As our next project is to create a pitch presentation we spent today discussing how to present and the best habits to have in mind when presenting.
We explored the importance of body language when presenting. Posture, eye contact, and how you move or look around the room all affect how your audience perceives you. I’ve realised that it’s not just what you say but how you carry yourself that can make a presentation feel confident and professional. Even small habits like avoiding looking at your notes too much or scanning the room naturally can make a difference.
Being mindful of timing was emphasised, presentations should be concise and respect the audience’s attention. Visuals are a huge help in this regard, as they allow viewers to focus on the image while you speak rather than trying to absorb everything you say at once. Images should support your point, and slides should avoid unnecessary jargon, ideally formatted in a 16:9 ratio for clarity and readability.
There are different ways to approach a presentation. You can either lay out what you intend to cover at the start or dive straight into the key points. Using rhetorical techniques can also help your message land, repetition, rhetorical questions, metaphor, alliteration, humour, and personal anecdotes all make presentations more engaging. We were encouraged to “speak like a politician,” in the sense of being deliberate, clear, and persuasive.
For a pitch specifically, the session highlighted the need to communicate vision, outline the problem and its scope, validate the concept, and propose a potential solution. A clear structure helps: introduce yourself, hook the audience with the opportunity or problem, explain how you would address it, show why it matters and the value it creates, and finally, ask the audience if they’d like to engage further. This format felt really useful as a framework for keeping a presentation concise while ensuring the audience understands the purpose and value of your idea.
Finally, we discussed research and validation in relation to pitches. It’s important to show that your idea has been thought through and has a reason to exist. This involves defining primary user groups, choosing ways to involve users, conducting research, and validating findings. Qualitative data is especially useful early on to understand behaviours and needs, while quantitative data becomes more relevant toward the end to support conclusions. Observational and attitudinal research, interviews, anecdotes from forums or social media, and statistics can all be used to build evidence. We also covered biases to avoid, including cognitive bias, confirmation bias, groupthink, selection bias, and cluster illusion. Thinking about a minimum viable product can help focus research and validation on what’s essential.
