SlideMagic Blog

These were the dreaded words of your McKinsey project manager when she ripped out your analysis masterpiece from page 10 to page 57 in the document. Then, as a junior analyst, I felt depressed as I interpreted this that my work has been for nothing.

Here are some things that project manager could have said in addition:

• Most of the time, slides that communicate the answer are completely different from slides that show how you got to the answer.
• Related: the project is moving on now, we have convinced the client that our assumptions are correct, now we need to get them to move and take action
• Without that slide that sits now on page 57, we would never have gotten where we are now. If we still had to talk about that analysis on page 10, we probably were doing something wrong

Photo by Nana Smirnova on Unsplash

Over the weekend I re-wrote the entire analytics engine of SlideMagic. (Apologies for the frequent app updates).

I had a whole bunch of tools installed, some of them dating bask a long time when I just started out with the blog. They were spitting out a lot of data that was never really used. Web analytics brings back memories of my time as a McKinsey consultant. The client having a massive and sophisticated business intelligence (“BI”) information system that could produce any breakdown of any segment at any time. Our work was to find what actually mattered, which often was a surprisingly simple chart.

If you are running a massive web site with billions of hits, then A/B testing the colour of buttons might make you money. You hire the web analytics consultant, let her do her work, and in the end your return on investment is a 0.005% uptake in conversion on a billion of clicks minus the cost of the data analysis project. The result is a massive amount of trackers that follow you across the internet.

SlideMagic no longer has them. I went back to basics, and put a very simple system in place, that gives me the information I need given the growth stage SlideMagic is in (making sure that the product works flawlessly). In the process I could also eliminate any possible information that could, if you really wanted to, identify a user. All is clean now, and I understand/control 100% what is actually going on with your data.

The question is raised in this tweet:

My perspective:

• As a point estimate, they are probably not useful. Forecasting something that does not exist yet is hard, and ‘TAM’ is not interpreted in a consistent way like ‘next year’s revenue’ is.
• But as a framework to think about things, it could be useful. Forget about the exact definition of TAM. Instead help yourself and a potential investor think about one more approach to think about the potential of your business. “What would you have to believe in order to…”

In the SlideMagic app, search for ‘TAM’ and you will find a few templates that can get you started. Another good framework to use are waterfall charts where you can peel off market segment layers. To put your chart in context, you can add some sort of crystal ball image…

Photo by Sasha • Stories on Unsplash

Most financial slides show an absolute number and its percentage growth for things like revenues, gross profit, operating profit, and operating income. But they also show margins: operating profit, gross profit, operating income as a % of sales. If the gross margin grows from 50% to 55%, is that 5% growth, or 10%?

Microsoft did it right in its last earnings presentation: explicitly name increases in margins as ‘points’. So going from 50% to 55% gross margin is a 5 points increase. See the example slide below

Mmm, now that we have a slide here, let’s talk about it. What is good:

• Clean font, clean layout, even without a logo
• Numbers are rounded up

What could improve:

• Use the full space of the slide, the table (probably coming out of Excel) is tilted to the left
• The titles of the table are a bit “heavy” with that blue colour splashed on them. It is better to use an accent colour to highlight a piece of data that is important for your message
• The dark grey font on light grey background looks sophisticated, but hurt the contrast that is important in financial slides

In SlideMagic, I put the following together quickly (in the SlideMagic spirit)

What did I do?

• Use the entire slide
• Accent colour is used for important data
• Light column headings
• Re-shuffled the order of the table items, yes, gross profit and gross margin are related, but I think it works better to group billions and margins
• Add small bar charts to highlight the comparison of the growth numbers

I made the user interface for speaker notes a bit clearer in version 2.6.12 of SlideMagic. The mysterious bullet point icon at the bottom of the slide has been replaced with a simple text link. Click and you will see a big and bold overlay over the slide where you can add your notes.

Speaker notes will show up in the presenter view window when you present the slides and are only visible to you the presenter, not to the audience. On a Zoom call, share the audience window to the video call participants, while you keep an eye on your private presenter view with important reminders of the points you want to make when presenting the slide.

In SlideMagic, you can edit your speaker notes also in this presenter view window. This is not only great for last minute fixes of your story, but also gives you a platform to edit the flow of your story slide by slide. Increase the size of your presenter view window, and click through your presentation. You see a small thumb of your slide, an even smaller one of the next slide up, and a big text box to write down your points.

When you return to the normal view of the slide, you will see that the speaker note edit link has changed colour, to remind you that there are speaker notes in this slide. This is important when you share .magic files with other users, because they will be able to read those speaker notes as well. (This prevents you from sending “Better not share our 50% churn with investors in the first presentation with investors if they do not ask for it….” to well, an investor attending your first presentation)

Some questions on Quora seem to be a setup for people with a solution to answer them. SlideMagic is not in the business of selling slide templates, still, I could not resist answering:

I think it is the wrong question to ask first. You should start with “What is my business model?”

A business model can have an endless number of options, no one is the same, hence it is hard to fit into a standard template. Even worse, trying to fit your business model into a PowerPoint template that actually does not fit gets your audience confused of what your business model actually is.

Once you have decided on your business model, you can find a suitable template, and it can be very simple and straightforward. For example, if you charge a set up fee, and an hourly rate, that is a table with 4 boxes… Clean simple, unambiguous.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

I answered a question on Quora:

I can think of a number of reasons:

1. A 2x2 is a nicer way to present options than a slide with 4 bullet points, a 5 dimensional space can get very complicated
2. It forces you to think things through thoroughly for holes and overlaps, maybe you start with 2 options, add a third, take a step back and think what actually defines these 3 options, come up with the 2 axis, and then realise you overlooked option number 4 to be complete
3. A 2 dimensional framework allows you to think about what happens if you move things around, and makes it easy to visualise.
4. In most cases there are more than 2 dimensions to a problem, but it is hard to visualise (see point 1), and think about. The 2x2 forces you to choose the 2 most important dimensions.
5. Cultural habit, if you are in a place that uses a lot of 2x2s, you will use it more often, it is a language that people understand easily.

SlideMagic has lots and lots of 2x2, 3x3 and other matrices as slide templates for your to get started. Download the app and get started.

Everyone is super imposing the image of Bernie on other photos at the moment. Why do certain images look realistic, others not? Some pointers that might help with your Bernie creations, but can also be useful when you need to make more serious presentations.

• Think of the size of Bernie versus reference objects close to thim. Putting him next to other people makes it easy to get it right. In the absence of reference people, focus on other objects to compare the size to. The size of Bernie versus objects that we know the size of, tricks the brain in getting the perspective of the image right.
• See at what angle the image of Bernie is taken. The legs of his chair show the angle at which the floor should run. Bernie’s image is taken from a long distance with a zoom lens, therefore you will see that most compositions that you took with a phone (lens 1.7m above the ground, subject probably 5-10 meters away) will not work.

It is hard to get these right. Simply move and zoom the image around a lot until you see that it fits right. Here is Bernie in my living room keeping Grifin company, In SlideMagic I put the living room as a ‘frame’ image, and made one big grid box as the foreground for Bernie. Then, I switched off the titles.

(@taber has already done the hard work for you, download a Bernie image with transparent background here).

If you always skip that part, maybe it is time to reshuffle your slides to a flow that comes more natural to you.

There was probably nothing wrong with the original slide flow you used, but things can get stale:

• You switched from a project flow, where the series of charts reflected the sequence of the project work, to the story that sells the outcome
• You have a much more powerful presentation opening with a real life customer story than the usual market data slides that are sitting there
• You are still using the same slides that you put in 3 years ago
• The audience of your presentation has changed, they either have caught up and know more things now, or you are presenting to different people.

Time for spring cleaning of your pitch?

Photo by Jeremy Sallee on Unsplash

I have made more improvements to the SlideMagic user interface. Is is now easier to select multiple cells, especially in fine grids.

If you select a column marker at the top of the slide, all boxes in your slide that “touch|” the column will be become selected, and you can apply formatting to them in one go (for example, make them all blue).

The same applies for rows, click a row marker, and all relevant boxes in the row line up.

Finally, you can select whole areas of boxes by first clicking a top-left element, then clicking a bottom-right element, and SlideMagic will light up all the boxes that are in between. See the example below.