Bringing Your A-game When Talking Data Science to C-Level Execs
By: Casey Whorton
Tags: Presentation Tips, Communication, Data Scientist, Humor, Career Development

Photo by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash

Your data science project has been getting a lot of attention and now you have been invited to present the topic to executive leadership. The anxiety radiating from your teammates and direct leadership tell you that there is something different about this meeting.

No worries. After being in this situation before I can give a few pointers so you can bring your “A-game” when talking data science to C-level executives. (Note: “C-level” refers to company organization members that have titles starting with “C”, such as the Chief Executive Officer, or CEO)

Start with these:

Executives usually have a long career with modest beginnings and are completely reasonable people. If you were promoted to CEO today, would you become totally unreasonable? No. So calm down.

You are being asked to present because you are the expert on the project.

Your C-suite partners are usually thinking about your data science project in a much larger context than what you are used to.

You’re allowed to be honest about your lack of knowledge on a subject, and you’re allowed to ask questions for clarification.

Being a Data Scientist means being a scientist. You are a seeker of truth through evidence, and you shouldn’t take the results of your executive meeting personally as long as you did your job well.

Here’s how you bring your “A-game”:

S tart strong with a bullet-point summary slide showing results, conclusions, and key-findings

That’s right. This is not like your presentations in college, this is more like an elevator pitch in a very tall building. For example, you could lead with slide with statements like this:

Using a pre-trained natural language machine learning model, department X was able to filter claims missing detail Y by 20%, bypassing the need for manual intervention

Monthly savings are approximately X hours, Y$

You’re giving away the end of the story, sure, but you’ll be backing up that story with other slides. Even if a result is shocking, you want that up front because you’ll want questions and time to explain the result.

Create slides to backup each of your summary’s points

If you say that you tested a hypothesis and said it was false in your summary, make another slide that restates the point, but add context and visualizations. You can add a lot of detail to each one of your points, and this is where you’ll be providing your evidence. Make sure you can easily navigate to your evidence in the slide deck.

Remember: “Show, Don’t Tell.” This means provide a visual representation for each of the points you want to convey. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Do not, and I absolutely mean do not copy & paste huge tables or spreadsheets into your slide deck. I’ve never seen this go well and yet, people still try to fit impossible-to-read tables into executive reviews. Do that and here is what will happen:

Your audience will ignore the tables and information entirely, or

Your audience will focus on a small detail in the table and spend valuable time discussing it instead of your project’s value

Stay Solution Oriented

Now might seem like a good time to list all the hoops you had to jump through to get the data into a working state for modeling or analysis. Instead, you should just simply state the problem and give details for a proposed solution. (If you don’t have a proposed solution, just say what your plan is to research a solution.)

Problem oriented statement:

“Department X keeps all their data in separate files, so we have to get all of them individually and combine them, and sometimes data is missing and we have to clean it, and nobody cares that it takes me hours to do it, so we should fix that. I mean, even Department X takes forever to assemble the data to answer even basic business questions.”

Solution oriented statement:

“We want to speed up analysis and model training using the customer service department’s data, which is difficult due to how siloed it is. We can use a database tool to store the data tables all the same way, so that both the data scientists and Department X can quickly retrieve the data and perform analysis. It will take some training but it’s worth it.”

Make it a Two-Way Discussion

Before the meeting, think about the types of questions the C-level executives might ask that are not clarifications of your work. Then, think about questions you have for the executives. Treat this meeting as an opportunity to have a two-way discussion about data science at the company.

Here are some example questions they might ask you:

What was the biggest challenge to this project? Could this have gone better?

If you had to do this again, what would you do differently?

Are there any organizational barriers to gaining value from this project?

What do you need from me/us for this project to succeed?

That last question can be handled differently depending on your role in the project. Your answer can range anywhere from “I need more time” to directly asking for tools & resources. Your direct leader should know before-hand if you are entering this meeting preparing to make an ask for resources.

Here are a few example questions for you to ask:

How large do you see the company growing our AI team?

What challenges do you see to integrating data scientists into your organization’s culture?

How do you feel our use of technology compares with other companies in the same industry?

Conclusion

You’re being invited to talk about data science because you are the expert

Leading with a strong statements about conclusions and results will get the discussion going, just be sure to have some evidence to back up your conclusions.

Be ready to discuss any problems you had during the project, and propose a solution to the problem if you can.

Try to make the meeting a two-way discussion, that way you will feel more confident.

Even if you ignore all of this advice, just be confident and be yourself and you’ll do fine.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully you got some good information from this article! Feel free to follow me on Medium or connect with me on LinkedIn.