time on creating compelling material that can used standalone. PodCasts and Videos are probably a good way to communicate with those with a short attention span – but of course, that is yet more work for the beleagured product manager!