I have worked across a multitude of companies in product, research, analytics and consulting field. In all these companies I have come across one common theme – How to create high impact presentation for data science projects? A lot of data scientists excel in the skill and art of developing world-class machine learning models, but they struggle with explaining the details to others. In the previous post ‘Storytelling for Data Scientists – Why is it important?’, we discussed the importance of storytelling and how can one build a story, especially for data science projects. In this post, we will discuss how to create high impact presentation for your data science projects.

1.      Audience

Audience is at the core of your presentation. You need to understand your audience, their skill-set and their focus area before you start working on your presentation. If you audience is Chief Technology Office or Data Scientists, you may talk about technical jargon and machine learning models; however, if your audience is Finance or Marketing professionals, then talking about Random Forest or Gradient Boosting will be complete alien to them.

2.      Facts

Stick to facts to the extent possible. In the case where you are presenting you opinion, that should be backed by facts and logic. A lot of times, people tend to bring in their bias and judgement based on their experiences. The whole idea behind using data is to remove bias and get a true sense of business. Don’t get carried away by emotions, judgments and experiences – always support your conclusion and opinion with facts.

3.      Structure

Create a skeleton of how and in what manner are you going to create your presentation. When I have to create a presentation, I always start with a clean slate and start adding titles to ‘Table of Contents’ or create a slide and write what you are going to cover in each of those slides. Once you have created a skeleton and added high-level points for each of the slides, you can go through each of the slides and prune to make the final structure. This will help you in achieving three objectives:

1. This will limit your tendency to provide redundant information.
2. Your information flow will be more coherent and organized .
3. Likelihood of missing out any key point will be reduced.

You need to ensure that data points and analysis are coherent with each other; one point should lead to another – in data analysis, one analysis should lead to another analysis.

4.      Exhaustive

Collectively, your presentation should be complete in itself – anyone going through your presentation for the first time should get clear understanding of the project, background, approach, results and impact, along with proper reasoning and explanation. This was covered in detail in the first part of this series: Why Storytelling is One of the Most Important Things for a Data Scientist?

5.      Action Title and Call-outs

Action title is one of most important components of the slides that I make. If I were to explain the entire slide or key takeaway from the slide in a single line, it should be reflected in the action title. In the scenarios where slides are too loaded with text or numbers, senior level executives don’t prefer to go through each of the points; instead, they are more interested in key takeaway from the slide. If you can’t express the entire slide in one line, you need to work on that slide, either it has too much information or too less of an information. Call-outs should be used to highlight any kind of outlier or abnormal behavior. You may just highlight/border the text with a different color and provide explanation for the same. In cases where you want to explain some behavior/trend in a graph, create a call-out and write your explanation for the behavior. It comes very handy while we are doing diagnostic analytics.

6.      Frame of Reference

Provide a frame of reference while emphasizing your analysis or results. For example, if I were to say, “sales of my company this year were US 110 Mn”, this standalone statement may not give me complete information. A better statement would be “sales of my company this were US 100 Mn, which represented YoY growth of 15%.” Second statement creates more impact in the mind of audience. Let’s take another example – “because of improved accuracy, revenue impact of the model will be US 10 Mn” vs “because of improved accuracy, revenue impact of the model will be US 10 Mn, which is 5% of our FY2018 revenue.” Bringing out these frames of references at the right places in your presentation make them more impactful.

7.      Icons

As it is said that visuals are always better than text, so why not use that to our advantage. Microsoft Office offers beautiful and rich collection of Icons that we can use to highlight certain points. For example, if I were to explain the scale of project that I worked upon, below are two methods I can use:

Method 1:

“The complexity of the project can be gauged from the fact that we had to deal with 1,000 Trucks, 100 million data records, 100,000 trips per year.”

Method 2:

Which method would you choose?

8.      Smart Art

MS Office provides some wonderful smart arts which you can use to present your points in a visually appealing manner. For example, if you want to present the entire project flow or different stages of your engagement, you may use process flow smart art. You may create your own smart arts using icons and shapes. In another example, let’s say you want to present a process which has data consolidation, followed by analytics layer and ending with a visualization layer – you can use a combination of icons, shapes and smart arts.

9.      Color Scheme

Be very careful of the color scheme that you use. Most of the companies would have their defined color scheme; in such cases you should adhere to the prescribed scheme. In case there is no prescribed color scheme, make sure that you don’t use very light or very bright color. Keep a consistent theme with your colors; if you want to highlight certain points, use same color across your presentation. For instance, you may use red color to highlight negative points or green color for positive points.

10.  Independent Feedback

This is an additional step which comes in when you have done everything at your end. Basically, once you have completed your presentation you should get it reviewed by a third person and take an independent view (this may not be possible in cases where you are working on highly confidential projects). Independent views will give you a clarity if you have covered all the aspects in terms of the presentation being exhaustive and coherent. Ensure that you are open to receiving feedback and inputs and justify them with objectivity, wherever required.

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