Last month, I gave a talk at Silicon Valley Product Camp 2010. This is the world's largest free and “unconference-style” event attracting product managers from various industries. This time, the one-day gathering was attended by more than 550 product managers. The real beauty of this event is that PCamp participants do not merely listen to lectures, but are encouraged to actively participate in the conversation, ask questions and share their tips and knowledge. In addition, visitors are invited to suggest their own topics for discussion.
I decided to take advantage of this opportunity and offered a discussion on how to make Web 2.0 work for product management, planning to share my experience of choosing and adopting various next-generation tools for managing the development of our project management software, Wrike. I was happy to see that the topic generated great interest from the public; however, the dynamic of constant interaction with my audience turned out to be quite different from what you experience during regular presentations.
I learned a couple of good lessons from this PCamp session. I tried to mix a fairly rigid slide deck with a lot of freeform discussions, which made the slide deck more of a distraction, rather than a guiding tool. While analyzing the session later, I came up with a few tips that I’ll make sure to use the next time I present during an unconference-style event. I thought it would be a good idea to share my tips here.
• Create a very light deck that’s not a streamline story, but rather provides supporting facts and visuals for some areas of conversation. In this type of deck, most slides should be interchangeable and pulled on demand.
• Make a slide with the session’s agenda and show it to the audience first.
• Ask the public what questions you should concentrate on. This will help you find out which parts of your presentation interest them the most and which are not worth wasting their time on.
After analyzing my presentation, I can say that unconference-style events are fun and can sometimes even produce a greater effect on the audience, since your listeners are taking an active part in your presentation. Yet you need the right preparation to make it a success. I hope you will find my tips useful. Have you ever spoken at unconference-style get-togethers? Please share your own experience in the comments.
Have you tried Prezi? I think for the situation you describe it has the benefit of freely zooming in to areas from a central "map" as opposed to the rigid "deck" structure.
Thanks, I'll take a look at it next time.
My only concern is that Prezi was not very reliable last time I used it. It had glitches with displaying the deck.
Cheers,
Andrew