The Conference Talk Prep Loop
Narrative before slides, rehearse until it's automatic, then own the room before anyone is in it.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 87%
Bastow's repeatable system for preparing and delivering a large-stage talk, assembled from watching hundreds of Mind the Product speakers and from being coached by a professional speaker coach. It has a build phase (story before deck), a rehearsal phase (record and play back until you can deliver it in the shower), and a day-of phase (power pose, empty-stage walk, find your nodders).
Origin
Janna Bastow, synthesising what she learned from the speaker coach Mind the Product provided for her 2017 stage talk plus years of watching every Mind the Product and ProductTank London speaker. The power pose is a widely-circulated (and contested) psychology technique she uses on placebo grounds regardless.
Core principles
- 01Slides should follow the narrative, never the other way around.
- 02Nobody enjoys listening back to their own voice — do it anyway; it is what gets you to the level a big stage requires.
- 03Familiarity kills anxiety: the more of the room you have already experienced, the less of it can surprise you.
- 04The audience is rooting for you to finish your point, not to fall over.
How to run it
- 1
Start with story points, not PowerPoint
Bastow explicitly stopped opening a deck first. Begin with your story points and narratives, work out what you are actually trying to say, and only then set it into the deck.
Pro tip Post-it notes on a wall are a valid first medium — that is where her 2017 talk began.
Watch out Opening in PowerPoint traps you in presentation mode, bending the narrative to fit the slides you already made.
- 2
Get an outside edit on the script
Hand the half-written talk to a coach or a sharp peer. Bastow's coach rewrote her jokes so they landed, reworked the stories so they carried through, and tuned the phrasing word by word.
- 3
Record yourself and play it back
The single tactic she calls out as most effective and most hated. Record the delivery, watch/listen to it, refine, repeat.
Pro tip Rehearse to the point you can deliver it flawlessly in the shower, on the walk to work, and while doing your groceries.
- 4
Power pose before you go on
Stand with your hands on your hips before walking on stage rather than sitting hunched in a tense pile of stress.
Pro tip Bastow knows the underlying study failed replication and uses it anyway — the placebo produces a genuinely better performance, which is the only outcome she cares about.
- 5
Walk the empty stage at tech check
Get out onto the stage the day before. Wander back and forth, look out at the empty seats, take in the sweep of the room, and imagine it full — so that seeing it full is not new information.
- 6
Deliver to your nodders
Once on stage, find the people who are nodding along and smiling. Ignore the ones on their phones — they will always be there. Pick one on the left, one in the middle, one on the right, and rotate your talk between them.
Pro tip No one notices you are effectively giving the talk to three people; the room reads it as engagement with the whole audience.
- 7
Have a recovery move ready
If you blank or freeze, take a breath, find the last point you remember, and simply keep going — or say you are starting again, and start again.
In the wild
At an early ProductCamp that had ballooned from ~50 to ~200 of the most professional product people she had ever seen, Bastow stood at the front, tripped over her words, forgot everything and blanked. She looked up, said 'I'm really sorry everybody, I'm just going to start again', and restarted with 'hi everybody, I'm Jana and welcome to product camp'.
→ The audience was completely fine with it. She argues it actively helped — by visibly surviving a stumble she showed the room that they could get up on the ProductTank and ProductCamp stages themselves.
Common mistakes
Writing the deck first
It puts you in presentation mode and forces you to make the narrative fit the slides, when a strong narrative would have generated the slides naturally.
Fixating on the disengaged faces
There will always be people looking down at their phones. Anchoring on them drains the delivery; anchoring on the nodders feeds it.
Skipping the playback because it's uncomfortable
Bastow still hates hearing her own voice, but says reaching the level required to speak to a thousand people means being willing to hear yourself do it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product managers and founders preparing for a conference keynote or any high-stakes stage talk, especially first-timers scaling up from small rooms.
Not ideal for
Short internal updates or improvised meeting contributions, where this level of scripting and rehearsal is overkill.
From the transcript
“now what I now do is I start with my story points I start with my narratives I try to figure out what I'm actually…”
“standing there with your hands on your hips and just feel better about it”
“find the people who are nodding along and smiling and going yeah yeah that's me that's me and just speak to them”
From the episode
Building better product roadmaps
Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad)