How to get ready for your first-time public speaking
By: Mariano Cocirio
Tags: Personal Development, User Experience, Careers, Personal Growth, Product Management

How to get ready for your first-time public speaking

Spoiler, you'll never be fully ready. But you can be less not-ready

This is kinda a personal story, but the idea is to go through the process of how did I manage to speak in public for the first time to an open audience about Product Management.

I think this might be useful for anyone hesitating about throwing themselves into public speaking for the first time as a guide to structure their way to it, or at least these were the steps I followed. After this short intro, let's get into it.

Decide why do you want to do it

It's important to have a motivation, and a reason to do it. Something that will impulse you to pursue the execution of your plan, and don't forget that reasons can variate a lot between different people.

Photo by Emily Morter

Your reasons might be to set your personal brand, to earn recognition, to help other people by sharing some knowledge you have or even to prove yourself you can do it.

My motivation was mainly to share my experiences as a fresh Product Manager to anyone in this path and to expose myself to the community to create networking. I've always liked to communicate and share experiences and thoughts, but I've always been writing blogs about it, I wanted to prove myself I could also do it in a different format.

Set your goal

Decide on a due date, add a deadline you should accomplish your goal, and it's also good to set due dates for smaller milestones. For example, if you say you want to perform the talk before the end of the year, then you should probably organize where you'll do it before November.

In my case, I decided in June that I'd like to have my first experience public speaking before Christmas, which led me to set small milestones aiming to have everything ready to be able to speak at any point after mid-September.

Find a topic you want to talk about

It's important that you decide on what you want to share, what's the story you want to communicate to your audience. It can be something really technical and specific from your area of expertise, like for example how to recreate the map function in plain JS.

I think one of the most important things at this step is that your topic is aligned with your reasons. For example, if your reason is to showcase yourself as a UX designer, probably a talk about Scope and Closure in JS is not the best topic to talk about.

Photo by Brandon Lopez

But also, which I think is the most important thing when defining what you want to talk about, is that you need to be able to create a story around it. Storytelling is a crucial skill when you are a communicator, the audience needs to feel involved and you'll be fighting for their attention.

For me, it was pretty clear that I wanted to talk about something Product related, but what could I talk about? In the end, I'm quite new in this area. Well, then let's talk about that, about being new in the area, and how I transitioned into this position. There is a story, and it's aligned with my reasons.

Find a place where that topic is relevant

Time to do your homework, at this point I hope you are already involved in your field of interest community. If not, then it's always a good time to start.

You need to find a place where your topic is relevant, it's important to know your target audience so you can align your search to your topic and reasons.

After deciding on it, it's time to get in contact with them to check their requirements, or the process to postulate yourself to speak there. You might be required to do a little screening, or a brief of your topic to be curated by them, it really depends from organiser to organiser.

I was looking to share my experience with Product Managers and people looking for a transition into Product Management. As I've been attending to a couple of Meetups regularly for the past months, I knew that Product People events were a really nice fit.

Set everything for the presentation

You need to prepare yourself for your presentation, it might sound quite obvious, but really, you should. Not just create the presentation, also think about where will you perform it from, what hardware will you use, who will be running the slides. It's better to be safe on stuff you can be safe.

It's also important that you practice your presentation, time yourself to see if you can fit it within the expected timeframe, it's really easy to either overrun or to get short.

Photo by Clay Banks

Another piece of advice I can give you is to run your slides through some colleagues, friends, and even the organisers as soon as possible so you can get early feedback. Usually, people are used to assisting to talks and meetups, so they might spot things that you as the creator don't do. If you can get someone to listen to you during a rehearsal, that's even better.

And finally, you should get ready for one of the trickiest part, the Q&A session at the end. It's well known that usually there is a Q&A session at the end of each talk, you need to get ready for the unknown. You won't be able to really know every possible question someone can derivate from your presentation, but you should ask friends to ask you questions, and you should try to role-play the spectator role and raise some common questions to yourself.

Go for it

And finally, just relax and go for it. Statistically speaking, there are high chances that everything will go right, and you'll get the experience of public speaking, you might like it or not, but it's good to have firsthand experience.

In my particular case, I really liked it, and I'm looking forward to having another opportunity to share what I've learned across my path with more people. If you organise any Product Meetup and you are looking for speakers don't hesitate in getting in contact.

Here you have in case you are curious about it my first talk about transitioning from Engineering to Product Management:

Hi, I’m Mariano. I’m a Systems Engineer working as Product Manager in Berlin. You can contact me via LinkedIn, Twitter, or mcocirio.com