Presentation Planning and Audience Analysis
Domain focus: how you convert an objective and an audience profile into a defensible structure before any formatting decisions are made.
Define the ask first
Write one sentence: "After this presentation, the audience will ___." If the blank cannot be filled with a decision, an approval, or a behaviour change, you have a report, not a presentation. Every slide must earn its place against that sentence.
Profile the audience
Four variables drive design choices: technical depth (jargon tolerance), seniority (appetite for detail), time on the agenda (which sets slide count), and venue (aspect ratio, projection size, lighting, and whether people will read the deck later without you). Attitude matters too - a hostile room needs evidence and an explicit objection-handling slide; a supportive room needs only momentum.
Choose a structure
Answer-first (conclusion, then support) suits executive decisions; problem–solution suits proposals; chronological suits post-mortems; SCQA (situation, complication, question, answer) suits consulting narratives. Storyboard in Outline view or Slide Sorter before choosing colour, and route deep detail into an appendix you will not present.
Worked example
A 15-minute steering committee slot with 5 minutes of Q&A leaves about 10 minutes of content. At roughly one minute per content slide, plan eight or nine content slides plus a title and an appendix. Reasoning: twelve content slides would force 45 seconds each - too fast for a committee that must approve funding - so merge the three background slides into one context slide and move the risk register to the appendix, where it answers questions without consuming stage time.
Traps that cost marks
Designing before planning; assuming one deck serves both engineers and executives; specifying 16:9 content and then presenting on a 4:3 projector; planning to run over and losing the decision.