How to outline a presentation: start at the end

Most presentations that fall flat don’t fail because of their slides. They fail because nobody in the room could say, on the way out, what they were supposed to take away. You can fix that before you open any software, with a sheet of paper and a pencil.

First, write the sentence the room should remember

One sentence, with a subject and a verb. Not a topic: a claim.

• “Project Atlas” is a topic.
• “Project Atlas is three weeks behind schedule, and here’s how to catch up” is a sentence.

Until you can write it, you’re not ready to make slides: you’re still thinking it through. That’s normal, and now is the right time to do it.

This sentence will be your conclusion. It will also be your filter: anything that doesn’t support it comes out of the presentation.

Ask yourself what the room already knows

You don’t make the case for the same sentence the same way to senior management, an engineering team or customers. Three questions are enough.

• What do they know about the topic? Whatever they already know, you won’t repeat.
• What do they expect from you? A decision to make, an update, some training.
• What are they worried about? That’s often where the first question will come from. You might as well answer it yourself.

Three parts, no more

Three parts stick. Five blur together. If your outline has five, two of them are probably subsections in disguise.

Here are three outlines that cover the vast majority of cases.

To persuade: the problem, the solution, what it takes to put it in place. That’s the outline for a sales proposal or a budget request.

To inform: where we stand, what’s changed, what comes next. That’s the outline for a status update.

To teach: why it’s useful, how to do it, now you try. That’s the outline for a tutorial or a training session.

Pick the one that matches your sentence, and under each part, write the two or three ideas that carry it. Then you’ll know how much time you need.

Give every slide a title that makes a claim

This is the tip that changes the most for the least effort. A title like “Quarterly results” forces the room to work out for themselves what they’re supposed to understand. A title like “Sales were up 12%, driven by exports” does that work for them.

The test is simple: read your slide titles in order, and nothing else. If you get a summary that holds together, your presentation holds together. If you get a table of contents, there’s still work to do.

Tip Write all your titles before you fill in a single slide. It’s faster, and the gaps in your reasoning show up right away.

Make the first minute count

The room decides very quickly whether to listen. Don’t spend that minute on a long introduction of yourself or on reading out the agenda.

Open with something that directly concerns the people listening: a question they’re asking themselves, a surprising number, the decision they’re expected to make. Then announce your outline in one sentence, not on a slide: “I’m going to show you where we stand, what’s holding us up, and what I’m proposing.”

End twice

The ending of a presentation happens in two stages, and the second is the one people forget.

First, you restate your sentence, the one you started with, almost word for word. It isn’t pointless repetition: it’s what makes it stick.

Then come the questions. When they run out, don’t let the session end on the last answer, which may have been about a detail. Take the floor again for thirty seconds to restate the key point and what you need from the room: a decision, a date, an action.

Skip the “Thank you” slide and the “Any questions?” slide. The last slide stays on screen for a long time during the discussion: make it carry your sentence and the next steps.

Do the slides last

Once the sentence is written, the outline chosen and the titles drafted, the slides become almost a formality. Each title calls for its own form: a number, three steps, a comparison, an image. All that’s left is to make sure each one can be read at a glance.

This is also when having your outline already written saves a lot of time. In Pimeli, you can paste that outline into “Créer avec l’IA” (Create with AI): the slides come out in your template, and you tweak the wording instead of the layout.