No One Is Listening

Does your company have a “sprint review”? Does it take an hour or more? Do people enjoying participating, and more important, are they engaged?

In the “old days”, you might have found people working while in attendance, or even on their phones while keeping one ear open. With so many folks remote now, it can be harder to tell what’s really going on, but I’d bet that in many cases, people are on mute, maybe even with video off (unless they’re presenting) and are either getting on with work, or checking the weather.

So why bother?

I’ve been around long enough to see these sorts of group status reports in many organizations, and they’ve been almost universally dreadful. At one company, an entire day was allotted for this mind-numbing activity, and this was in 2014, not the 1950s. No one paid attention in this monthly slog, including top tech execs, for whom these sessions were nominally being held.

One of the first rules of public speaking is to realize that, by default, no one really wants to listen to you. There’s an “activation hurdle” that you have to cross, whether you’re a comedian, politician, or business leader. Even seasoned comedians will get heckled if their latest material isn’t up to snuff - you have to keep the laughs coming or the room will turn against you. At work, you might not get tomatoes thrown your way in a sprint review, but you can bet that unless your presentations are focused and fluid, people will slowly open the laptop lid and tune out.

Focus

Keep things short. Shorter than you’d believe is possible. You can deliver an update in under a minute, maybe even less than 30 seconds. Sound crazy? Try it. People will be astonished how clear and organized your content was since it was all meat. No introduction, no prelude, no “here’s what we’re going to talk about”, and so on.

Time yourself talking for a minute. It’s a long time.

Fluidity

Keep things moving. Learn how to speak clearly, at a reasonable pace, and keep a few notes in front of you so you don’t lose your place. Pretend you’re doing the evening news - you need to project that level of “authority” or your audience’s interest will wane.

Don’t have multiple presenters. If you’re the PM or tech lead for your group, do the whole thing. Handing things off to someone else adds clumsy time while screen-sharing is changed or their mic doesn’t work. Their vocal cadence will be different from yours, which is jarring to the audience. Just do the whole 1-minute update yourself. If you want to share the “fun”, next time let someone else do the whole thing, but keep it to one person per presentation.

Relevant Content Only

Don’t discuss Jira, Jira stories, story points, burndown or similar charts, estimates, wrong estimates, unfinished stories that will be carried over, what order things are in the backlog, what people have holidays coming up because they work in a different country, or any similiar “team internals”. No one cares, and most of those things don’t mean anything anyway.

Instead, just tell people what is now done that wasn’t done before, and do it in as few words as possible: “The history API now uses standard JSON instead of the legacy format, and we’ve already seen a 70% uptick in successful requests from customers.” Done.

Gratitude

DO thank your other team members. Always give credit where due, especially since they don’t get to be the “face” of the team.

No Teleprompter

Don’t read off a prepared script, narrate your slides verbatim or present things as if you’re reading a hospital chart. Keep your head up and address the audience (or camera), not the podium or your desk. If technical snafus happen, just address it with a bit of humor (“This is what happens during live demos.”) and move on. Don’t try and fix it live, unless you’re sure you can do so, and can walk people through the fix as you’re doing it.

This is CRITICAL for people that have customer-facing roles, or for higher-level execs who have to address large portions of the company often. You HAVE TO be able to speak off the cuff; listening to someone dictate a pre-written speech is akin to attending a 5th grader’s animal report session. If you cannot do this, look for a mentor, public speaking coach, improv class or something similar.

Done Means Done

Many people have trouble with silence - don’t let this be you. When you’re done speaking, say “… that’s all for us, thanks a lot everyone.”, and just stop talking. Don’t backpedal or mumble on just because no one else has said anything. Wait for the host to pick things up, switch to the next presenter quickly and concisely. If that’s the end of the show, all it takes is “Thanks everyone for attending, we’ll see you next time.”, and then click the end meeting button.

Jokes Help

If you can be funny without disrupting things, do so. As an M.C., I once started a 1000-person company event by asking if we could “Just go around real quick and do some intros.” It was funny enough to get things started, and helps everyone know that you’re not there to bore them.

Keep things short, keep it moving, and have fun!

Photo by Leilani Angel on Unsplash