Public Speaking: Creating your Content
How to create unique, practical, and actionable content
In this month’s post, I’ll share a behind-the-scenes look into my preparation process for my first public-facing conference talk at this year’s Women in Product Conference!
In this mini-series, I’ll cover the following topics—as a minimum:
Creating content
Practicing your talk
Preparing for live audience Q&A
Day-of routine
In this first post, I’ll share my perspectives on creating content.
Read until the end, to access a worksheet that I shared with conference attendees for usage after the conference.
Identify topics you’re passionate about
I recommend going through this exercise on traditional pen and paper.
Set a timer for 15-minutes, and write down a list of topics that you have expertise about and are interested in sharing with others. At this time, don’t think about the title of your talk.
Identify constraints
If you’re planning on submitting a conference proposal, then your submission likely needs to be aligned with the conference theme or topic.
Conference organizers will likely give your talk a timebox, so a time limitation is also something to take into account.
Identify the intersection between ideas and constraints
Based on the constraints you have, use this information to eliminate topic ideas that are not viable.
You may also use this information to get more specific about topics.
For example, you might be interested in talking about the topic of “career growth for product managers.”
Given this year’s Women in Product Conference theme was “Evolve and Excel,” you can take the topic in a couple of ways:
Growing from senior individual contributor (IC) to people leader
Product management in the context of the age of generative AI
Building secure products
Leveraging PM skills to start your own company or join a startup
Create an outline
Build out the foundation of your talk.
Start with your thesis. What is the one key takeaway of your content? Put another way, if someone were to listen to your talk, what action would you want them to take afterwards to change (positively influence) their behaviour?
Identify the main arguments to support your thesis. As a rule of thumb, a solid argument takes approximately 5-minutes to flesh out with sufficient context and detail.
Fill in details
Describe your stories in vivid detail. To do so, I imagine that I’m sharing my experience with my past self, as if she were to go through this experience and turn to me for advice.
Be courageous and challenge your willingness to be unabashedly vulnerable. You want to establish trust with your audience as quickly as possible and retain it throughout your talk. One approach to do so is by sharing the catalyst to your call for adventure (that is, the root conflict of your experience), so your audience joins you in your quest towards resolution.
Befriend Generative AI
To preface, I didn’t go this route.
However, I recommend using tools, such as ChatGPT, as a sounding board to critique your ideas, your prose, or even help yourself get unstuck from writer’s block.
Thanks for reading this month’s post!
If you’re joining me from Women in Product Conference, please find my journaling prompts worksheet, which I shared with attendees to use throughout and after the conference.