Creative Leadership Articles

We’ve all been there - Our big pitch is hours away, and we’re just starting to drop in all our beautiful design boards into our keynote or powerpoint, or just saving out a PDF. We rush into our big presentation or pitch meeting, and just jump right into the 3 amazing designs we’ve made for the project. But suddenly - that amazing discussion we were hoping to have about how deep our ideas were in the concepts, are being quickly put aside to answer questions that seemed so obvious to us.

I learned quickly within the first few years, that presentation decks had much more meaning than just a vehicle to hold my exported .jpg images or storyboards. They form and craft the entire narrative for how you present, and how your audience sees your strategic thinking. Over the first couple years getting more comfortable pitching, I realized that there were key slides that I either had started to use more frequently, or some I kept realizing I was missing. By adding these slides, I found pitches went much smoother overall - less friction, and easier to focus on the creative being presented.

Let’s take a deeper dive on the 5 slides that really changed the structure of our Pitch game

The Ask Slide

This is the first slide in most of our creative presentations. It’s the opportunity to re-write in your own words what you’ve been asked to come present comments on. It allows you to confirm right at the start of the presentation that what you’re about to present is aligned to what everyone expects to see - and that the ideas you’ll share, are going to be solving the right problem. If your interpretation of the ask, is not agreed to, you can quickly identify the gap, and ensure it doesn’t impact what you’re about the show/share creatively. (And if it does, I’m so sorry! We’ll talk about interpreting briefs soon!)

What you’ll see today

It’s easy to interpret this slide as an agenda slide, but I definitely would not consider that. ON the column on the left below, you see a far more typical “Agenda” type of list items. You can include something like that if you need, but what I mean more specifically here, is what you’ll see on the right side. I found that in the middle of talking to a design or idea, I’d inevitably get a question like “have you checked to see how this fits in X size” or “is this the only idea your sharing today or are there more” ? To alleviate the question, and frankly allow the visibility of my colleagues of what they’re going to see, I blow out more specifically what they’re going to see, to keep them focused on that, and set the expectation and mood upfront, instead of keeping them in suspense throughout the whole presentation wondering if it’s about to end or not. It’s kind of like a clear roadmap for the hour.

Agenda Slide	What you’ll see today:
Welcome/Intros Concepts Feedback/discussion	3 Concepts grounded in brief Digital mockups of Social Ad Units Copy post language

Who worked on the presentation

If your team is larger, and not all team members are in the presentation - it’s a nice slide to include that allows 2 things :

1) Allows you to share how many people/creatives are involved in putting a pitch of this size together for your stakeholders. I can’t tell you how many times some people have simply assumed that because you present the work, you are the only one who worked on it. This can be especially problematic when the natural conversation at the end of the presentation, goes into “when can we get this” and you need to share how many moving pieces and people are involved to deliver the final project

2) It allows you an opportunity to speak to the teamwork your management style allows to bring strong creative ideas to life. You can easily give credit to your team members, and make it clear that all ideas are collaborative.

The Rational Slide

Sometimes this can go before showing the concept, and other times, it’s best suited after - depending on the impact and pace of your presentation - but things and reasons why you believe the idea is worth presenting, can sometimes be missed or overlooked by your audience - especially if they aren’t creative. It’s important to add notes, or reminders why this concept fits the brief to a T.

In the following examples, you’ll see X slides that have some key notes alongside the concept itself, or an explanation of the rational before /after the creative that helps sell your idea.

This is also very helpful if the deck is going to be shared digitally with people who were not in the presentation for any comments or input (Yes, this is another topic completely to itself) - if you don’t include these elements, all your smart insights are lost for the person who is seeing the deck for the first time. It allows a clear way for you to be certain, no matter who sees the pdf, that they’ll have your commentary.

The Recap Slide

You’ve rocked through the presentation, you’ve shared a few different ideas or concepts, and now people want to chat through them, and go around the table for peoples opinions. But we’re all human, and not everyone has photographic memory - and you’re asked (can you back to the 1st concept) of powerpoint … now go to 2 …. Can you go back to 1…. It just gets messy. We create 1 slide at the end, with all our concepts on 1 page, with their names - it facilitates discussion among your colleagues without having to flip all over the place in your deck, and keep you focused on hearing the words and the comments, not looking through your deck for what slide they want to refer to.

Try adding these format slides to your pitch decks and let me know if they make your pitches any easier!

Back in 2016, a project landed on our team that we weren’t quite expecting. It was the second last week of November, and we were being asked to concept, ideate and design a new brand, from the ground up, and present it within 3 weeks ahead of the Christmas holiday break.

We can all debate how much time is really needed to pull something like this off, and the various ways of going about it until the cows come home. (Will definitely be another post on this topic!) But we undertook the project and quickly realized we’d need to strategize how to move it forward as quick as we could.

I quickly established that some of the normal processes and methods were not going to work for what we needed here. We had to scrutinize our normal process and find the fastest and sure-fire way to be able to deliver our pitch on time.

Step 1 was to identify the key designers on the team, that had both some availability in their schedule, along with the skill set to help conceptualize and ideate this new mark.

With the selected designers at the ready, I Immediately decided that creating a daily ritual and cadence for our connections would likely be the best way to drive progress forward on a daily basis - so we set the time towards the end of each day. Some prefer the morning, but our team got into a groove of sharing progress at 4pm daily. By changing the time to afternoon would allow them the day to explore and work, and offer that guidance for anyone who was going to stick around and work a bit after 5 - , or early in the morning.

Many functions of Agile frameworks would likely suggest the daily scrum early in the morning - but for us, it just didn’t work. Creatives need their morning (we aren’t all early birds)

At the start of our explorations, things were really wide open. We started just doing research in our target demographic for the brand we were designing. Mood boards of ads they would likely see, brands they had affinity to, anything related to them we could inspire ourselves from.

From there, we kept our first week of exploration wide open - just doing sketches and ideas for us to see where this mark could go, without any judgement or plan. At the daily scrum, everyone would bring and quickly present what they’d found or sketched since the meeting the prior day. Everyone got to comment on everyone’s finds and see what worked well or if there were any triggers/flags on a specific path that would impact it’s path further.

As we started the design phase the same theory would apply - we narrowed down some specific marks in sketches we liked, and each designer was assigned some that they’d either sketched or had ideas for, and started refining them.

It was in this process that I learned that you really need to be able to know when to get specific in your feedback, vs keeping things high level. When you’re racing against a clock, sometimes it’s more helpful to be more specific about what you’d like to see changed, along with the rational, vs leaving things too open ended. When you have lots of time, leaving things open ended for multiple rounds can be fruitful, but after 2 days of wondering where we’d get, we couldn’t afford another few days of exploration so specific feedback came into place.

The other element that really helped our daily scrums, was being able to identify specific and clear outcomes of what an ideal state 24 hours from here would be. So for example, at the end of each scrum, we would review with each designer what would be ideal for them to share at the next meeting. For example. (Make the tweaks we spoke about on Concept 1, change the colours on Concept 2, and for both concepts, let’s add in the business card design ideas, and an out of home poster for each). This way you could pre plan more deliverables you would need for your pitch and to have them all in time.

When we started the project, not all of our dates and meetings were set in stone yet - after all, we’d just been given the project - so how can. You make dates and deliverables clear, when you don’t know when you will present? Well, for this I don’t have a perfect answer - but I will share this - the minute you know of dates getting confirmed, share them with your team. It’s important for the team to know what we’re driving to as a team and goal. If you only inform them of what they need for tomorrow, without knowing the full picture, they could assume that after tomorrow the exploration is complete. The idea here was to share here’s what would be good to see by The next daily scrum, and our overall presentation is 1 week away.

At the end of this project, we had one of the most well structured brand presentations we’d ever come up with as a team, and started our process of growing the design disciple in our organization. We use this scrum model for all of our big projects now, from brand design to our larger campaigns, we mimic this format. And in today’s world of Digital meetings, this format still works - It’s a daily Teams Call, and people upload pictures of their sketches or ideas, our copy writer adds a word document with her thoughts on tone and language, and we connect on a daily basis in this format and it’s worked so far!

The next time you have a project that would benefit from a scrum, try this method out and let me know on twitter if it was successful or what you changed to make it your own process!

Key Slides to include in every concept Pitch

Getting the Most out of your Design Scrums