Techniques
Public speaking comes up from time to time. I mean, it should. You really should speak, in a public setting, on purpose, on occasion.
"But I'm a programmer, not a public speaker"
Yes but sometimes you have to sell the team on something, like a full rewrite or even just a refactor.
Harnessing your public speaking skills today makes you better in front of a crowd tomorrow. As with every skill, the only way to get better is to do it - just like weightlifting - you don't get stronger by knowing the techniques, but by practicing them in reality. Anyway, here's a technique.
Jobs Says
So let's get to it. I found this quote from an article I can no longer find, ages ago on hackernews or somewhere:
As told by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, these 5 things are essential to all presentations: a headline, a bad guy, a simple visual, a demonstration, and a memorable moment. And don't forget to sell dreams, not products.
Your headline is what you're talking about. Visuals, especially visuals are simpler now thanks to AI tools, the demonstration is up to you, the memorable moment - maybe I'll come back to that someday. But the bad guy. That's today.
This is probably the world's most unbeatable sales tip. It's the vacuum salesman that pours dirt on your carpet then dares your old vacuum to pick it up. When it can't, he declares your old vacuum useless, calling it broken (the bad guy), then he pulls out his new cool device and introduces the good guy. He sells you on the dream of truly clean carpets.
Who's Your Baddy?
When I talk about software quality, which is still a critical issue, even in the world of agentic AIs building software for you, my "bad guy" is not the bad software or quality defects. It's the downstream effects of low quality software. The further down you look, the compounding issues close in tighter until you've got an expensive mess and an inoperable software product.
I encourage you to look for the most obvious problems as well. Jobs would show you something from the industry, then show his new sleek thing. He would show you last year's model and touch on the worst parts, then show this year's model and convince the audience that they've solved it in a way you never thought possible.
When I'm giving a software demo - it's important to not just show a new feature, but to frame it as though we saw an injustice in our software - our users were unable to do this critical task. Build up a tiny bit of empathy, which is shockingly easy, then deliver the solution with much greater effect.
The Back & Forth
Steve Jobs would go back and forth. The bad thing, then the good thing. The bad thing, and then another good thing.
This is tech, so we're not going to compare our new feature to something honestly vile - it's not a genocide verses the new user product addition. Instead of painting a bleak picture so we can save the day, you can describe a mild injustice, frame the solution, then describe a different aspect of the problem before showing how the solution solves that as well.
People don't know how good they have it until they remember how bad it was before.