 You're not performing a play on stage. You're not singing in a concert. You're not there to be awesome and have everybody recognize it. This is not the AERUS tour. Dr. Nancy Lee, a director product on Future Enforced, had helped 100 people land a film in PM job offer in fan companies in unicorn startup and continue to get promoted as a product leader. In this channel, we cover tech trends and free product management training. Like and subscribe to check our new video every Tuesday. This is awesome, Jonathan. And so excited to have you on our podcast today. And especially, we're going to talk about exactly presentation. So lots of people are very confused regarding exactly presentation because they think, oh, it's too far out. Sounds like for executives. And if they're new into the career, should they focus on exact presentations or not? Can you give us an overview? What is exactly presentation? Yeah, so when I talk about this, it is to a degree focused on something that's very common in these large technology companies like that, you know, refer to as the fangs, the sort of the metas and Googles and so forth where you have these layers of management and you have people who are relatively senior, whether their title is director or senior director or vice president who are responsible for broad areas. They may be leading a product used by hundreds of millions or even over a billion people. Huge amounts of money could be at stake and you need to basically explain what the heck you're doing to them periodically in order to get their buy-in, get their help, make sure that they're not surprised by things. And that's a very, very common thing in any organization. You're always transmitting information between teams or between layers and so forth. So there are a lot of different versions of this but that's what this is a little bit focused on is sort of you've got the big high stakes meeting with somebody important. Cool. Hey, Johnson, let's dive deeper a little bit. When you mention, hey, when you present to executives they may not get what you want and then you had to push you through and I can't imagine for large cooperation like Google given working there for almost 15 years you have experienced many different kind of executive environment. Can you walk us through regarding what types of executive environments you're in? Yeah, so I was lucky enough to go from things that were comparatively small to things that were really pretty enormous. So during my advertising career when DoubleClick was independent I was basically with only one or two other people a very small product team leading the sort of publisher advertising server reporting directly to a head of product who reported to the CEO. And then when we were purchased by Google that group grew pretty dramatically so that my own team was pretty large and there were more layers all the way up to sort of the senior vice president of the entire Google advertising business who would have input to things. I've also been involved when I worked at Jigsaw it was a very small group of only about 50 or 60 people inside of Google. So it was this unusual thing where there weren't a lot of layers but the layer we did have would sometimes be like the head of Google's legal team and really, really senior executives responsible for an enormous amount of stuff who were kindly making their sort of time available. And then finally when I was doing counter abuse technology this was a horizontal team. We were a central group trying to help lots of different Google products. So then I would be talking to executives from all over the company that weren't part of the same reporting chain but had their own areas of responsibility. Sounds a very broad type of executives you have went through. Can you give us specific examples? You mentioned earlier saying, hey, getting executive buy-in is very challenging. For example, so why is challenging? And also how many times you need to propose your new ideas to executives? Yeah. Yeah, so there's kind of two things in there. How many times is interesting because that can vary a lot by organization. I mentioned to jigsaw it was sort of a short circuit up to really senior leadership. In advertising in Google, because the group was so big, you'd often be saying, okay, well, if I was a director I might have to present something to a senior director and then they would be on board and then we would go to the vice president to present it to them. And then maybe a group of vice presidents and then maybe the senior vice president. I would sometimes joke at its worst. It would feel like you have to present 10 times proving you weren't making a mistake before you could do anything. Now that's a bit of an exaggeration. That sounds really long process. So how many rounds and how long it takes? I wouldn't even think of it as just excessive process. It's sort of when you're in a large organization think of it like a human brain, you're full of neurons in your brain that have to transmit information to each other to get you to be like, oh, wait, I just put something too hot in my mouth. I better get it out or I want to write something. There's this whole transmission because you're a big complicated thing. If we were little flatworms with like a hundred or a thousand neurons you could get the message through a whole lot quicker. So you don't necessarily need as much of the overhead if you're in a startup of 40 or 50 people because you can kind of get together and figure it out. The only thing I would say is you're always transmitting information especially as a product manager where you're almost never fully in authority over everybody that you're working on. You live or die by your ability to communicate effectively with people whether it's like flatworm size or brain size. Yeah, so let me dive deeper a little bit. Can you give a specific example regarding what size of the topic do you actually do exact presentation and all we push to like VP director maybe CEO level. Is this about one feature change or it's more about part of strategy, romance, let's do AI. So you need to push all the way to soon darkness CEO level. So this is where to your point about personalities. It's really important to understand who your leadership is and how they operate. Some leaders might be very hands off and they don't want to hear about little details. They only want a big update on really big important decisions because they're really busy doing other things. There are other leaders that want to know the details and want to interrogate everything really, really deeply. So I think that's a key skill in an effective executive presentation is remembering and trying to understand who you are speaking to and with and understanding what they want, how they work, what their personal style is. You're not going into these things to communicate your own material. You're not performing a play on stage. You're not singing in a concert. This is not the AERUS tour. You're not there to be awesome and have everybody recognize it. You need to understand who is this person in the room and what are they looking for and how do you adapt what you're doing not to hide the truth. You want to be telling the truth and getting your point across but everybody has a different communication style and you need to understand your leadership in order for it to work well.