Product Agility

Why You're Presentations Aren't Creating Stakeholder Buy-In and How to Fix It (with Abdo Wahba)

• Ben Maynard & Abdo Wahba • Season 2 • Episode 41

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In this episode of the Product Agility Podcast, Ben Maynard welcomes Abdo Wahba, presentation coach and product expert, to explore why so many presentations fail to create stakeholder buy-in—and more importantly, how to fix them. Drawing from over 1,300 hours of coaching experience, Abdo shares practical techniques to improve your communication skills and effectively influence stakeholders.

If you’ve ever struggled with delivering impactful presentations that resonate with senior leaders or align your team, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you succeed.

Key Takeaways:

  • Start from the End: Why leading with your conclusion hooks attention and drives decisions.
  • Engaging Stakeholders: Practical steps to tailor your message to resonate with your audience.
  • Storytelling in Business: How to use stories to build emotional connections.
  • Focus on One Key Takeaway: Ensuring your message is clear, memorable, and actionable.

Practical Tools & Methods:

  • Audience-Centric Frameworks: Flip the script to prioritise what your audience needs to hear.
  • Gossip as a Strategy: Engage through relatable stories and examples that hold attention.
  • Houston, We Have a Problem Template: A storytelling structure for framing problems and solutions effectively.

Quotable Moments:

"Your audience doesn’t care about your process; they care about what it means for them."
 "Focus on one takeaway—because chances are that’s all they’ll remember."

Links and Resources:

This engaging conversation provides a masterclass in making your presentations matter. Whether you’re pitching to stakeholders, rallying a team, or presenting at a conference, you’ll learn how to inspire action and drive alignment.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Ben Maynard

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Product Agility Podcast

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Stories is essentially if you talk about people having done or said something to other people. And when you think about this, essentially we're talking about gossip. To tell a story is to gossip a little bit. Yes, of course you can have on the arc of tension, the protagonist, the antagonist, the year's journey, all of this stuff. But this is for the context of business and product. This is a bit of overkill. If you can do it, it's great. You'll be awesome. But you can still be awesome without having to go through this excruciating learning. Welcome to the Product Agility podcast, the missing link between Agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies, and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why, I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Hello and welcome back to the Product Agility podcast. If you listen to this then it must be Thursday because we release episodes every Thursday and try and keep the quality of guests very high. Now we are not known to be heavy on bullshit in this podcast. So when we interviewed lot of the speakers at productize. Yeah, some episodes did well, some episodes did really well. And one of the episodes that did really well was the open Secrets of Successful Speakers with Abdo WABA. And it did say, well, we've invited him back for a full length episode, but we are going to be exploring more secrets of successful speakers or not secrets because technically not a secret. If we're going to put you on a podcast delving into some of Abdo's wealth of experience in product management. I think 17 years also involved in change management as well and has spent the same more recent part of his career focusing on helping people become successful speakers. So I'm hoping to get some tips from myself. Ad though it is excellent to have you back on the podcast. How are you? I'm doing great, it's a pleasure to be back on your podcast. I enjoyed the last episode and that's why I'm highly motivated to join you again and share more secrets. Good. Well for those fools that didn't listen to the original episode, would you mind giving people an introduction to yourself? Yes, my name is Abdul, I'm from Egypt. I'm a trained engineer, but I've worked for the past 17 ish years in product management and leadership and in various industries in various setups, in various products, all in software. And I also have delivered over 1300 hours of coaching and training with a focus on presentation skills, public speaking and product management. How did you get into this thing on helping people? Public speaking. It started when I was in university. I was part of an activity that was basically organizing workshops for students by students to train them on soft skills. And I realized I have an act for this back then. And it stuck with me somehow that I essentially whenever I find someone who is not doing a good presentation, I get frustrated. And if I can change it, then I act to change it. And it turns out that a lot of people needed this change. And the things that I learned when I was younger seem to be not common knowledge. And I realised that I, I was very lucky and blessed to have to have people show me this, this correct path Once Upon a time. And this is essentially what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to show people you can be a much better speaker, whether it is in a conference or in an internal presentation in your company, if you follow very simple steps. Awesome. Well, maybe we can cover a couple of those steps, but I think we should start the conversation around the recent piece of discovery work. That you've been doing, so you've had a bit of a focus of late trying to get some data and maybe perform some analysis I suppose. And you said it's around the around particular product managers, is that correct? It is correct. I have been exploring for the past few weeks, I've been exploring the different use cases product managers have when it comes to presentations because I realised that essentially if you go to product managers and tell them, hey, why don't you invest in your presentation skills because it will really elevate your game. The response is usually, yeah, I think I do, I think I should, but honestly, I have more important stuff to do. And I, I built a hypothesis that this is the response because presentation skills as is doesn't necessarily speak to a specific problem that product managers have, at least from a perceived point of view versus, I mean, not versus while the problem is there. Like everybody struggles with presenting in internally to stakeholders. Everybody, I mean, the struggle with stakeholders is real to swing them to your, to your plan to get them to opt in to your vision or your ideas, or at least to get them not to block your efforts. Everybody faces that. And one of the key solutions to those problems is essentially if you're able to tell a better story, if you're able to make a better case, if you're able to present your ideas in a way that the stakeholders can relate to. And this is essentially built through working on your presentation skills. So what I was trying, what I was trying to explore is essentially, OK, how does the problem of lack of presentation skills or precision skills that have that require improvement, how does this problem manifest itself? And what is the correct positioning slash formulation of this problem in the eyes of product manager? OK, well, let's, let's take a. It's a lot to digest there. Yeah, a lot to digest. Let's start at the beginning. So when you were looking at different use cases, like what were the use cases that you were able to discover? The interesting thing that I found was that there are a lot of varying use cases, but there is also a bit of overlap between most of everyone I spoke to. For instance, the overlap is always, always with speaking to stakeholders or pitching to top management or presenting in an all hands or a town hall or a company wide meeting. Talking about whatever, be it road map, be it updates, be it change, be it whatever you know. And those are the biggest 3 overlapping positions. Obviously there is, there is the daily rituals if you know for juniors or for people who are more tactical talking to the, you know Sprint planning or Sprint reviews or retros or or sharing discovery results or analysis results and so on. Those are also there. But the ones that I was asking also to have had the highest stakes were usually the former ones, meaning pitching to stakeholders to get their support and, or to get to remove their blockers or, you know, pitching to top management or presenting a new strategy and so on. And those use cases seem to be consistent throughout most product professionals, regardless whether they are leaders or, or individual contributors. And one of the things that I learned was it is always, I mean, when it comes to juniors or people who haven't been doing this for a while, the struggle is usually that it is not easy to figure out how to distill the information that I want to say to the audience in a way that makes them understand and digest it and act upon it. OK, so they've got the information. People just are struggling with finding ways to formulate that and have people engage with it. Yes. And this is, this is something that is not specific to product managers or product people. This is something that I find also quite universal. And, and it's, it's one of those things that is really baffling to me because it is universal across cultures, whether you are from the UK, from Europe, from the US, from the Indian subcontinent, from North Africa, from Asia. I find this quite prevalent that people whenever they want to, they have a presentation or they want to talk, you know, they have to make a point. They don't really start by thinking, what do I want to, you know, what is, what do I want to reach? But they start by thinking, what do I want to talk about? And I think we addressed this in the last episode, but I don't get tired of saying that because it's so prevalent that, you know, a lot of people think, OK, what do I want to talk about today to this audience? And they start listing their ideas. I want to, this is, I want to introduce the topic. I want to present some background. I want to present my data. I want to present what I did. I want to present where we're going. I want to present also the stuff that we delivered. But if your audience is there, especially if you have a stakeholder who is a Hippo stakeholder, high, high opinion paid, high paid opinion in the room or like ACXCEO or a director or top management, chances are they don't necessarily care about this. They come in with a specific question like should we support this person or not? Or will this initiative make us money or not. And, and this is the question you need to find out, and this is the question you need to be answering. And this is how you you build your entire presentation. Like what do I want the audience to retain, take away after they leave the presentation? I think it's really ironic. And is it ironic? I don't know. I mean, like you look at product people and even like people in the agile profession, you know, we take these two separately. 1, You know, if you're in the agile profession, they're working close to your customers, making sure you're delivering value incrementally, all these great things. And then we go and give presentations which don't do any of those. We ignore that advice and we get into a habit of maybe preparing for a presentation which is based upon our previous experience. And then I say when we're in the moment, you know, our inability to think is probably down just to the fact that we feel threatened in some way. Not, not everybody really revels in speaking in front of people. They hate it. And so maybe a mixture of these two things, the habit and then the perceived threat and the fear when you get in there, you know, just 'cause people to deliver really lackluster presentations. And then we think about from a product person's perspective, a lot of peas in there, the product person's perspective. I did well for this this time in the morning to get that out without the stuttering that if they taught, if they taught, if they took the perspective of their presentation being more like a product and did the work of understanding stakeholders and understanding what they wanted to. And then kind of pitching it to them in such a way which is more aligned with how they would and they talk to their users or go about understanding what their users want. Maybe, you know, they would be more successful in it. It's a, it's a strange habitual thing, I think that we get into when it comes to presentations and public speaking. That's hard to break out of. It is, it is very strange because I don't know how something can be so universally incorrect across cultures, across nationalities, across languages, across, you know, upbringing backgrounds. How can everyone in the world, not everyone, but like, how can it be very, very universal? And honestly speaking, I don't know and I don't care. I just find it that it's, it's a problem that needs to be fixed. And The thing is, I, I also, one of the things that I, I realized is that we, I mean, if anyone went to some higher form of education, be it in school or in university or whatever. When you're sitting in front of the teacher or the professor, you are highly incentivized, maybe not motivated, but incentivized to listen and take notes and take away as much as possible from what the teacher, professor is saying. But as soon as you exit this education system and you are in a work environment or, or not even in a work environment, there isn't such a consequence because there is no test, There's no exam. This is this high, high incentivization or this, you know, very vivid incentive is no longer there. If you miss something in the, in the presentation of the CEO, nobody will give you a test on it. There's no, there's no MCQ exam that will ask you what did the CEO say? And that's why a lot of times we find ourselves in a, in a, if we're attending a prestige in a conference or whatever, found ourselves distracted, we find ourselves opening up our phones and checking our e-mail or doing whatever. And that's not, I'm not saying that this is a bad behaviour. I'm just saying if you look at this from a speaker's point of view, the audience no longer has a very deep incentive to listen to you. So if you are not able to hold their attention and engagement throughout the entire time that you're talking to them, chances are they will be distracted. Yeah. And this also brings, brings a new thought or a new view of things that not only do you have to manage their attention and engagement and keep it, but also you have to be very sure that, you know, how many messages or takeaways do you want to give the audience to go after they leave? Because if they're not taking notes, if they're not incentivized to listen to every word that you're saying, and if they're not. Incentivized to study and look into their notes to study what you said because there is an exam, because there isn't 1, then there is a high chance that you won't be able to tell them a lot of things and for those things to stick. I suppose if you're trying to convince a senior stakeholder of something, then you're kind of on the back foot because that person, you know, maybe like doesn't want to change their mind. People don't like changing their minds If you're trying to convince somebody of something else and sway them into a particular direction. But actually finding ways to engage that person and making it incentivized so that they are taking notes and that they are like they're willing to change their mind is a brilliant skill to be able to obtain. And are you saying then from your experience, this is a skill that which we can all learn regardless of our position in, in society or the organization or or the world, that we're able to learn these skills to keep people engaged and to make few people feel incentivized to change their mind or come with us on the journey? Yes, it definitely is. I mean, I remember a long time ago when I was working with, with, with a friend of mine in the, in his company and he was trying to introduce a new way of working to his team. And he brought me in to kind of shake things up a bit. And I sat down with him and said, OK, how are you going to, how are you going to introduce this to the team? He said, yeah, I'm going to talk to them about, OK, here, this is what we're doing, this is where we're going to, and this is what's going to change and this is how we're going to do things in the future and so on and so forth. And I was like, OK, logically speaking this is all sound, but what exactly do you expect them to do after you tell the mall of this? And he was like, yeah, I want them to essentially follow, you know, follow the new path to, you know, there's a new sheriff in town. And I wanted to figure this out. Have have you? I mean, you've been doing this for a long time, my dear friend. And I'm pretty sure you tried this before, otherwise you wouldn't have recommended it, right? He said, yeah, OK Has it ever worked in the past? He said, well, I mean, it does work, OK. Have you ever seen the change happen immediately after you do this presentation? He said, honestly, no. OK, then what have you observed? I said, yeah, a lot of questions. And chances are in a few days afterwards, everybody didn't really remember what I was trying to say. OK, that's a very good start. Let's sit down and try to figure out why this happens. And when we went through his, his presentation, I mean, to me, it was a bit obvious, but I, I, you know, I went through it with him and I, we, we realized together that he's trying to deliver so much information in one go when his message essentially was, hey, guys, there's a change happening. Either you jump on the bandwagon or not, or you're out. And when we work together to to kind of narrow down this message and his presentation to deliver this message, we had to cut away a lot of stuff because it was just distracting. Like he wanted to say, OK, this is the history. This is how much happened in the past, this is how much is going to happen in the future. And this is the future of the company. And this is going to be here are the different changes that will happen to the organization. And it's like, OK, if you speak to everyone about all the changes that you expect to happen, somebody will have a heart attack. You know, this is you've been thinking about this for for the past few months or, and weeks, but they're hearing this for maybe the first or second time. So you have to kind of be gentle and and essentially focus your message on something very specific. So we reworked it entirely to listen guys, changes ahead. And we have to get with the times and we're going to change a lot of things. And that's why I'm bringing new people to do this change. It was received much differently, like the the discussions and questions afterwards were very different than the usual. And you can see that people who were were afraid of change, and that's normal, but they were kind of cautiously approaching it a little bit, at least in the discussion. And the surprising fact was, you know, I I didn't know it during the time, but after the presentation, after the discussion, you know, was debriefing with him. And he was like, yeah, remember this, This person who kept asking questions and was asking questions about how we're going to change and what she can do, what they can do to change and so on, and said, yeah, that was very positive. He said this person was usually the person who was most resistant to this kind of change. And, and I was surprised because. And he was also surprised and, and he said, yeah, maybe we did something right this time. Yeah. I said, yeah, this is what happens when you kind of move, move in a different way and start thinking about your message in a different way. But I think that's the challenge, isn't that? I think we all approach it logically, and maybe that's why it's so prevalent in many people that you engage with, is that we approach these things in a very logical fashion and think that logic well out, when actually it's a much more emotive than that. And it's also an element here of being able to focus. You can follow through all the logical steps, but what's the one message? And in that instance, the one message being we are changing. You are either coming with us or you're not. I think it's a really powerful message. It makes your options very clear and then forces people to understand, OK, well, what are we going to do? Am I going to go ahead with this or am I going to look to find another job? And I think then some of the challenge then is, you know, keeping that message real and helping people exit gracefully, right? So you can get the people in that you need. So if we took that example. Of that focus and let's say you are a product person you are trying to convince a senior stakeholder what are the is one of the early steps that you would then do in supporting somebody based upon the discovery work you've done actually helping them focus on what the key message is or is there steps before that? Yes. So first of all, I would, whatever I would do with if, if I, if I need to, I mean, there there's a thing, there's the situation that everybody in product faces. You know, you, you, you have prepared a certain narrative and you go into a presentation with one of your stakeholders who is maybe the CEO or top management or whatever. And you know, 2 minutes or maybe a minute into your, your presentation, they say, OK, listen, I want you to skip the narrative and just go straight to the conclusion. Go to the last slide. You know, spare me this time. Go to the last slide. And I've obviously faced that before and I've talked to people who have faced that multiple times. And this is usually a sign that we're not really getting to the point fast enough. And one of one of the people I worked with, they had this problem. And what we, what we worked on together is to flip it, like flip the situation. You can call it whatever you want, the inverted pyramid, don't bury the lead or whatever. But I like to call, I like to, you know, tap into my background and culture. Being from Egypt, you have the saying which is start from the end. Spare me, spare me the fluff. Start from the end. What is the bottom line? And that is what I genuinely always recommend. Start from the end. OK, you go in. If you want to talk to a top level stakeholder and you want to tell them, hey, I need you to, I need to course correct or we are, we are moving in the wrong direction and we need to change things or this is my new strategy or whatever you want, this is how you start. OK, listen, we are here today because I want you to understand that the results of our discovery is showing that. In the direction in which we're heading is not OK. Start from the end. You don't have to tell them how you want them to discovery how many people you talk to, how many interviews you did, what are the initial findings, and put this all aside. Start from the end and then you know what will happen. They will start having questions in their heads and if you're able to anticipate those questions and then build your narrative based on those questions, you will have their attention. So if you, if, for example, I mean, 1 of this person that I worked with, they wanted, they wanted to tell them, hey, the analysis is not working. The analysis shows that what treatment is not working. We're building a loyalty pro or where we were thinking to build a loyalty program. Everybody we've had experience with it. We shut it down in the past and everybody thinks it's going to work, but the data shows it will not work. So this is what you start. And then this, this friend of mine, this this colleague of mine did that and say, hey, today we're here to talk about the recent efforts of our investigation in the loyalty program know whether it's going to work. And to start from the end. What we found is it won't it won't work. And the question was the next question was, OK, why would it not work? Then, you know, say, OK, the question they didn't even the stakeholder didn't even get a chance to ask the question because my colleague built it as such that OK, why won't it work? Which was immediately the question that the CEO had because 12345 the analysis shows, yeah, there is potential. But when we talk to our customers, we found that they will not take part in it because everybody's looking to build their own loyalty program. Nobody wants an open, you know, an open platform loyalty program now anymore, even though the users are interested in it. OK, And how did we come about this information? How did you come to this conclusion? We did it because we talked to this. Here are the list of customers we talked to. Those are the ones who are happy and those are the ones who are who, who are, who like the idea so much that they're building their own loyalty program. And therefore, if we have, if we don't have those, those 7 customers or partners in our program, we don't have a program and the story. It was clear, obviously it was backed up by data and everything, but that, you know, instead of starting with, we did an analysis of all of the customers and all of the users. And we found that users, you know, 80% of users like the loyalty program and 20% were not very interested. And based on our data, there was no real fraud happening and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then the customers were not going to support. So in conclusion, it's not it's not going to work. Half the audience has already fallen asleep or at least felt confused. OK, what the hell are you trying to tell me? I just want to know, will we move forward with this damn thing or not? So when we flipped it, when we flipped this whole situation and said, OK, start from the end, You have the stakeholders attention. I've also had a similar experience myself in the past. And where I, you know, I want to you have you always have this this issue of convincing stakeholders, hey, guys, the things that you're asking for is too much and we cannot deliver that on time. And this argument never ends. Yeah, but what the hell are is the team doing all day long except other than working on the stuff that I'm asking for? Because the stuff that I'm asking for is the top priority should be the top priority because I'm the one bringing in the money or whatever. Even if it's not said explicitly, we all of us know that you have such a stakeholder in the room. This is what they're trying to say, or at least this is what they're thinking. And one of the things that I thought about, OK, how can I, how can I deliver this message to those stakeholders in a way that they understand? And that is just, you know, that's clear enough for them to say, OK, I get it. So what I did was put together. OK, I put together all of the requests. I sized them up. I learned something from a different planning process and I decided to bring it in, which is we made-up a fictitious currency. Because, you know, the stakeholders were commercial people. So we made-up a fictitious currency, which is essentially story points, but we just called it a currency. We gave it a, a name like, you know, PA EUR, you know, yeah, PA dollars or whatever. Yeah. And it's OK. Listen guys, this is everything you're asking for is, is our shopping list. And if we sum up everything in our shopping list, which is all the requests you're asking for, all the ideas that we're going to do, we will have to spend 1370 PA EUR. But if you look at our capacity, if we use the same currency to estimate our capacity in terms of engineering, we only have €250 to spend or, you know, PA euros to spend. And therefore we can only cover a small fraction of it. And all of a sudden those commercial people were like, shit, we are poor. This is a direct quote. I was even, I mean, this is a direct quote from a chief sales officer I worked with before. And I was preparing for this. And he called me up, I mean, back when we had phones on our desks and he called me up on The Voice. I have though, I think you're working late today because you're preparing for our discussion tomorrow. I said yeah. And he said, yeah, OK, how how much do we get to spend on, on our on our shopping list? And he said, yeah, you get 30 PA EUR and he's like, holy shit. I thought I would have like, I don't know, 250 or something only for me. And I was like, no, that's all of us have 150 PA euros to spend. He's like, holy shit, up the we are poor. I said, yes, we are poor. Finally. I mean, I was thank you, God, Allah, everything you know, finally it came across and this is, you know, you have to speak the the their language. You have to think about, OK, what's it for them? How do they understand this? They understand money. OK, let's make it into money. So if I did just dissect that for a moment thing about starting with the end, basically starting with the end of mind and kind of working backwards and maybe starting with the punch line rather than the, the, the build up to the joke and then kind of working back and dissecting it. And then what was interesting about the second little story you shared with us then is that one, there was a certain degree of preparation work you were doing before which wasn't working on some slides. It was actually coming up with some form of activity to engage people and you're having conversations with the people who are going to be present in that session like prior to it. So from that, can we in further, yeah, it's OK to find different ways to engage people based upon their lived experience, based upon their context. And that just rocking up with a fancy looking deck and maybe starting with the impact and working backwards sometimes won't cut the mustard. And that, yeah, we need to find more ways to engage the audience than just just telling them a nice story and showing them some slides. It's not OK. It is absolutely mandatory. It's not not just OK. I mean, like I said, if you don't hold the attention of your audience for the entire time they're listening to you and they're with you in the room, you lose them. And if you lose them, then your message will not come across. I was speaking to, I mean, I, I, I had a bit of coaching sessions in the last few weeks and one of the people I was talking to was, was preparing a presentation for the, for an event. You know, you know, when a company does an event to kind of show off their stuff and invite their stakeholders and customers and partners and whatnot. And The thing is what this person really prepared a very nice presentation. The content was there. The, the script was awesome or the, the stuff that they said was awesome. The information is very crisp, to the point and everything. But the thing, the thing that was missing was essentially where, why? Why should I care? You know why? OK, this is interesting stuff, but why should I care about it? Me being in the audience, and if you don't think about your audience from from the starting point, this is what happens. You might have a very clear set of information that you're talking about. You might be very concise in everything you wrote. You might have very clean slides on how you're working, but if you don't tell the audience why they should care and very early, why should they care that you're a good product manager or that you are you have a strong product organization, which was the message that this person was trying to deliver. If you don't tell them why they should care and why this is important for them, you have almost lost them. Or at least you're, you're sitting in front of a, an audience who's kind of watching a YouTube video about raccoons, you know, and they might be interesting, interested in raccoons, or they might be naturally curious. And that's, that's why they're listening to you because they're learning something new. But this is not the majority of people. This is an absolute minority. And you don't go on stage to speak to the minority of your audience. You want to cover most of them. And therefore you have to explicitly tell them why this is important for them. Why is it important for the stakeholders to understand that we as a product organization are effective and efficient in delivering stuff for them? It's essentially because, well, remember those, the situation in the past where I, I, I, I don't want to reveal in a lot of information because I, I'm not supposed to, but you know, nobody's. So I'll be a bit vague, but let's, let's put it this way. Hey, audience, remember when we had those big crashes in the last two years, recovering from them and this is something, you know, everybody faces every once in a while. Recovering from them took took us five days. When we change our process, first of all, we change it that those crashes don't happen and also that we don't, you don't have to wait for us five days to recover. You only have to wait half a day or a few hours to recover. This is something you know, OK. If you're in the audience and you have no idea what tech and product is, but you, you understand when your, when your product is not working and you tell them, hey, our way of working ensures that our product is working and that your business goes on a business as usual without interruptions. OK, They can understand that when you, you know, obviously another thing that this person had in their, in their narrative was remember, I mean, something that we introduced together was a story. And they told me, hey, there's this, there's this very specific story with a customer and a partner where there was a bit of confusion of whose responsibility was what in a very specific functionality. You know, who, who is responsible for creating the demand, that, who's responsible for creating the supply in this very specific platform, who, who delivers the data and who does the analysis and consumes the data. And the problem was there was a bit of confusion there because the, the, the partner and the, the customer would in different contexts, they would switch roles. You know, when you're, for example, you know, when you're working in user generated content, You know, if you, if you were posting videos on YouTube, sometimes you are the creator, but sometimes you're also the viewer. Similar to this analogy, those, but imagine this with institutions, not, not just with individual persons. And this unclarity in the situation was solved by, you know, the, the the product team sitting down, analysing the problem, understanding, talking to all of the partners, all of the users, all of the customers and figuring out the different use cases. So this person was doing the presentation was also saying, hey, we also do a lot of discovery and this was a perfect story to tell. Hey, remember guys when we had this confusion and the functionality was built in a very weird way that was confusing you? When you were trying to, you know, deliver, deliver material, deliver the data and also consuming the data through discovery, we managed to iron this out. And now it's super clear. And the audience obviously understood, oh, yeah, this is very clear and we understand it. And yeah, thank you very much. We love how you work. And this is the thing, if you are clear on what you're trying to communicate and you think from the audience's point of view, and you also tell stories, you know, telling stories is something one of the is one of those things that's highly underrated. And I have this impression or feeling that it is a bit frowned upon. You know, it feels like you're you're in, in how do you call it in, in English fairy tale hour, you know, you're telling a bedtime story. You're not. It's, it's story is when stories is essentially if you talk about people having done or said something to other people. And when you think about this, essentially we're talking about gossip. To tell a story is to gossip a little bit. Yes, of course you can have the arc of tension, the protagonist, the antagonist, the year's journey, all of this stuff. But this is for the context of business and product. This is a bit of overkill. If you can do it, it's great. You'll be awesome, but you can still be awesome without having to go through this excruciating learning. But, and this is by, you know, cutting through the chase and thinking gossip. Human beings are extreme. We are hard wired to be extremely interested in gossip for whatever reason. I don't know, maybe it's evolution. It doesn't really matter, but fact fact is there are multiple billion dollar euro # industries in the world that are entirely based in gossip. Think news, think celebrity gossip. All of those too much if you watch football, all of those analysis studios talking about who did what and how they played and whatnot. This is all gossip. And this is this is very engaging for human beings and therefore if you want to engage the audience, you have to not only deliver your point but deliver stories, IE. So our time is moving towards the end. And what I'm wondering is if I'm in a situation where I am delivering a message to key stakeholders, senior stakeholders, trying to sway them towards something that I, I would like and I want to get their opinion. I'm going to get their alignment on. And I've taken on board some of your advice. I've done some storytelling. I've started with the end. I'm looking to keep them engaged every step of the way. And then all of a sudden I just kind of realized that I've, I've lost them, but I don't really know why, but in the moment, right then and there, I feel like I've lost them. What advice do you give to people when they find themselves in those moments? The one advice that I can give people that if they, if, I mean, I can give lots of advice, but if, if, if there's one thing you should remember is if you feel that you have lost your high level stakeholder audience, then jump to the conclusion. Try to get to the conclusion as fast as possible. This is if you are, if you're already in the situation and you realize that you lost them because you haven't really structured your presentation as such. Ideally or not ideally you the more sane advice that I would give is prepare with the conclusion upfront. Start from the end. We are here to talk about this. You are here to talk about our next release and I'm here to tell you that we will not make it or we will make it on time or the requests that you have the CEO wants to put in our road map. We analyzed it. Here's why it's going to work. Or here's what it will work, and here's why. Or it will not work, and here's why. Yeah, this is, this is essentially the essence of talking to high level stakeholders. They don't have a lot of time, they don't have a lot of attention like all people and they are especially focused on the questions in their head. So I mean, sometimes actually, when I have a presentation to a high level stakeholder who is internal, who I know, I asked them, Hey, what do you want to know before the meeting, before the presentation, in a few days or whatever, while I'm preparing or before I even start, Listen, we have this update. What are the things you want to know about? Or I did this and asked what, what are the questions you want me to answer upfront? And a lot of times they answer and they say, Hey, I want to know this and this and this. And thank you very much. This is this is how I'm going to build my story. Question number one, is it going to work? Yes, it's going to work. No, it's not going to work. Question #2 why and question #3 how did I decide that this is the reason? So this is, for example, I mean, this is usually a very known template statement reason. And how did I get to this reason? Another way of if you want to convince it to do something, the easiest story template, storytelling template is Houston. We have a problem. Listen, guys, we have a problem. The problem is X, and the reason this problem is important is why. And the reason it's important for you, not only for me, is X. And the reason why we should tackle it now is this. Therefore, the way we should tackle it is that, and why we think it's going to work is this. So if you follow those steps, the problem, why it's important, why it's important for you, why it's important now here's here's what will happen if we solve it. Here's the solution. You're, you're, you're more or less golden. If you follow this template, you will be described as a strong storyteller or this when people say you have to tell a better story, follow this template. You will, you will tell a better story. I can almost feel people kind of going back 60 seconds on their podcasting app just to kind of just make some notes about what those things were, because there's some really solid advice, really sort of advice. I'm really practical as well. I think. Yeah, we do get lost in the. You know, let's break things down to a very logical set of statements or points we're going to tell. But actually then when it comes to storytelling, there are different ways that we can approach it. And I think what we're what's coming through from me really loud and clear is, you know, it's starting with something emotive, something, something captivates people explaining the problem or explaining the outcome, the impact, and then an only then kind of giving them some of the information behind that. Because then you can get people engaged in the first few seconds and hopefully they will remain engaged throughout. And there was something I remember many years ago, I can't think what it was. Maybe it's watching something about stand up. I can't remember. But you know, if you can get people engaged, you can get people laughing in the first few seconds. Then after that, yeah, the challenge is kind of keeping them engaged, which is a damn sight easier than trying to pick up their engagement whilst they decided the best thing to do is go and check the sports results on their phone or in some whatever way distract themselves. They thank you very much for coming on and sharing some of your your stories and your tips and your advice. There's a lot there for people to digest and say. Thank you very much for taking the time on this. What is it today, Tuesday morning, this episode? Yes, Tuesday is and this episode's been recorded on the 26th, so this is coming out next week. So if you listen to this on the Thursday, this was recorded last week. In our general drive to keep our episodes fresh and keep the content real, we are still keeping that lead time between recording and release very, very short. So please do get onto social media and let us know your questions, your thoughts about this episode. But Abdo, if there was something you wanted to leave our audience with, something you feel that and it is important for them to remember and retain about the time we spent together today, what would it be? It would be if you are going to talk to an audience, be it two people or 2000, always think what do I want the audience to take away after they leave? My my presentation and make it one thing because chances are they will only take this one thing with them. Awesome advice Abdo. If people wanted to communicate with you, ask you questions, employ your services, how should they go about doing that? I'm available on LinkedIn. You can find me under Abdo Wahba ABDOWAHBA and just write me. I'm quite responsive there. I'm also write a lot about presentations and products and so on. So see you there. Excellent. Wow, everyone go and do that. You know, if it's something you're going to do now, like one, go and connect with Abdul and LinkedIn 2. Find a post from the Prodigality podcast and give it a like or maybe even add a comment because your engagement and your comments, reactions on social media are what keep this podcast going. So thank you very much everyone for listening, for going onto social media, for connecting with Abdo Abdo. Thank you very much for coming along and sharing all of your wisdom with all of us. We'll be back again next Thursday for more fantastic content from another fantastic person. So we look forward to giving you something valuable. Then. Thank you everybody.

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Ben Maynard

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