A time to present your work to the org.
Project Presentations are an exciting time for the org, but have been a bit of the pain point in the past. In some ways, the lack of standardized presentations is great: every pair of leads has their own unique style of presenting and adds their own flavor to the presentation. This really helps us avoid monotone presentations and makes a better experience for our members. However, our lack of standardization causes some presentations that should last around 10-15 minutes to take up to 25 minutes. We'd like to address this, making sure we can maximize the value of the presentation within the given time constraint, but we'd like to still give teams the freedom to add in their own flavor and style.
Below you'll see a structure guideline with times and justifications for why they take that long. The ordering can be moved around somewhat (e.x. team intro can be early or late in the presentation), but the flow should remain logical and easy to digest for those without prior background on the project.
As a member, seeing other teams presentations is a great way to learn about other problems and how they're being solved. For the team, it helps them build the skill of filtering down about 400 hours of work down to about 10-15 minutes. To do this successfully, the team must figure out how to quickly and successfully describe the problem they are solving, the main features of the solution and how these address the problem, and finally the individual contributions. This takes time and practice, and cannot be put together last minute.
Longer presentations lose the focus of the audience. While your team has probably done many more cool things than what can be described in time frame this short, going into more detail will make it harder for viewers to understand which details are more important and hinder them from getting the most out of your presentation.
We would also like to give members enough time to ask questions. These questions can be really important for every viewer's understanding of the project is something was unclear in the presentation and is also helpful for the team presenting as it may help the team gain new perspectives on their project.
We love memes in general and even in our presentations. However, don't drown your presentation in memes, and don't put memes that add no value. Memes in presentations can help provide a couple seconds of relief into the presentation (a quick transition) or describe something in a funny way. BUT, notice that there is no section or alotted times for memes. This means that memes should fit into and add related information to one of the sections below (unless it is a transition in which case it should be less than 5 seconds of the presentation). For example, many teams do memes for each of their team members in the team section. This is great, but this doesn't mean you can extend the time limit on that portion.
This year, we are envisioning MVP more as a midpoint check-in. This is done to encourage high quality code and also reflects five weeks of development beforehand and five weeks until Product Showcase. For this reason, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have features fully done — rather, we just want to see what you've been working on and hear about your next steps.