The side track trap

Now that I am teaching my kids how to code with the help of online courses I can see where instructors take the wrong turn. By now, I mastered the material myself, and can put myself in the position of someone who is trying to understand it (I was there myself a year ago).

One mistake is a side track trap. You introduce a completely new concept, but before explaining roughly what it is about, you introduce a few exceptions or unusual use cases where you could also apply this new concept, that the presenter has not fully introduced yet).

From a logic flow perspective, this could look great: we cover all the use cases together. From a teaching perspective, this is confusing. A reference video (‘How did that work again exactly?”), is different from a 101 introduction video.

I am not sure the instructor does this intentionally. Maybe videos get edited later and she needed to find a place to insert this specific concept, “plop”, this seems like the right spot.

Notice the difference between detail and side track. If you need to go into the details to explain something, a newbie can probably follow along as long as you stick to the one specific use case of pieces of information that reinforce each other. Leaving things at a high level (i.e., no details) but lots of different tangents can still be very confusing for the newbie.

This relates to the blog post earlier this week, where I discussed answering questions with the risk of tripping up your story line.

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Best COVID-19 stats?

There seem to be almost more COVID-19 data charts than cases around the world at the moment. Cases or deaths, log or linear, increase or cumulative. The one I think is most useful is deaths per million on a log scale. It is impossible to get an accurate picture of cases, and you need to adjust for population sizes. This graph shows the current picture.

To see how badly countries have been hit, the absolute deaths per million inhabitants

To see the current state, the new daily deaths, per million inhabitants:

All data provided by Our World in Data

Credibility

YCombinator VC Paul Graham argues that the current pandemic has exposed politicians that talk confidently about things they do not understand: see the post her about credibility in corona times.

• He is right

• Most of these politicians probably did not knowingly lie, I assume they believed they understood things, that’s probably a key asset of being a politician

When it comes to pitching to investors, credibility is crucial, and you can only loose it once. Investors will have to work with you for a long time, they don’t have time to check everything you do, so as soon as one incident gets exposed where it appeared that they cannot trust you, that’s it.

So you get a question you do not know the answer to:

• If it is factual, give the answer after you consulted with someone who knows, maybe after a short delay

• If you truly don’t know, say so, with an approach how you mitigate the uncertainty.

Bluffing an answer is not the right thing to do here.

So as a startup CEO, you can still be highly confident that your idea is going to work, and keep credibility while admitting that you do not know everything, and that you might actually be wrong.

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Bullet points in the age of video calls

Most video calls at the moment are between small audiences that know each other, discussing internal issues of a company (i.e., not the global launch of the next iPhone).

Maybe a bullet point slide can work in these situations (yes, you hear this from someone who considers himself a presentation expert).

• They are quick to put together, especially now that your brilliant PowerPoint guru is not sitting next to you

• They make it easy to refer to an element in the chart when you cannot point at it. (Try doing this in a sophisticated management consulting framework)

• They fit in the current sober culture, where showing this really flashy presentation might leave people wondering whether all that effort and time could have been spent better elsewhere

But in a video call with insiders you can adjust your presentation style:

• Give everyone a few seconds to read through the text for themselves. (I.e. don’t read them out, the audience can read much faster than you can speak)

• Then verbally highlight what’s important (“As you see in point 2, we postponed the launch to September, and in point 5, I added Harry to the team”), then open up for discussion.

• Pay attention how you write the bullet points: long verbose points full of fluff wont’ work, super short summaries are too vague 

• Make those bullet points look decent: spread out over the page, readable font size, equally spaced out

Note the audience setting here, you won’t win that $10m RFP with a bunch of quickly slapped together bullet points. The audience does not know you, does not know the story, and here, showing that you made a lot of effort in itself will give you points, even on a video call.

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We will get to that on page 35...

Working from home means that I cannot help to overhear fragments of startups pitching to a VC (my wife is a partner in a healthcare venture capital fund).

You are in a Zoom call, going through a deck with a few people from the VC, and the senior management team of the company on the line. One of the impatient investors throws in a question on a crackling audio connection. Answer it, or (tell her to) wait for page 35?

If you were presenting to a huge crowd (webinar, live audience), then the answer is clear, tell them to wait for page 35, or even ask to leave all questions to the end.

The “intimate” Zoom call is similar to a conference room setting though that opens the door to more interaction that throws you of your planned story script. There is no general rule, but here is how I would handle the interruption.

• Always give some sort of very brief answer: ‘The short answer is “yes”, it has something to do with “this and that”, we will discuss it in more detail on page 35. This takes you as much time and disruption as saying: “sorry, page 35 will show up in 20 minutes”

• Then calibrate based on the sort if question. If it is a super naive question (junior analyst, VC who does not really understand the substance), maybe insist on continuing your story line so everything falls into place nicely. If it is a razor sharp question by someone who is really informed, pinpoints the exact weak point in your story, and/or addresses a big elephant in the room, you could assume that people have done their homework and know what they are talking about. Sticking to your script might not give you points here.

• If it is a big interruption of your original flow, have a way to continue the story in a slightly different order, bringing everything back together for the other people in the room

• If you get tripped up a lot by questions, maybe this is a sign that your story flow might not fit that of your audience. The 101 sequential story is great for explaining things to the uninitiated, but will not work for impatient experts in the field.

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Alpha testing: SlideMagic PowerPoint plugin

If you want, you can try out the SlideMagic plugin for PowerPoint. When installed, it opens a task pane on the rights side of your PowerPoint screen, you can log into SlideMagic, search for templates, which when downloaded appear in a new PowerPoint presentation. With a copy-paste or drag, you can add them to your presentation.

I am currently in the process of getting SlideMagic Ltd. approved as a Microsoft Partner to add it to the official Office app store. Microsoft is experiencing some capacity issues at the moment as the working-from-home-world is overloading its cloud servers.

To beta test the add-in in the mean time, you can do the following. This is a slightly advanced process, sorry.

• Download the slidemagic.xml file here

• On Mac follow these instructions (original on the Microsoft site). Copy the .xml file in this folder: /Users/<username>/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Documents/wef (if you cannot see the Library folder in your Finder, select the ‘go’ dropdown in the Finder, then press the OPTION key and it should appear. Restart PowerPoint and a new icon “Start SlideMagic” should appear.

• On Windows, the process looks a bit more tricky: see here.

• The easiest is actually the online version of Office (instructions). Open PowerPoint in your browser, select Insert, select Add-ins, click manage my Add-ins, then upload my Add-in to upload the slidemagic.xml file.

This is all still work in progress.

Now is the time to experiment

Everything gets thrown around at the moment. Everything is all of a sudden allowed. Laundry, pets, and kids in the background of video calls., no problem. Why not take the opportunity to change the way you present as well?

Sorry, I did not have a lot of time to prepare that 100-pager, but these 10 pages capture exactly what we should discuss today

And while you are at it, why not use SlideMagic as an alternative to PowerPoint now that everything is risk free? Hey, maybe some of the new habits will stick.

PowePoint plug-in mechanism works

A follow up on yesterday’s post: the basic mechanism of the PowerPoint plug in works. I can side load the app in a task panel, let users log in, you can search for templates, to add a slide to your presentation I can only open it as a new presentation with 1 slide at the moment, you have to copy the slide across to your own file.

It is fascinating to see all the stages this slide goes through (automated mostly):

• I design the slide in the SlideMagic app

• Upload them to the template server

• The server converts them to PowerPoint and create screenshots

• The server updates the tags

• PowerPoint connects to the server and loads the side panel

• User logs in, and searches

• PowerPoint loads the PPTX file from the SlideMagic server

As soon as you download the SlideMagic slides into PowerPoint you instantly see the strength of SlideMagic when it comes to adjusting templates. Try adding a row to the SWOT diagram, it is hard.

I am not expecting to unseat PowerPoint’s install base any time soon, and the optimal situation would be where both applications can work together nicely. A robust plug in can help users who are hesitant to make the full switch to SlideMagic (and included in these users are people that work for companies that have very tough security policies to run software from new vendors on corporate machines.)

The next step is to make the plugin robust and get it distributed properly in the Office app store. Work in progress

Working on a PowerPoint plug in

I am continuing to experiment with how people access the slides of SlideMagic. Currently I am building a side panel plug in for PowerPoint, where subscribers can log in and paste slides directly into a PowerPoint presentation.

Now that I have mastered both front end and back end development, the search mechanism and user interface is easy to create. The tricky bit will be the final step, when it comes to adding a downloaded slide into an existing presentation. Microsoft does not give PowerPoint a high priority when it comes to the Office Javascript API. Let’s see how it goes.

Happy with the search engine

Over the past few days I have ironed out a lot of small issues with the template search engine. Most of them were behind the scenes, how I can classify, tag, and group slides in a world of duplicates, typos, plurals, and related keywords. I think things are really starting to work now. Now it is just a matter of continuing to add templates that are useful (i.e., not diluting search results for the sake of template volume). I am aiming for a Google-type improvement: the front page won’t change much, the usefulness of the search results will get better and better over time.

PS. That Unsplash image on the cover is really nice, I quickly added a template based on it on the template store, you can find it here.

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Another Corona metric?

The current flood of data about Corona cases and fatalities shows once more how graphs and other slides are not very effective in changing behaviour: everyone is happily going outside infecting each other. Too much information, too abstract (20% exponential growth, so what?), and looking backwards rather than into the future.

I think governments should publish a daily updated forecast number for the number of cumulative fatalities 4-8 weeks from now, and adjust that number based on daily developments. To make it more tangible, you could pro-rata that number down to the 50 to 150 circle of friends and family most people have. One simple, tangible number that gets updated everyday at 18:00 based on how we are doing as a group together.

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Further search improvements

We got the house settled into some routine now which means I can focus my attention on SlideMagic again. Following up on a blog post of 2 days ago, I made more improvements to the slide search algorithm that produces related slides:

• It identifies variants of the same design (more or fewer columns or rows for example

• A similar message or concept that they are trying to convey

• Slides that are different but have the same visual structure as the one you initially picked

I removed the category labels in the search results (that were useful for me, but not really for a user). Instead, I am going for a single list of slides sorted by relevance without revealing what is behind that relevance. And that algorithm will get better and more accurate over time.

Size-based suggestions

A key step in my slide design process is figuring out what sort of grid I need: 3 x 1, 1 x 5, 4 x 4? Almost every slide in a business presentation is some sort of table in disguise. Today I started adding a “more x by y” search suggestions on the web-based template browser of SlideMagic. I will add more automation to slide classification in the near future. One obvious extension is the same slide but then with 1 more column, etc.

How to design management dashboards

The number of app installs of SlideMagic 2.0 is still small, but the graph has a similar shape as the exponential graphs we all have gotten used to over the past weeks.

Modern analytics tools allow you to track literally everything under the sun in your app and/or web site. Instant information overload supported by colourful graphs that look good, but don’t say much. This overload of data is similar to the ones I would encounter as a consultant at McKinsey. And now, 15+ years later, I find myself following a similar approach to making sense of it for my own app.

Most case examples about analytics are built for established apps and web sites with huge customer flows you can micro analyse whether the check out button should br green or red. SlideMagic is not there yet.

• I find myself going through a certain cycle. It starts with a basic question, “how many people did actually install the app”, which results in a daily manual routine to find the latest number, which then gets translated into a proper query in an analytics app. I check whether my analytics tool is consistent with the numbers I can dig out of my own server. Slowly, slowly, I get a sense of how the app behaves with a consistent set of data that I can recognise.

• Slowly, slowly, I start adding more questions to the picture, and make sure that I keep a picture of how they relate.

• Each factor has a specific visualisation: some are lines, some are bars, some uniques, some totals, some cumulative, you need to play around with it.

The key factor I need to work on now is a very specific one. Of the users that know of SlideMagic, installed it, tried it a first time, then tried it out seriously (now we are down to small numbers), of those, can I get a handful of users that really, really start using it. If we get that final step to work, I am confident that the previous steps in the funnel will work itself out.

Work in progress.

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Getting to the point

Everyone is working remotely The meeting is on an improvised video call. Less time to prepare the slide deck. People watching slides on small screens. There is less room for “escape behaviour”, request another sensitivity analysis, rephrase slide 25 to get back to it later.

The current situation might be a turning point in corporate communication. PowerPoint still holds the fact packs and the result of our analysis, built up over months, updated with the latest information. Then, there is the (virtual) meeting tomorrow where you have 5 minutes to make a point. “OK, what it all boils down to is this…”

And that’s where SlideMagic comes in: fast and simple.

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Home school your kids coding

Schools are shuttered here in Israel, I took the opportunity to create a morning routine where I teach my kids to code. They like it so far. Coding is actually hard to learn in a 30-person class room setting, and our Waldorf-style school does not even offer it as an option. This school break might actually turn out to be very productive.

I chose Javascript: you can use it both in the browser and on servers, and code experiments in a browser give instant visual feedback of your efforts. I am using this course (the beginner one from the same instructor I used to dust off my 1992 degree). No affiliate link links or kick backs for me here, prices for Udemy courses vary wildly depending on different times you check them out (some sort of A/B testing I think).

Photo by Feliphe Schiarolli on Unsplash

Stock photos and the virus

We are getting used to the photos of hospital entrances, images of empty trains, empty shelves. But they are still a lot better than the photo model wearing a mask with impeccable make-up, no sign of sweat, ready to cure the next patient.

Instant reaction to a draft pitch deck

The other day I was eye balling a pitch deck and here I am jotting down my reactions as I go page by page:

• Logo and colour on the front page looks nice, a grammatical error and an over used buzz word in the slogan

• Vision statement instead of describing what the app is all about. Vision statement contains overused buzzwords, and lists actually multiple possible consumer hooks, each could be a business in its own right, some are features, some are business models

• App screen shot looks nice, but highlighted features do not match the vision of the previous page

• Lots of market data, but in this industry, no one will ever doubt that the market is small, the question is how to take on the existing giants and way of doing things

• Product description (matches the screen shot, not the vision). Trying to relate this product to products I know (both traditional ones, and other innovators I am aware of). Maybe this product is new and does not merit a direct comparison, but still I am trying to understand what it actually does before getting into the positioning. Existing product comparison are good for the purpose of educating.

• Very dense internal consulting chart that shows how the team came up with the value proposition

• Competitive analysis is a detailed spreadsheet, competitor columns need re-ordering, feature rows need re-ordering and grouping

• A key strategic partner pops up at the end of the slide deck as a very important part of the brand

This is not a critique of a final, polished investor pitch, this document was just version 0.1 of an interested customer of SlideMagic, asking me what templates to use. SlideMagic can instantly upgrade the looks of these slides, some of the consulting frameworks are on board as a template already. But designing the deck is too early.

It looks like the project started as an original product idea with a very distinctive feature. Now the team is working to build the right consumer positioning out of it and is mid-way. Some recommendations:

• Keep the investor positioning and the consumer positioning separate. For investors, be very clear how your product/technology fits, relates, is different from other players in the market. The consumer pitch can sound different. You need to have a consumer pitch, since the investor wants to be confident that you know how to market, but that is a different check box you need to tick.

• Separate the charts from you internal consulting project from the pitch deck, they are totally different. Not only in graphical style, but also in content. Working documents show doubts, trade offs, analysis, pitch charts have a very clear and confident message

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15+ years of working from home...

I have been working from my home office since 2002, and for me, the experience has been great. Well, it fits my personality (introvert who does not crave water cooler chats), and the sort of work I like to do (create, design things).

The coming weeks will give an opportunity to find out what sort of work can be done from home, and to what type of people it will appeal. There will always be people that need constant supervision and checking to stay “focused”. There will always be managers who just love to have all subordinates around ready to be called in at any time it suits her agenda. There will always be cultures that thrive on corridor chats to coordinate things.

For other situations, this might be an opportunity.

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"Only three per customer!"

This slogan creates a sense of scarcity and it works. People who would otherwise buy 1, or even one, take 3, just to be sure. Google used it to get users to sign up for Google Wave RIP.

The same is happening now with people stocking up with supplies. They see a half empty shelf, better make sure not to be left out, and the shelf empties out completely soon after.

When thinking about how to use scarcity in your presentations, consider the long-term implications to your brand as well. User might feel duped when they find out that you opened the flood gates 3 weeks after that special offer.

In the case of SlideMagic, the early restricted signups were required since things were still buggy. Today I removed the required to sign up for an account before downloading the app as a sign of confidence in the platform.

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