Data scientists are often called on to present their work to non-technical exec-level audiences. For example, you may be asked to present at a weekly VP meeting that hosts speakers to give deep dives about new projects in the company.
Assuming you already have a technical presentation appear prepared, how do you turn it into something that can be presented to an exec level audience?
1. Add an Executive Summary Slide
An executive summary slide describes:
- Basic context
- Problem being solved
- Proposed Solution, with costs and benefits
If it doesn’t all fit into one slide, put the context on its own slide and the other points on a separate executive summary slide.
In your talk, you can say that “first, I’ll preview the key points, which are on this slide, and then I’ll go into detail about exactly what we’ve found and why it makes sense.”
2. Expand on the Context
An exec audience needs to know a certain minimal set of facts to understand what you’re doing and why it’s important. These facts describe the current state of the world: specifically the objects and their operation.
Objects needs to be defined: “Cobra is a machine learning model that predicts fraudulent transactions…”
Operations need to be described concisely and may link other objects together: “Cobra is trained from human generated examples collected from a team called Bigfoot.”
3. Explain the Problem
Given the context, what is the problem? Two possibilities:
- Objects: there may be objects at play that shouldn’t be, or there may need to be additional objects that aren’t yet there
- Operation: how the objects perform may be suboptimal
After identifying the problem, emphasize why it’s a significant problem. Why should the execs care? Translate the technical problem into the big picture business problem.
4. Simplify Your Formulas
Complicated formulas should be avoided—they can take a long time to explain to an exec audience and can lead to a lot of confusion. Replace a complicated formula with an extremely simple one or with a diagram.
If you’ve expressed the problem in terms of the objects and their operation, then you can also express your solution as a change in the set of objects or how they operate.
5. Show the Costs and Benefits
The easiest way to convince leaders of something is to show them quantitative proof that your proposal is a good idea. If the benefits hugely outweigh the costs, then supporting you becomes a no-brainer.
6. Reiterate the Main Takeaway
End with “if there’s the one thing I’d like you to walk away with after this presentation, is that…”
Finally, when giving the talk, don’t feel the need to improvise. Stick to your slides, and if in practicing you find yourself needing to improvise, update the slides to fill in what you will need to say.
Data Science Principles 