11 Things That Will Take Your Technical Presentation to the Next Level

Introduction: Start with a Hook, Not a Title

Luca Bruschi opened his session by quoting a Harvard research team — spanning MIT, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and "our proud sponsors, the Google" — who spent four years studying whether a picture is really worth a thousand words. Their conclusion? Some pictures are worth 500 billion words.

It was completely made up. And it worked perfectly. The point: your opening does not have to announce the topic. It has to earn attention.

One Idea. Not Ten.

The creativity phase of building a presentation feels great — a blank page, all the ideas, total freedom. But at some point you have to narrow down to one central idea. The single thing you want the audience to take home. For technical presenters especially, this is the hardest discipline. The temptation to share everything you know is real.

Resist it.

Know Your Audience — and Speak to the Least Informed Person in the Room

Luca demonstrated this live by asking the audience about CPU cores, threads, and "20 beats" — the last one entirely invented. The hands that stayed up longest revealed exactly how jargon works: it flatters the few and loses everyone else.

The rule of thumb: if you do not know your audience, drop the jargon entirely. If you do know them, tailor your language to the least knowledgeable person in the room. And always lead with benefit, not feature. Steve Jobs did not announce a new touchscreen. He said you could use the best pointing device ever invented — your fingers.

Visuals & Demos: Raise the Bar

• A slide works. A demo is better. But the right demo depends entirely on who is in the room. A CXO wants to see outcomes. A room full of engineers wants to see you open a terminal and start typing.

  
  

• At Lego, Luca's team reinvented the IT onboarding experience by building a physical Lego model to tell the story of IT support — complete with superheroes, a chef finding the right recipe, and Luke Skywalker using the Force for the rare edge cases. New employees remembered it. That is the goal.

  
  

• When you can make an abstract concept physical — something the audience can see or touch — it travels. Luca's playing card explainer video, borrowed from a similar approach, has far more reach inside his industry than any slide deck ever would.

Pace, Pauses & the Words That Fill Silence

Obama's victory speech ran at around 100 words per minute — slow, deliberate, charismatic. Bill Gates uses filler words just 1.7% of the time and spends up to 80% of his pauses in silence, letting ideas land. These are not accidents. They are choices.

Normal conversation runs at 120–150 words per minute. Presentations should sit at 100–150. Slow down. Let pauses do work. And rehearse out loud — not in your head, not by flicking through slides, but speaking the words at full volume so your body and memory can actually encode them.

When Things Go Wrong — Be Funny

A Blue Screen of Death mid-demo at a Windows 98 launch. A browser that will not load because half the audience is on the conference Wi-Fi. Both happened live, on the biggest stages. Both were handled with humor. The audience laughed. The session continued.

You do not need to only be funny when things break. Humor throughout a presentation releases tension, builds connection, and makes the whole experience more memorable. As Luca puts it: when you laugh, your brain produces endorphins and life looks better. Why not help your audience have a better time?

Energy, Confidence & No Notes During The Presentation

Come on stage without notes. It is too dark to read them anyway, and the moment you look down, you lose the room. What you need instead is preparation — real preparation, out loud, multiple times — so that the material is inside you, not on a piece of paper.

Bring your passion. Exude confidence. As Luca tells his under-15 basketball team: I do not care if you miss the shot. I care that you give 120% every time you are on the court.

Final Thoughts: The 11th Thing

Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, puts it simply: people are afraid to be simple. That fear leads to bullet points. Bullet points lead to boredom. Boredom leads to suffering.

Put aside the time to design slides that are genuinely visual and clean. If design is not your strength, find someone whose strength it is. Focus your energy on the story, the flow, and the connection with your audience. Leave the rest to the professionals.

Eleven things. One stage. Go bring it.

Join the Conversation 

Which of the 11 presentation tips resonates most with you — and which one do you want to work on first? Share in the comments below.