提交给高管。

management (130)

雅虎老板部分地由内部雅虎队推动！搜索技术命名Vespa。我们遇到了一堆挑战，我决定说服我的团队我们应该迁移到SOLR。我的经理要求我presentation for our next team meeting. The meeting came, I started to present, and within two slides things fell apart.

“不，不，这不是把它放在一起的方式。这就像一个学术介绍。你必须首先从结论开始，“当他突然终止我的演讲时，我的经理悲伤地感到遗憾地感到遗憾地感到遗憾。暂停刷我的甲板的碎片，他提供了一些最后的智慧，“不要在图表中使用曲线。那些nevermake sense.”

我花了几年时间来收集这个经历的教训，但是当我与刚刚开始向高管展示的人一起工作时经常想到。给予高级领导的演讲是一点黑暗的艺术：掌握需要一段时间，大多数人做得很好，不能完全阐明它们是如何做到的。更糟糕的是，许多人都非常依赖抵抗复制的优势：Charisma，快速机智，深度主题专业知识或多年的经验。

那说，很少有人看着我炸毁我的雅虎！演示会打赌我曾经弄清楚这一点，所以你应该知道这是一种可读的技巧。沿着我拿起一些我希望的提示，帮助您为下次演示做准备：

  • Communication is company specific.每家公司都有不同的沟通方式和模式。成功的演示者可能无法告诉你他们的成功所做的事情，但如果你看着它们并记笔记，你将识别一些一致的模式。每次观看带领领导的人，都会研究他们的方法。
  • Start with the conclusion.Particularly in written communication, folks skim until they get bored, and then stop reading. Accommodate this behavior by starting with what’s important, don’t build towards it gradually.
  • Frame why the topic matters。通常，您将介绍您对您非常熟悉的区域，并且对您的工作可能非常明显。对于那些不经常考虑该地区的人来说，这将不那么明显。首先解释您对公司的工作问题。
  • 每个人都喜欢叙述。Another aspect of framing the topic is providing a narrative of where things are, how you got here, and where you’re going now. This should be a sentence or two along the lines of, “Last year we had trouble closing several important customers due to concerns about our scalability. We identified our databases as our constraints to scaling, and since then our focus has been moving to a new sharding model that enables horizontal scaling, which is going well, and we expect to finish in Q3.”
  • 准备绕道。许多论坛将允许您根据计划领导您的演示，但在提交高级领导时，这是一个不可靠的预测。相反，您需要准备好自己引导整个呈现，同时讨论讨论旨在延展出意外问题的线程。
  • Answer directly。高级领导者往往是间接地对广域领域负责，并经常刺破调试问题的地区。他们的经验“调试穿孔”调整他们的雷达以获得避免答案，您不想成为该屏幕上的昙花一现。而不是隐藏问题，使用它们作为解释您解决计划计划的机会。
  • Deep in the data.You should be deep enough in your data that you can use it to answer unexpected questions. This means spending time exploring the data, and the most common way to do that is to run a thorough目标设置锻炼。
  • Derive actions from principles.其中一个目标是提供您如何查看主题的心理模型，允许人们熟悉如何做出决策。显示您的“数据”是其中的一部分，另一个方面是定义您正在使用的指导原理来接近决策。
  • Discuss the details。Some executives test presenters by diving into the details, trying to uncover an area the presenter is uncomfortable speaking on. You should be familiar with the details, e.g. project statuses, but I think it’s usually best to reframe the discussion when you get too far into the details. Try to pop up to either the data or the principles, which tend to be more useful conversations.
  • 准备很多;练习一点。If you’re presenting to your entire company, practicing your presentation is time well spent. Leadership presentations tend to quickly detour, so practice isn’t quite as useful. Practice until you’re comfortable, but prefer to prepare instead; getting deeper into the data, details and principles. As a corollary, if you’re knowledgeable in the area you’re responsible for, and have spent time getting comfortable with the format, over time you’ll find that you won’t need to prepare much for these specifically. Rather, whether you’re able to present effectively without much preparation will become a signal for whether you’re keeping up with your span of responsibility.
  • Make a clear ask.If you don’t go into a meeting with leadership with a clear goal, your meeting will either go nowhere or go poorly. Start the meeting by explicitly framing your goal!

That’s a lot to remember, so I’ve synthesized these ideas into a loose template. There absolutely is not a single right way to present to senior leaders, but hopefully the template is a useful starting point.

My general approach to presenting to senior leaders is:

  1. Tie topic to business value。One or two sentences to answer, “Why should anyone care?”
  2. Establish historical narrative。Two to four sentences to help folks understand how things are going, how we got here, and what the next planned step is.
  3. Explicit ask。你从观众寻找什么？一两个句子。
  4. Data-driven diagnosis。沿着一行strategy’s diagnosis phase, explain the current constraints and context, primarily through data. Try to provide enough raw data to allow folks to follow your analysis. If you only provide analysis, then you’re asking folks to take you on trust, which can come across as evasive. This should be a few paragraphs, up to a page.
  5. 决策原则。Explain the principles you’re applying against the diagnosis, articulating the mental model you are using to make decisions.
  6. What’s next and when it’ll be done。Apply your principles to the diagnosis to generate the next steps. It should be clear to folks reading along how your actions derive from your principles and the data. If it’s not, then either rework your principles or your actions!
  7. Return to explicit ask。The final step is to return to your explicit ask and ensure you get the information or guidance you need.

I’ve had a lot of luck with this format in general, and think you’ll find it pretty useful as a starting point. That said, the first rule remains true: communication is company specific. If things don’t quite work for this format in your company, then watch how other folks present. Given a few examples, you’ll be able to reverse engineer the discussions that go well into a workable template.