Presenting Your Product to Executives
3 steps to a successful presentation
You've been working on a product concept for weeks. Now it is time for the leadership team to allocate resources to the concept. You need to present your product concept to several functional executives to get commitment to doing the new concept. How can you get the executive approvals while doing your regular product management job?
Why to Present to Executives?
You've likely been working with your peers while developing the business case. You've reached consensus with your peers that the conceptual service or feature makes good sense for the organization. You probably have preliminary effort estimates and revenue estimates of the new item. You've worked hard to understand the complexities of a new market and new capability of your product. However, this project needs resources for the next phase.
Getting executive approval for the resources now depends on your ability to persuade senior people in the organization. What are some ways to get approval from your senior executives?
Give a Simple Story
You have 100+ slides on your product concept including business case, competitors, design and roadmap. Can you present these slides to the executive team and get the resources? Probably not. You have about 15 minutes to catch their attention and convince them to allocate resources. This means you need pictures to communicate a simple story in about 5 slides. The key points for the 5 slides are:
Current situation that sets up the problem
How to solve the problem
Request for approval
A simple story with pictures is easy for the executives to remember when prioritizing your product concept over others. Be clear on the approval you want from the executive.
Understand What Each Executive Needs
There are a few ways to get to know the executives in an upcoming presentation:
Know the role of each executive - especially understand how their performance is measured. Some typical executive measures are profitability, delivery, market share, bookings, and strategy.
Talk to your peers in the executive's organization - understand the key goals of the executive
Review successful presentations to the executive team - find out what material works from prior presentations
With this information, take a new look at your presentation from each executive's perspective. Be sure to tune the presentation for the lead executive each time your present.
Be Ready to Handle Objections
Your 100+ slides come in handy on handling objections from the executive team. However, you do not have time to show any of your supporting slides. By preparing the large slide deck, you are ready to handle objections verbally. You can always send a relevant slide in email after the presentation.
In many cases, questions from an executive sound like an objection when the executive simply wants to better understand your conclusions. Handling questions and inflammatory statements in a factual manner shows the executives your confidence in your proposal.
Conclusion
A successful executive presentation takes practice and preparation. You get better each time you present your material. Keep your 100+ slides updated so you are ready to practice your presentation a lot.