The Fine Art of Demoing: So What?
The “So what?“ principle was something that completely changed the way I approach my presentations. It was one of those little “obvious“ things that everyone knows about, but rarely uses…
Here’s the premise. It’s easy to get carried away when you are presenting something you are passionate about. Things that you think are really important may make little to no sense at all for your particular audience. Our minds are structured in a way that prefers talking about what we are passionate about instead of what the people we are talking to actually want to hear…
Now that I think about it… The “So what?“ principle has much larger implications than just presentations or demos.
Why should you use the “So what?”
Remember the 8 seconds rule? Yep. That again. I’d argue the number drops even further when you are talking about something your audience doesn’t really care about.
I’ll give you an example.
Recently I’ve been mostly demoing a Headless Content Management System (CMS). For those of you who have no idea what that is - it’s the software that holds all information about a particular piece of software. More often than not - Websites. It would be mind-boggling to keep track of everything in code, so we do it in a CMS.
Such systems offer a lot of tools to support your content, like rich text editing experience, permissions systems, coding playgrounds, etc…
When I present the CMS, it’s really easy to get carried away with the technical details like the coding tools. Especially given my developing background. And sometimes that is OK. But the audience has to be the right one. More often than not I am presenting to non-technical people and upper management. You can guess how interested they are in coding…
It’s far better to present what the audience is looking for. If you need to push something on top of that - intertwine it in the main narrative. And again… Ask yourself. So what?
How to use the “So what?“
It’s actually much easier than you’d think. Want to add something to your presentation? Alright. Picture yourself presenting that particular piece of information and ask yourself. So what? What does that do for my audience? Why should they care about that? Does it bring anything of value? If the answer is No, then just skip it.
Easy as that…
What does the “So what?“ give you?
By following that simple principle you will get a presentation that is tailored to your audience's interests and competencies. You will get a structured and engaging narrative that will help you keep your listeners’ attention.
Combining the “So what?“ principle with all of the other approaches we talked and will talk about has helped me raise the quality of my presentations by orders of magnitude.
So what? How is that important to you? I firmly believe that even if you ignore all of the other topics in The Art of demoing series, by just using the “So what?” principle you will bring your presentation game to a whole new level.