Are you delivering a technical presentation? Don’t tell me about capabilities.

Don’t tell me about products, or features, or tools.

Tell me a story that I can relate to^[1].

Tell me a story about someone who struggled, and tell the story in a way that I can relate to the struggling character. When you tell me a story, you immediately have my attention, because my human brain is optimized for learning from stories^[2].

Tell me a story about a problem, and the pain that problem has caused. The pain makes it real.

Now tell me about the solution. You already have my attention, and my emotional engagement. It’s time to take advantage of this fact.

Tell me about how your products, features, tools, and capabilities were used to solve the problem, and to eliminate the pain.

Why did the person choose a specific tool or feature? How did she use that capability, and what impact did it make? How did the person’s life change and improve because of the actions she took?

When you tell me a story instead of telling me about features, you probably won’t get to mention every feature you want. That’s OK.

If you tell me a story you might only be able to mention 5 or 10 features instead of the 50 or 100 features you wanted to mention. That’s OK, because I’ll remember the impact those few features made, and I’ll know how they can help me.

If you’d talked about all of the features, I probably would not have remembered any of them – unless I already had my own story and could connect the dots myself.

It’s the story that makes the message stick. I wish every technical presenter remembered this. Maybe I should tell them a story…

^[1] No, no, not one of those – a real story!

^[2] A quick search will yield many results that highlight the value and importance of stories for learning. This blog post presents an excellent summary.