Common questions
I observed two questions coming up over and over again during my team’s presentations.
The first is some variation of “I didn’t get the files, could you send them again?” Usually it was because someone joined late. Do yourself a favor and make sure that both you and your teammate have the zipped files ready to send.
The second is “how does Alteryx/Tableau compare to this or that other software?” There’s a high likelihood that you’ll have never used the other software before. If you get this question, don’t be afraid to look for an answer on Google while leveraging your knowledge of Alteryx/Tableau to come up with a decent answer. For example, if Google tells you that this other data preparation software is heavy on code, you can point out that Alteryx is a relatively low-code environment.
Keep your headspace clean
The biggest source of anxiety for a lot of presenters will come from asking themselves what they’ll do if this or that goes wrong.
The reality is that you’ll mostly be talking from a script for about an hour. You’ll have your prepared materials to demonstrate, that you’ll be quite familiar with because you made them yourself, and you simply have to explain what the materials are, what they do, and how to put them together to create a workflow or dashboard.
Don’t worry about the audience. You’re probably not going to get a Zen Master visiting to sit in judgement of your work. You have your teammate to handle most of the questions while you present. The reality is that the audience will be silent for more or less the whole presentation, and with the exception of answering chat questions during downtimes, you’re basically talking to yourself.
Don’t worry about messing up your workflow. As long as you’ve prepared the solutions beforehand and have them at hand, there’s no real risk that you’ll get stumped and be completely unable to continue. If worst comes to worst, simply tell the audience that your current demonstration has hit a technical snag and that you’ll come back to it, then move on to the next thing you’re demonstrating.
Good luck.
