Published: 9/8/2026

Rule number 1: never start at the beginning.

It either sounds counterintuitive, or, if you’ve read my blogs before, you’re already rolling your eyes and saying Here we go again. I know, I know, stay with me.

You actually have to present backwards. Start with the outcome, and then work your way in reverse through the process that got you there.

My client built a dashboard for management to track sales. When she walked me through it, she made it sound pretty useful, even innovative and cool – here’s the view of the pipeline, and here’s where all the metrics sit in one place for easy reference. Ok, great. So why do we need this?

She then explained that this dashboard would fundamentally change how the president ran meetings and save him a huge amount of time in the process. Ahhh – now we’re getting somewhere.

No Lights, No Camera, Just…

“Your meetings are no longer updates – they’re action plans.”

If you heard this from someone on your team, I bet you’d sit up straight and pay attention.

In this case, my client created the dashboard so that the president could see real time updates on the sales pipeline without waiting for the team to inform him. Meetings then became a response to that information – delegating people to close the gaps right away.

This is the formula for maximum engagement: You have a problem, here is the solution. Don’t mess with the sequence.

In this case, the problem was a bottleneck on information that cost leadership time. If you’re going to save their time with the dashboard, might as well expedite the explanation. Then once you’ve framed it properly, you’ll have their full attention to show them how it works and what they can do with it.

A Well-Designed Talk

All kinds of technical experts fall victim to the chronological presentation structure. Just for fun, let’s take this a thousand miles from sales dashboards and see the same issue in a scarf.

Designers go through many iterations of their products, and usually want to show the process to get to the final form. Sometimes they even show the finished product in the beginning, which is almost perfect. It just flashes something cool without explaining why we should care.

I worked with one designer who started like this, and then talked through the minutiae of changing each color, pattern, shape, and size. Even though we have the beautiful finale in our heads, it’s hard to follow all these details. What’s the point?

Instead, I had her start with the guiding principle that informed all these changes. In the meeting, she said it like this:

“Why do clients prefer the scarf on the right over the left? It comes from a sense of balance and harmony. Here’s what I did to achieve that.”

Then the room, even non-designers, was primed to see the design principles come to life. They focused on every detail she explained because she gave them a reason and a payoff.

That’s the power of starting with the key point. It makes everything else worth following.

Reverse Chronology

Chronological order is the default because it requires the least amount of thinking. We just recap what happened with no further decisions. Invariably, this type of presentation comes out as generic and low stakes. If it’s not tailored for a specific audience, how will they know that they should care?

Chronology also buries the outcome. What management cares about – the results – almost always happens last, and should be stated first. With this principle, you can flip the default. Start with the payoff, then go through the process.

Skip to the Action

Technical presenters often delay the payoff, thinking it needs to be introduced by the steps it took to arrive there. Instead, follow the strategy I taught my client.

Just like she delivered management a shortcut to taking action in meetings, she learned to do the same in her presentations. Lead with what changes for the person using this, and present backwards into how it works. Then your speech works for you and not against you.