🎤Public Speaking: Preparing for Live Audience Q&A
How to reinforce your content and frame it in the context of Q&A
In this month’s post, I’ll continue sharing 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:
Preparing for live audience Q&A—this is today’s post!
Day-of routine
In today’s post, I’ll focus on sharing my routine for nailing down speaking to a virtual audience.
Let’s get started.
Getting ready
Reflect on content you cut out
There is a high likelihood that the content that you decided to cut out from your talk is ripe for your audience to follow up with you on during post-talk Q&A.
Review your content a few times, while asking yourself, “What might an audience member be curious to learn more about?”
After all, people love getting into the details.
Ask your beta testers
If you demo your talk to trusted connections, after they have shared feedback about your talk with you, ask them what questions that have for you, or what they would have liked to learn more about if you could add five minutes to your talk.
Structuring your responses
Reinforce key messaging
Q&A is an opportune time to reiterate key messages or takeaways from your talk, with your audience.
Know your talk’s thesis statement and key supporting arguments like the back of your hand.
Then, whenever it makes contextual sense to, bring your response back to one of those key messages.
Organize your response
From Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast podcast, I learned this three-part framework for structuring your stance:
What? (Your idea/stance)
So what? (Why is it relevant to your audience?)
Now what? (What comes next?)
Practice using the framework at work
Get accustomed to structuring responses to questions by practicing at work.
Have a presentation coming up? Running a workshop? Helping a new colleague with their onboarding?
The beautiful thing about the framework is that it’s applicable to a variety of situations, especially in the workplace.
Above all else, remember that you are the expert of your talk. While you have the microphone, own it!
If you have additional tips that you would like to share, please do so in the comments below.