Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Storytelling with Nancy Duarte: How to craft compelling presentations and tell a story that sticks
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A lot of people think that the only time you really need to present well is when you have a big stage talk and you make the big investment in the script, the big investment in the contrasting story. I'll tell you a dirty little secret. I can get my husband to do chores for me on the weekends with a real quick "what is, what could be" new bliss. So the ability to just have that contrast as a framework in your brain during a meeting on a phone call, any moment of influence. Like literally it works. It works in any format. Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Nancy Duarte. Nancy is the type of guest that I never imagined being able to get on this podcast, but I'm so happy that it happened. Nancy is a best-selling author, speaker, and CEO of Duarte Incorporated, which has helped create over 250,000 presentations for the world's most influential business leaders, brands, and institutions including Apple, Ted, Google, the World Bank, and famously Al Gore on his inconvenient truth presentation. In our conversation, Nancy shares a ton of tactical advice for how to improve your own presentations, how to tell better stories, how to lay out convincing arguments, how to reduce your nerves when you present, and even a simple communication framework to improve your relationship dynamics. I had such a good time chatting with Nancy, and I'm sure you will love this episode. With that, I bring you Nancy Duarte after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft Clarity, a free, easy-to-use tool that captures how real people are actually using your site. You can watch a live session replaced to discover where users are breezing through your flow and where they struggle. You can view instant heat maps to see what parts of your page users are engaging with and what content they're ignoring. You can also pinpoint what's bothering your users with really cool frustration metrics like rage clicks and dead clicks and much more. If you listen to this podcast, you know how often we talk about the importance of knowing your users, and by seeing how users truly experience your product, you can identify product opportunities, conversion wins, and find big gaps between how you imagine people using your product and how they actually use it. Microsoft Clarity makes it all possible with a simple yet incredibly powerful set of features. They'll be blown away by how easy Clarity is to use, and it's completely free forever. You'll never run into traffic limits or be forced upgrade to a paid version. It also works across both apps and websites. Stop guessing, get clarity. Check out [email protected]. Are you hiring? Or on the flipside, are you looking for a new opportunity? Well, either way, check out lennysjobs.com/talent. If you're a hiring manager, you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand-curated people who are open to new opportunities. Thousands of people apply to join this collective, and I personally review and accept just about 10% of them. You won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders. Join almost 100 other companies who are actively hiring through this collective. And if you're looking around for a new opportunity, actively or passively, join the collective. It's free, you can be anonymous, and you can even hide yourself from specific companies. You can also leave any time, and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out lennysjobs.com/talent. Nancy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me, Lenny. How many presentations have you helped craft at this point, both directly and indirectly? That's a great question. People now all take us wag at data and pretend it's real. I had a president who took us a whack at that number in 2014, and he said at that time it was 225,000, and that was almost 10 years ago. I can't even tell you. We stopped tracking, but it's a lot. In 35 years, we have thousands of projects we open, and each sometimes has two to 100 presentations in it. It'd be hard to tell. 200,000? He said 250,000, but that was 10 years ago. I didn't do the math. When my team questioned it, I'm like, "Oh, Dan did the math." They're like, "Oh, then it's accurate." Because they thought I was just making up this number. I'm like, "No, we actually went in and looked." I was not expecting it to be that large. That's insane. It's so funny, because I have the whole history of the Silicon Valley in a way. It's like every little startup, and then they grew to massive brands like Cisco. You could
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