The biggest failure when presenting to leadership
When presenting to leadership, own the recommendation. Don't "weather report."
Time commitment: 4 minute read
Early in my time at Facebook, my manager tasked me with exploring an ambiguous opportunity area. We had just launched a new product showing strong signs of product-market fit, and the potential directions for growth seemed endless. We were focused on finding the ones with the most relative leverage. Typical product problem.
I immediately went into deep analysis and discovery mode. I looped in members of my team and we were all consumed by this work. We gathered every bit of information we could and a couple weeks later I told my manager I was ready to do a review of our initial findings. A few days later, I was getting ready to present to my manager and his cross-functional peers.
I confidently started walking through all the info we had collected, slide by slide, point by point. I had the talk track down. My manager stopped me about five minutes into my monologue and said, “Thanks for all this information, but…what’s your recommendation?” My what? My job couldn’t possibly be to tell these senior leaders what to do. It was to give them all the information needed for them to make the decision...right? It took some hard feedback and a few missteps to realize that this was wrong.
“Thanks for all this information, but…what’s your recommendation?”
The reality is that you’re always going to be much closer to the day-to-day work than your manager is. They won’t know it as intimately as you do. Because of this reality, your recommendation on what to do is also highly valued. Your job is to deliver a clear recommendation and support it with the approach you used to arrive at that recommendation. No matter how “junior” you feel that you are, own the recommendation. Presenting information without a clear recommendation, is essentially weather reporting. You're presenting facts without offering a point of view on the next steps to take based on those facts. If you are getting ready to present the assessment of a problem or opportunity at a leadership review, be sure to include a recommendation and take the following into consideration:
1. Be clear about your decision framework
Your decision framework is the collection of dimensions that you used to evaluate and choose a recommendation. For example, you might know that the company or team is optimizing for user engagement as their north star. You might also know that resources are tight and existing project “X” can’t fail. So your dimensions might be “User engagement opportunity size” and “Impact to Project X’s timeline.” You can keep it really simple and go with a “high, medium, low” approach, or if it’s warranted, assign weights to each dimension and quantitatively arrive at a recommendation based on your decision framework.
2. Present with options and highlight your recommended option
Your recommendation, no matter how strong, should have alternatives. There is always more than one way to solve a problem and that needs to be very clearly put forth. The important thing to remember is that you should pick an option as your recommendation. Simply presenting a bunch of options without a structured point of view adds limited value. Also remember, in most cases, presenting the option to do nothing is important. The conscious decision to do nothing is a strategic one and should be treated as such.
3. Call out what not to do as part of your recommendation
Take your recommendation one step further and call out what should not be done. This may not always be applicable, but most of the time it adds a lot of value to voice your perspective on what you think should certainly not be the path forward. This could be as simple as highlighting one of the options as “not recommended” and explaining your reasoning why. It could also be a separate discussion on something you uncovered, related or unrelated to the original assessment, that should actively be stopped. As an example, maybe you are assessing whether to build or buy a specific capability for your product. As you dig into this, you find out that the engineering team is spending hours on maintaining another feature that is almost never used by users! Sure, this is a somewhat unrelated finding, but an important one to call out.
Owning your recommendation and avoiding “weather reporting” is a great way to be impactful (and memorable) with leadership. An anti-pattern is to present information so that others can make a decision. Instead, present the facts, propose a decision, explain your rationale, and seek consensus. I’m grateful that I learned this through trial and error and I hope by sharing, it helps you grow!