An important component of becoming an effective Product Manager is strengthening your ability to communicate your ideas to executives and senior-level people. It’s not uncommon for PMs to deliver a presentation, in some shape or form, to senior staff.
Examples:
- Quarterly product roadmap review
- Presentation at a business strategy offsite
- Review of high-visibility features, or a/b test results
While presenting to executives can increase visibility of your team’s accomplishments and ambitious future plans, there’s always a chance you’ll get grilled.
Many executives are skilled at asking tough questions to expose weak arguments. Sometimes your perspective and/or recommendations will simply be at odds with a highly-paid person in the room.
In order to be seen as a true product authority and effectively present your ideas to get the outcome you want, preparation is key. Below are a few principles to follow when preparing an executive-level product update.
Principle #1: Be purposeful.
Imagine you’ve spent the past week preparing for your presentation. You’ve gathered the exec team and started going through your slides. After a few minutes the COO interrupts to ask, point-blank, “What is the problem you’re trying to solve here?”. She just short-circuited your entire presentation!
Consider spending a moment at the start of your presentation to briefly cover your agenda BEFORE getting into the meat of your delivery. It should be clear who you are, why you’re in the room, and what you’re going to discuss. What is the outcome you need to move forward?
Principle #2: Be aligned with your boss’s priorities.
You should understand your boss’s priorities in the abstract (e.g. “growth”, “retention”), as well as specifically for your team, or slice of the product.
For example, if your boss has asked you to build tools to help Marketing acquire new users via a paid referral program, don’t tell the CEO that you believe organic growth should come first.
Your presentation should be consistent with your boss’s directive and strategy, unless otherwise cleared in advance.
Principle #3: Keep it high-level, problem-solution oriented.
Let’s pretend that the goal of your presentation is to get buy-in for your proposed product next-steps from company leadership, or stakeholders. A decision is needed.
Your presentation will provide value if it takes all of your nuanced learnings about customer preferences, product friction, competitors, etc., and boils them down into key points. Think about what actually matters to customers. Is there a story you can tell, or data you can surface, to make that clear?
Executives typically do not need to grasp every nuance, and an exec update is usually not the appropriate time to deliver such detail. What’s important is that your audience understands the problem (decision to be made), the short list of solutions (costs), and what you, the product expert, recommend (strategy, tactics).
Listeners should gain an understanding of the priorities and tradeoffs involved in solving the problem. Impact on KPIs, or other outstanding stakeholder requests, and development time/cost (t-shirt size works well) are examples of tradeoff discussions you might have.
At the end of the day, you must provide a crisp, clear recommendation for what to do next that resonates with the overall company strategy/vision.
Principle #4: Always bring data to the party.
It’s easy for discussions on product strategy to devolve into lofty theorizing, or, worse, full-blown arguments.
To guard against this, always bring data to the party to support your recommendations, but also anticipate and gather data relevant to opposing viewpoints. Being empirical will help keep the discussion grounded in reality.
If you’re making assumptions about customer behavior, then clearly state them, and explain why they’re valid.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce PM with the goal of improving customer retention, maybe your presentation if to gain buy-in for rolling out a shopping cart feature to all users. You might present a/b test data from a small user cohort showing that, even though you see a short term drop in order conversion, your test cohort has significantly greater LTV, or lifetime value. Your assumption is that this cohort is largely representative of your user base’s behavior.
Why is your assumption valid? Be prepared to defend it with data. If push comes to shove, expanding an a/b test to a larger population is not a bad outcome.
For bonus points, I recommend having 2-3 variations of your assumptions, each with different values. For example, in the above shopping cart example you might show three models, each with an increasingly worse order conversion rate, and the subsequent impact on revenue. Or you might play with the LTV assumptions. There are many possibilities, so think about the most important metrics, and keep these models in the appendix of your presentation so they’re available to the skeptics in the room.
By the way, qualitative feedback, such as from customer interviews, can also serve as empirical data. In my experience, however, the crux of your argument should utilize business/product data and KPIs. More so than driving business decisions, user feedback will help you sharpen your own product intuition.
Principle #5: Practice and polish.
Think about what you really want to convey, in terms of customer insights, the impact on your strategy (and hence, roadmap), and tradeoffs/costs.
Does your presentation articulate those points?
What would someone only reading your slides take away?
Show/present your arguments to a co-worker, ask for feedback, then iterate. Practice until you can’t get it wrong!
Strategies, Tools and Tips for Product Managers 