That time I said yes

How I prepped for speaking at ProductCon London

I did a super scary thing 😱

I spoke for 20 mins in front of 5,000 people at the Barbican for ProductCon London. It was huge, for a number of reasons:

📌 Replay link here.

1. ProductCon is the biggest industry conference for Product Managers. It only takes place once a year in SF, NYC & London. (Hopefully more cities soon, I hear ya APAC!)

2. I had never done a keynote to an audience of this size before (2k in-person, 3k online).

3. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, but I was the opening speaker for the day and the pressure was real. 😰 (Definitely recommend keeping the ginger shots till after!)

4. A little known fact, I was very jet lagged 🥱 on Tuesday having just gotten back from Japan 🎏 on Sunday.

This could have happened 🫠

Prep

Broadly I broke it down to 3 parts with rough time allocation: Content (50%), slides (30%), delivery (20%).

I had 1 month from committing to the talk, to delivering it at the event. In retrospect, I wish I had more time, especially given I took the last 2 weeks off traveling in Japan. Content was the most time consuming. If you know your stuff well, coming up with the talking points ☝️ shouldn’t take too long and it didn’t for me. However I spent a ton of time on the narrative development (ie. how to storytell to make the materials relatable; which examples to use) & editing (ie. what to keep/ cut ✂️).

My talk was ‘Go Global 🌏 with Your Product’. When Product School first approached me, I quickly said yes but took some time to zero in on a worthy subject. (It was actually my manager Charlie Richey’s idea 💡, so thank you Charlie!) International expansion of B2B XaaS companies is something close to my heart 💛 and an area I’ve dedicated the last 2.5 years to. In fact, there was so much to cover I could go on for days. The challenge here was prioritisation.

Content

I started by putting together a ☠️ skeletal agenda/ talking points with target time allocation in a table format.

The skeleton agenda/ plan

My go-to is a 3-point takeaway approach. I began with more than 3, whittled the list down and worked backwards 🔙 to contextualise with examples. With these, I also casted the net wide first before narrowing down my selection. All these happened in a doc, not slides.

Examples ideation, most didn’t end up making the cut. 🔪

I then developed a script and started running time checks, using that as the feedback loop 🔄 for editing. Only after that did I start putting slides together.

Slides

📌 Deck link here.

I’ll just say upfront that I suck at design 🎨. I am someone who uses off-the-shelf templates, not out of laziness but because I’m incapable 🫠. To avoid mishaps I tend to keep my slides minimalistic, stick to 2 typefaces and 3 colours max.

I chose not to use the Twilio brand template because I see the talk as my own IP and not Twilio’s 😎. Yes, most of the examples I used were from Twilio but that was due to recency and relevance more than anything else. I could have easily pulled examples from my 🏦 banking days too, but then I would have to spend even more time on context setting, which was not ideal.

I tend to limit my slides-to-minutes ratio at 1-1.25:1. ie. 20-24 slides for a 20-min talk. No science behind it, just a personal preference. Probably something to dig into. This time I landed at 20 slides for 20 mins (which included the front and back/ thank you’s covers). I opted not to have an agenda or section slides, due to the format. In a 👩🏻‍🏫 lecture/ course setting I would.

As a visual person 👀, I believe ‘a picture says a thousand words’ and in the use of humour 😛 hence the emojis, gifs & memes. Finding the right ones took time, but it’s a worthwhile investment in my opinion when they resonate with the audience. Believe me, I debated with myself fiercely 🫠 about which of these gifs best illustrated ‘team sport’, before settling on Argentina’s 2022 ⚽️ World Cup win. Considerations included whether it was an apt analogy; its relevance to the audience; where it landed between funny vs offensive (Because… you know, Ronaldo has a huge fan base too 🙃 and I was speaking in a European city. Political correctness can be tiresome. 🥵)

Disqualified due to 🎾 tennis being a two-person only sport and not close enough an analogy to a true cross company effort.

Disqualified due to it being too niche and didn’t invoke enough emotions for me.

Disqualified due to it not showing enough of the whole team’s effort/ involvement.

Delivery

My primary concerns with delivery was pacing 👟 & a smooth flow. To ensure I stayed within the time limit but avoid rushing & hiccups, I recorded myself and played back a few times to 1) time/ speed check 🚅; 2) iron out parts where I might stumble. I fine tuned by experimenting with various tones and energy.

To be honest, I didn’t think about my movements (pacing on stage and my hand gestures) until the day before at the dry run. I saw the stage 🧑🏼‍🎤 for the first time, understood how it was going to be set up (where the lights will be casted, the prompt monitors will be placed; if the lights would be bright enough to blackout the audience etc.) I opted for an authentic, natural, relaxed way 🧘🏻‍♀️ instead of being too rehearsed.

I am someone who needs to practice some to familiarise, but not rehearse to the point that leaves no room for impromptu changes. All in all, I only rehearsed a couple of times in full and a few more in sections, before walking onto that stage. I did not memorise my talk and relied completely on the prompt monitors 🖥️.

Dry Run 🏃‍♀️

This happened at 3:30pm the day before, ie. T-18 hours. Product School took us on a tour of the venue so we knew where to pick up our passes, locate the speaker lounge, lunch and restrooms. No one had time to do a full rehearsal. We all mic’d up, did sound check and flipped over our slides to make sure we were happy with it all.

While it was swift, I found it incredibly helpful 🌟 in de-risking any shock factor and unpleasant accidents.

• My fellow speaker Yi-Wei Ang picked up the classic Mac/ Windows formatting issue on my slides (thank you 😉), which I promptly resolved thanks to the brief dry run.

• The sound technicians kindly adjusted the mic to fit my small head, glasses and hair so it wouldn’t come off midway.

• Our stage manager Sarah showed us where the centre of the stage was, took notes on how we wanted speaker notes to be shown and taught us how to control our slides. 🕹️

• Importantly we got an opportunity to walk up once onto that huge stage while it was still empty, to take in the magnitude of the space.

Feedback… pretty please! 🙏🏼

What’s your experience with public speaking? How did you prepare? What were your wins & lessons learnt? What would be your advice to me? How would you approach this differently? I’d really like to hear, so please pop in a comment and I promise a low-ego, growth-focused discussion!