Top Tips to Wow Your Board as a Product Leader

WHERE TO: You impressing your board with compelling presentations.

WHERE FROM: Feeling anxious about your board presentations or struggling to effectively communicate your product strategy and progress in a way that resonates with high-level executives.

WHERE NEXT: Improving your board presentations by focusing on their key concerns, simplifying your slides, and building strong relationships with board members.

Is your first board meeting coming up soon? Feeling nervous about it? Or maybe it's already your 20th but you want tips to improve. Maybe you need to coach less experienced colleagues taking their first steps in leadership.

I was lucky to get some fantastic training on what makes a successful board presentation while I was CPO in Residence at Insight Partners. Many of the product leaders I’ve coached have struggled with understanding how to shine in front of the board and there isn’t a lot of content out there on templates for the product slides in a board deck. I’ve shared some common tips time and time again with my clients and even created a helpful guide to help build them up as trusted product leaders. Now it’s time to share these helpful hints with you. Ready?

Build Empathy for Your Board of Directors

The first rule of effective communication is to know your audience. Start by reflecting on the personas who make up the board. You quickly realize these C-level professionals operate at a much higher level than the nitty-gritty of daily activities your internal partners worry about. Their job is to make sure company leaders manage their available capital properly. They therefore focus on revenue targets, operational expenses, fiscal reports, and financial projections. This is how they're able to fulfill their fiduciary duties.

But as a product leader, you don’t spend your day looking at financial figures. Instead, you’re dealing with adoption metrics, wireframes, Kanban boards, and roadmaps (or flight plans!). While these are all useful tools at your level, they mean very little to the board, as they don’t directly relate to their goals.

This is where the biggest challenge lies: in overcoming the disconnect between the technical focus of product leaders and the financial perspective of the board. This is the mountain before you, can you overcome it? You must figure out how to enter their world, speak in their terms, and present answers to their questions in a manner they are comfortable with. If you can bridge the gap and do this successfully, they will see you as someone they can trust to deploy the company’s often HUGE investment in product development effectively.

Build Trust and Confidence

The main goal of your presentation is to instill trust and confidence in you, the product leader. It’s an opportunity to show them that you have a solid grasp of what is going on and how to move the company forward. That you will make judicious decisions based on real-world data and audacious company goals.

Your job is to connect product and company strategy and you can do this by focusing on two main points: how product sustains top-line growth and how product maximizes bottom-line margins and EBIDTA (profitability).

In your presentation, start by reminding the board of your previous targets. Remember that they only think about your company once a quarter, so provide context and remind them about the basics. Follow up by showing how you did against the targets, and include some of your learnings along the way. Finally, describe how you plan to allocate resources to accomplish new goals.

Remember to provide the right amount of information. It’s tempting to include everything to show your expertise, but remember this golden rule with board members: less is more. Focus on high-level information, leaving out the details. This helps them get an accurate grasp of the situation. This is why it’s called an EXECUTIVE SUMMARY… it’s brief but paints a full picture.

However, don’t be fooled into believing that high-level information is all you need; be like a scout and always be prepared for anything. Board members will likely ask you follow-up questions on your presentation and it’s essential that you’ve done your homework and can answer these effortlessly. You may share detailed data in an appendix or simply have it available to share if called upon, it’s your choice.

Finally, remember to align with the board’s perspective and convey information in financial terms. Your board thinks about value in three ways: increasing revenue, protecting revenue, and reducing or avoiding costs. This is the mindset you must adopt when discussing matters with them. Focus on business and financial value instead of customer value and convey business metrics instead of product metrics.

Here are a few examples of changes you can apply:

Adoption → Revenue, ARR, Revenue recognition

NPS → Churn, Net Revenue Retention, LTV

Headcount → Cost, Gross Margin, EBIDTA

Customer groups → Market Segment, TAM Opportunities

As a product leader, shifting from a customer mindset to a business one is a significant transition, but it is a required step as you move up the organization and need to earn the trust and confidence of your board of directors..

Build Effective Board Slides

Overall, your slides should follow this basic structure: What? So What? Now what?. In practical terms, this means describing the facts of an event, analyzing, making sense of them, drawing insights, and finally applying your lessons for effective next steps.

The slides for board presentations should be more dense in information than a typical product presentation. This is the type of content that suits your audience’s needs, so adjust to serve the people you’re talking to. Remember that decks are often provided to the board in advance, so make them work without your talk track.

Your slides must match the overarching narrative of the CEO and other stakeholders, such as the CFO, Head of Sales, and Head of Marketing. Product slides often come towards the end, after finance and sales, so make sure your slides reinforce what was already said. To guarantee you’re aligned, talk your numbers over with Sales and the CFO beforehand.

Albeit the denser slides, remember that you are still presenting to human beings. Find ways to introduce storytelling elements in your presentation, as these help you foster empathy and buy-in. For example, use the slides’ headlines and sub-headlines to create a cohesive storyline throughout the presentation, and include a takeaway at the bottom of each slide to reinforce key points. Make use of strategic images in your slides, by sharing data as pictures with insights - always making sure this data doesn’t disagree with your conclusions!

When you’re presenting, talk in 45-second bursts and check for responses. This gives your board an opportunity to digest what you’ve presented and you a chance to get instant feedback that you can use throughout the rest of the presentation. It also gives you time to catch your breath which is important for your ability to present full thoughts ;)

Build Relationships With the Board

Presenting to the board is hard - I get it. Even when applying the tips above, you probably still wonder if you’re doing it right. An experienced product leader I coached years ago asked me how they could be sure they were providing good board slides given that they had never seen anyone else’s confidential decks.

I advised them to think about their presentation as a product and to apply the product skills they had developed over the years. Like that product leader, you should do the first thing every product manager should do to improve their product: talk to users! In this case, your users are the board members and they have intimate knowledge of what they want and need.

Ask for their feedback, question them about how they think YOU can improve, what additional information they are looking for, and inquire about what other product leaders are doing that they appreciate which you can adopt.

This iterative attitude brings about two valuable benefits. It improves your slides and presentations over time, and it helps you establish a deeper relationship with board members. More exposure will hopefully increase their confidence in you and grant you a more leeway when you need their support. You won’t always have all the data to support your ideas, and if your board trusts you, it will go a long way.

Finally, nurturing a good relationship with board members is key at your current company but it can also prove useful as you evolve in your career. Chances are these people will eventually sit on the boards of other companies. Having created a bond with you, they're likely to remember you and your summaries when they need to hire. It’s a simple way to create a strong reputation and an ever-growing network of decision influencers.

Conclusion

Presenting to the board becomes easier if you keep in mind some basic aspects of human psychology and communication and you set your goal of building trust and confidence.

Your goal with these presentations is to earn trust in you but avoid focusing on that. Instead, work to serve others. Give them the information they need, in the format that is right for them, and that serves their goals.

Treat them professionally and bring your A-game to each of these presentations. But always remember that you’re a person talking to a room full of other people. Empathy, clear communication, and putting yourself in each other’s shoes are all little changes that take you a long way.

If you need to present to the board but still struggle with it, I am here to help. I invite you to check my programs to find the right fit for you or schedule a FREE 30-minute chat to talk about your current situation. You can also always send me an email at [email protected] to share your story or a question.