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Jump To:
Essay 1: Feedback // For the whole story, start here.
Essay 2: The Do-Over // The Helpful Safety tips start back here.
Essay 3: Bringing It

[Written two weeks after the previous posting.]

Time passes as progress is made. I’m most of the way through the certification process, partially delayed by a bunch of work-related travel in the middle. As it tends to happen, I’ve been de facto mentoring someone in an overseas office, helping him with presentation skills, and going through a few of the things I’ve learned so far. The process of mentoring has clarified a bunch of things I already knew but never got a chance to say, so here we go:

Tell your story. Presenting a technical overview to a customer roughly works out to telling a story, but one that is put together only at the last minute. The beginning and ending are mostly set, but you’re not going to know which chapters to throw in the middle until the customer tells you what actually interests them. It follows that you probably need about three book’s worth of chapters in order to assemble your story on the fly, q.v. previous point about having to have a very deep well of knowledge in order to speak breezily and competently about a topic.

Listen to the words of the question. It’s awfully tempting to hear a customer question, listen for a keyword, and queue up the next narrative in your head while they finish. After all, it’s nice to feel one step ahead of the game. However, while you’re just waiting for them to finish, you’re discarding a ton of information. How technical are they? Are they actually convinced by your last answer? Do they want to drill down on something else you talked about? Do they feel you’re wasting their time? All of these and more can be puzzled out by just listening to how and what questions they ask. I’m not going to give a dictionary, here… just give yourself a chance to react to what they were saying, not what you think they said.

Choose three proxies. This is something I was taught, as opposed to figuring it out. If you’re talking to a larger group of people, choose three people in the audience, preferably on the left, the center, and the right sides. While talking, rotate between looking directly at each of these people. It gives you a place to focus, and people will generally think you’re looking directly at them. More importantly, these three people become your proxies for the audience. If Mr. Center is yawning, the whole center is yawning. If Ms. Left is engaged, the whole left side is engaged, and so on. It allows you to get an active read off of the crowd, while limiting the input you need to take in during your talk.

This is a skill like any other. There’s no magic. There’s just work, and the desire to improve.

Jump To:
Essay 1: Feedback // For the whole story, start here.
Essay 2: The Do-Over // The Helpful Safety Tips start back here.
Essay 4: Training Montage!

[Written a week after Essay #2]

So, the third and fourth whiteboard talks have come and gone, and I believe I’m finally getting the hang of these. My pacing is better, the presentation flows reasonably nicely, and I’m generally better at talking about the material.

Observation: The name of the game here is not to “absorb and recite all the information ever”. First off, it’s a pretty unrealistic goal, and secondly, no one cares about my ability to regurgitate a large body of knowledge; most of my colleagues do that five times before breakfast. Rather, the goal is to come up with a strategy for understanding (and then teaching) an overwhelming amount of new material. Once I figured out a strategy, it was about rendering down the Sap of Knowledge to the Grade A Dark Maple Syrup of Wisdom, and then lovingly pouring it over the French Toast of Customer Expectations.

Other random things I’ve learned and/or done:

I bought a watch. There are many ways to keep track of time, but having to fumble at my phone every time was ungainly, and it discouraged me from doing time checks with the frequency required to wedge in a lot of material. So, I bought a watch, the process and results of which are a posting in and of themselves. Short form: large plain face w/ second hand, narrow circular bezel, thin profile, and is in proportion to my wrist and arm. Also, I like wearing a watch, and haven’t done it since I wore a Swatch in high school.

Control the complexity level. I picture a successful whiteboard talk as occupying a very tight band of complexity. Within that band, the customer will go along with the narrative, with the understanding that they’re being given the whole picture at a certain level of abstraction. If the band is too large, the presentation gets very hard to follow due to the amount of domain-specific knowledge needed to keep up. If I break out of it too high, I’m handwaving and will invite questions to probe my knowledge (and assert status). If I break out of it too low, I’ve painted myself into a corner and no one is actually getting the information they need.

Avoid negation. This is more of a general debate skill. People tend to forget the articles in a sentence, so saying “We will not melt down your pet rock” works out to “We… melt down your pet rock”. Even if intellectually they know that you put a “not” in there, it crossed your mind that you might want to melt down their pet rock, else why would you have said it that way? Find a way to state your assertion positively, e.g. “We will protect your pet rock.”

The fifth whiteboard talk is tomorrow, and it promises to be the trickiest one, yet.

Jump To:
Essay 1: Feedback // For the whole story, start here.
Essay 3: Bringing It
Essay 4: Training Montage!

[A few days after the previous episode.]

In a previous posting, I mentioned that I had done my first whiteboard talk at the new job, and it went… not as well as I would have liked.

The do-over was much better. Here’s what I did more/better/at all, in order of importance:

1. Control the conversation: Most of my friends are thinking: “Matt, isn’t some small integer percentage of your metabolism permanently committed to controlling conversations?” I’d like to think the answer is “no”, mostly because that percentage is useful for other things sometimes, but it is a skill I have. I just didn’t know that I had to employ it in the context of a whiteboard talk, the first time around. Here are a few things I did on the second try:

1a. Formalize the Interaction: Have an agenda, drive the agenda, stick to the agenda. Have opening and closing statements prepared and rehearsed. Setting the tone at the beginning and formally closing the discussion at the end (even if it’s just “Thank you all for coming. Have a good afternoon”) is something humans are really into. Just ask any spiritual leader.

[Note from the Present: Another thing about agendas is that you can blame them. That is, you can tell your audience to temporarily hold off on questions because there’s a lot on the agenda, and it’s important to cover the topics at hand. If the question is really important, the audience will hold onto it for later. If it wasn’t, it will be forgotten.]

1b. One Hit, One Kill: Some things will need detailed technical explanations, but for the most part, a Whiteboard is a high-level technical overview. Answering questions with accurate one-liners is preferable to diverting into a deep technical discussion which will detract from the topic at hand. The gotcha is that answering with accurate and satisfactory one-liners requires a large amount of knowledge, because it indicates comprehension of the material to the point where a concise explanation will suffice. Additionally, when I didn’t know the answer I admitted it quickly, noted it down, and kept the conversation moving.

1c. Bring Them Back: When the group started asking about specific technical details, I had to make a decision: was this specific point really important to them, or was there an overarching issue where they already decided on implementation, and the question was in their comfort zone? At a few points during the discussion, I said “So, I hear all of these questions, and we can answer them in specific in a future implementation meeting, but there appears to be a common theme regarding concerns about $subject. So, let me speak to that directly.” Hence, acknowledging the questions, showing comprehension of the larger issue, and keeping the discussion out of the weeds. I will admit that I didn’t make the correct call all the time, and I was dinged for tabling a couple of questions that should have been answered in depth, but in general I was making the right calls.

1d. Keep Moving: There’s a certain momentum in these kind of talks. I’m giving information, the audience is receiving information, and I’m able to answer questions quickly enough to keep everyone interested. Which is to say, there’s a tempo to a talk like this, and I break it at my own peril. It’s very similar to meetings where two people get bogged down in minutia and the meeting can not continue until they’re done; people stop paying attention, zone out, and everyone loses focus. I think the biggest challenge for me was keeping the meeting within a very narrow band of technical abstraction. Too high, and there’s no content. Too low, and I end up bogged down like the first time.

2. Time Management: This is a role-play exercise, and having a cheat sheet is verboten. However, everyone has a cellphone, and having it on the table with a stopwatch and/or a clock is completely allowed. Evidently, my audience/colleagues had never seen a new hire actively manage time during a discussion. This includes telling the audience how much time is left in order to set expectations for levels of interactivity in the rest of the discussion. I have a feeling that active time management is going to become part of the standard routine from now on.

3. Audiences Are People, Too: As mentioned above, it’s okay to say “I don’t know”. I kept a corner of the whiteboard for “questions to answer for people later”. Now in reality, this meant “homework for me to do”, but as a general approach, it means that your audience sees that you’re listening to them, and that what they asked is important enough to write down and recall for later. I can say in my own experience that I’ve been very impressed when a sales team committed to getting me information in an afternoon meeting, only to have relevant, non-canned information only a few hours later.

The next whiteboard talk is in approximately 14 hours.

Jump To:
Essay 2: The Do-Over // To get right to the Helpful Safety Tips, start here.
Essay 3: Bringing It
Essay 4: Training Montage!

[10 days after being hired, nearly 2.5 years ago.]

I just received my first lesson in salesmanship, and I’m a little singed around the edges, but I’m fine.

“Okay. Today we’re going to be shoes.com, and the topic is [product]. You have 45 minutes, starting now.”

This is all about “Salesmanship 101”. In short, part of the certification process for me to get in front of customers is for me to do a bunch of whiteboard talks on various parts of my employer’s technology.

The twist is that these are role-playing discussions, where I’m the first post-sales person they talk to, and they’re playing the “web guy”, the “security guy”, the “CTO-who-had-no-idea-this-got-signed”, and so on. It is not meant to get ugly, but they’re skeptical.

[Note from the present: As I was to later find out, Salesmanship 101 is only a part of it. The Whiteboards are also a test of how well you can integrate everything you’ve learned into a cohesive whole. Memorization of facts will not save you, young Jedi.]

I completely forgot that this kind of talk is a storytelling session, and because I have a very large range of knowledge, I entertained and discussed all questions that they asked, as opposed to diverting the question and continuing with the story. I was given the 3 minute warning on a 45 minute presentation, and I spent maybe 5 minutes total talking about the product, and doing such technical digressions on it that I completely skipped over the most significant features.

During the feedback session at the end, they said “We didn’t have to distract you. You distracted yourself, which is a new one.” Every person on the panel said something like “You have an exceedingly deep well of knowledge, and you felt compelled to display it, as opposed to using it to inform your storytelling approach.”

I will admit that I felt pretty beat-up at the end, and I’m getting a do-over on Tuesday. No one thinks poorly of me for it… I fell into a standard-issue smart-person trap that others fell into before me, just with a double-twist and a half-gainer (difficulty 2.6).

It’s very much like the Neo-Morpheus fight scene in the The Matrix, where Morpheus said “How did I beat you?” I could see what was happening while it was happening, but I couldn’t find a way out in real time. This is all Salesmanship 101.

The funny part is that I’ll probably be able to look at sales pitches much more analytically, now. Practice Increases Resolution.

Okay. Back to prepping. I have a story to tell.

At my current employer, every person in Professional Services goes through New Hire Training, which includes The Whiteboards.  Ask anyone in PS who has gone through The Whiteboards, and they will speak about them in reverent tones, along with a few war stories about the first time they flamed out.

The proposition is simple: stand in front of your peers (who are pretending to be a customer), and give a whiteboard talk on a product/service for 45 minutes.   Your peers want you to succeed, but they have to be convinced you know the material.  The process of passing a Whiteboard typically results in three things: a better knowledge of how the products work, a crash course in basic salesmanship, and a familiarity with the concept of “humility.”   If you’re really paying attention, you also end up deriving Pedagogy 101 from first principles.

The next several essays are several of the lessons I learned from doing the Whiteboards, with a couple of side-trips into how to survive in a fast-paced corporate environment full of grownups.

Jump To:
Essay 1: Feedback // For the whole story, start here.
Essay 2: The Do-Over // To get right to the Helpful Safety Tips, start here.
Essay 3: Bringing It
Essay 4: Training Montage!