How to structure a presentation: what are the steps?

You structure a presentation in three stages: foundation, creation and preparation. Slides come late in this process.

One of the biggest mistakes is to start in a slide program such as PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides. The foundation comes first. Then you build the storyline. Only then do you design slides. I described this process in My creation framework for presentations.

What should you decide before you open your slide program?

Decide three things: your audience, your goal and your core message.

1. Audience: who listens, what they already know, what their pain points are and what interests them. A presentation is a product for your audience. You cannot build a great product without knowing your buyers inside out.
2. Goal: two goals, in fact. What you want to achieve, and what your audience gains from listening.
3. Core message: the main message of the whole presentation in one simple sentence. Only when you know it can you build a presentation that conveys it.

Next comes the storyline: the main pillars of your story and the order in which they flow. Build it in a note editor, on a whiteboard or in an online whiteboard such as Miro. After that, you open the slide program and work on copy and images.

In which order should you present your points?

Start with the answer, then back it up. This is the Pyramid Principle, a method developed by Barbara Minto at the consulting firm McKinsey.

Many founders tell their story in chronological order: "First we did X, then we learned Y, and now we're doing Z." That order rarely matches the way an audience processes information. The Pyramid Principle has three steps:

1. Conclusion first: the main point your audience should remember.
2. Grouped arguments: the reasons or proof points that support it.
3. Evidence: the details for each argument, once the structure is clear.

Compare two openings. The chronological one: "We started building in 2022, tested with 30 customers, iterated, and finally found product-market fit." The pyramid one: "We've found strong product-market fit in a fast-growing $2B market. Let me show you how we got there." Product-market fit means the product clearly meets real demand in its market.

The principle works the same way for an email, a sales narrative, a team meeting or a keynote. More in Why your presentation and pitch falls flat.

Why do the opening and the ending matter most?

People give the most weight to what comes first and what comes last. The middle fades.

Psychology calls this the primacy effect and the recency effect. What comes first shapes perception. What comes last dominates recall. In a 30-minute pitch, investors remember the opening narrative and the final takeaway. Slide 14 rarely survives.

Large language models (LLMs), the AI systems that read and write text, show the same pattern. Give one a very long document, and the early instructions and the most recent prompt receive disproportionate weight. Information in the middle loses influence. Researchers describe this as "lost in the middle". I compared both in LLMs have the same cognitive bias as humans. Three design rules follow:

1. Opening: design it as the frame for everything that follows.
2. Ending: design it as the anchor people take home.
3. Middle: compress it until only the essential signal remains.

Founders often add detail to increase certainty. Executives extend decks to increase credibility. Both raise the mental load and lower what people retain.

How much content should a presentation have?

Less than you think, and only your strongest material.

New information disappears fast. The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, a model of how quickly people forget, shows it: people may forget up to 50% of new information within an hour, and up to 70% within 24 hours. Think of the seat number on your train ticket. A few minutes after you checked it, you check again.

Two consequences follow:

• Repeat your core message: said only once, it is easily lost.
• Simplify: communicate at least ten times simpler than you think you need to.

The pop singer Dua Lipa put the editing rule into four words: "All killer, no filler." Leave out every slide that is there only because a template says "you have to have this slide". One mediocre piece of content can lower the perception of your whole story.

How should slides look when you present live?

Slides for a live talk show strong visuals and almost no text, so the audience can take them in at a glance.

A deck that people read on their own is a handout deck. It has to work without you. When you present live, you are the messenger. At a series of startup pitch events with more than 20 pitches, I saw only one founder whose slides were made for a verbal pitch. All the others presented their handout decks.

A handout deck on screen competes with you for the audience's attention. A simple check helps, which I call the Glance Test: can listeners take in everything on a slide in one to two seconds? If not, the slide was made for reading. Use no text, or at most six words when you need to stress a statement. More in Why are you fighting with your own slides?.

How do you prepare once the structure stands?

Fine-tune, then rehearse. Preparation is the stage many presenters neglect, and it is a main success factor of a presentation.

• Fine-tune: test the presentation with friends and family, and adjust images and wording based on what you learn.
• Rehearse: as often as you can, and record yourself while you do it.
• Simulate: walk through the situation in your mind before you enter the room.