The moment you become CTO, everyone expects you to know things you couldn't possibly know yet. The board wants your technical roadmap. The CEO wants your assessment of the team. The engineers want to know if you're going to rewrite the platform. Sales wants to know when the feature they promised to an enterprise client will ship.

You've been in the role for three weeks. Damn it.

The instinct — particularly if you were hired externally, or promoted quickly — is to act. To demonstrate competence through visible change. To show that you're not just another person in a chair, but someone with opinions and the authority to act on them. That instinct will cost you.

The first mistake: moving before you understand

The most common move is a technical audit. Dig into the codebase in week one, identify the debt, present a cleanup plan before month one is out. It feels decisive. Engineers often appreciate that someone finally named the problem. The board nods.

And then six months later, the original delivery timelines are blown. The cleanup turned out to be more complex than the audit suggested. The engineers who knew where all the bodies were buried have left, taking that knowledge with them, but leaving the bodies there. The features that customers actually needed are still not shipped.

The problem wasn't the audit. The problem was acting on it without understanding the context that created the situation in the first place. Technical debt doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists because of decisions made under specific pressures at specific moments. Understanding those pressures tells you whether the debt is reckless or survivable, whether it's getting worse or has been stable for two years, and whether now is actually the moment to address it. Often the answer is: not yet. "If it ain't broken, don't touch it" is not a cop-out — it's a surprisingly powerful tool in a new CTO's first 90 days.

You don't learn that from the codebase. You learn it from the people.

There's another reason to slow down that nobody says out loud: the opinions you form in the first 30 to 60 days tend to stick. You'll update them, but the shape of your initial read — who's doing good work, where the real problems are, what the culture actually rewards — stays with you longer than you expect. Those first months are the last time you'll have genuinely fresh eyes. The person who just joined and has no idea why things work the way they do is an asset. Use it to look, not to act. You are that person now. But only now.

What the first 90 days are actually for

The first 90 days are not a performance. They are an investigation.

Your job is to understand what you walked into. Not just the architecture (that is almost the easy part), but the culture — the unspoken rules about how decisions get made, who actually has influence, what subjects are politically untouchable. The things that won't appear in any document but that explain every decision that confuses you. And that is the hard part.

This requires talking to everyone. Not in formal structured interviews, but in actual conversations. Ask engineers what frustrates them. Ask the product team what they wish engineering understood. Ask the CEO what keeps them up at night — and listen carefully to whether the answer is tactical (this quarter's revenue) or existential (whether the product is the right bet). Those are very different situations to be walking into.

One question I've found cuts through faster than most: "What do you think will surprise me when I go deep?" It makes people think past the obvious answer. The response is almost always either something remarkably novel, or something remarkably broken.

And ask what they didn't try — not just what failed. That question sparks more than the backwards-looking version, and it tells you something about the imagination of the team.

What to ignore in the first 90 days

Ignore the loudest voices in the room. Not because they're wrong, but because volume is not a proxy for importance. The person who corners you in week one with a laundry list of things that need fixing has an agenda. That's fine — most people have agendas. But you should hear the agenda before you act on it.

Ignore the first version of the technical debt story. There's always a first version: "the codebase is a disaster, the previous team made terrible decisions, we need to start over, it's the product managers!" There's always a more complicated truth underneath it. The truth comes out in the second and third conversation, not the first.

Ignore the pressure to prove yourself through visible change. Lasting credibility comes from making good decisions, not fast ones (although fast ones sometimes are needed). A CTO who understands the situation before acting is more trustworthy than one who ships a restructuring plan in week two. The people who will matter most to your success are watching how you learn, not just what you do.

What to fix in the first 90 days

Fix the things that are actively getting worse. Not the things that are bad but stable — those can wait. The things that are spiralling: a team that is losing members faster than it can hire, a deployment process that is causing multiple outages a week, a relationship between engineering and product that has devolved into open hostility.

Fix broken trust where you can. If there is a specific, concrete thing that is making the engineering team feel unseen or undervalued, and you can address it without overcommitting yourself, do it early. Not as a political gesture, but because trust is the medium through which everything else in your job happens. You can have a technically brilliant strategy and fail entirely if the team doesn't believe you.

What to watch

Watch who the informal leaders are. I call them kingpins. Every engineering organisation has them: every decision goes through them somehow, they are always consulted, they know what is happening before it happens. They're at the coffee table and people come to them to whisper things. They're not always the most senior — often they're not. Find them. Understand their perspective. Don't try to co-opt them — they'll see through it — but make sure they're not working against you before they've given you a real chance.

Watch the relationship between product and engineering. This is where most execution problems live. If product and engineering are in sync, you can fix almost everything else. If they're not, nothing else you fix will hold for long.

Watch the CEO's relationship with technology. Whether they trust it, fear it, or ignore it will shape your political reality for as long as you're in the role. Understanding this early gives you a head start on the managing-up work that is a much bigger part of your job than you expected.

And do the same for the whole management team. Understand what each person wants from you, and what they can offer you in return. Are they allies or quietly working against you? Are they on your side or protecting their own territory? Does the CFO need a shoulder to cry on about infrastructure costs? Does the Head of Sales have one thing that, if engineering fixed it, would change their quarter? These are not political games — they are the map. The CTO who knows this in month one moves faster in month four.

And watch what's going well — actively. When people tell you something works, listen, but stay curious. Sometimes you're hearing genuine pride. Sometimes "our project management is really solid" turns out to mean full waterfall. The more important signal is what nobody mentions at all: the things the team takes completely for granted. Your job is to see those things and name them. I was once in a role where the whole team seemed lukewarm about a recent app rebuild. Nobody flagged it as a win. But it had let the team adopt completely new technology and ship dramatically faster than before. That was good. Someone needed to say so.

The undocumented things are almost always about relationships — between people, between teams, between organisations. I used to joke that at Nokia I could trace any bug between two teams back to two people who weren't talking to each other. Architecture follows organisation. Bugs follow internal conflict.

The thing nobody tells you

Your first 90 days will feel slow. You will want to do more than you should. The pressure to act — from others and from yourself — is constant.

Go slow to go fast later. But don't wait for certainty. In my experience you reach about 80% confidence on your initial read faster than you think — and that's enough to act. Waiting for 100% is how you stay in investigation mode forever. Form the opinion. Test it. Move.

The platform will still be there to rewrite in month four. The relationships you need to make it go well are built in months one through three.

Ironman 70.3 Aix-en-Provence, 2026

Around kilometre sixty-five of the bike leg at Ironman 70.3 Aix-en-Provence, I started the penultimate climb of the day.

It is not a brutal hill on paper. Twelve minutes or so. But the whole first half of the bike course is a mental exercise in not killing the climb that arrives at hour two and a half — because there is still another fifteen kilometres of rolling road after it, and then a half marathon to run.

I rode up that climb at 245 watts. My FTP is 273. I could have pushed more. I had the legs. I didn't.

There was nothing happening in my head. No bargaining. No what-if. I knew the gear I was in. I knew the wattage I was holding. I knew that the rest of the day on the bike was a hold, not a race, and that the race was the run that came after the bike.

Just execution.

That feeling — the absence of internal noise — is what eighteen months of working with a good coach actually buys you. It is not a fitness gain. It is a cognitive gain. The fitness is a side effect.

It is also, almost exactly, what I am trying to buy for the first-time CTOs and CPOs I mentor.

The novice's signature move is doing more things, harder

Last year, at my first half Ironman, I trained somewhere between seven and nine hours a week. I finished. I was proud. I had no idea what I was doing.

Yes I was disciplined but I rode hard when I felt good, even if the plan was saying otherwise. I skipped recovery because it felt like wasted time (not proud of this but it's true, and we tend to do it so often in worklife..). The race itself was an emotional event. I went out too soft on the bike, so much so that my heartrate started going down instead of up. The start of the run I pushed an impossible pace for 7Km, then my legs wanted to kill me. I crossed the line as a story I told myself about willpower and pain-avoidance.

This year I trained eleven to thirteen hours a week. Almost twice as much. And the race was nothing like an emotional event. It was a controlled, almost boring execution of a plan. I finished faster, fresher, and with enough left in me to jump under the finish arch instead of collapsing under it.

The interesting thing is not the training volume. The interesting thing is the texture of the time. The same hours, spent badly, would have produced a worse outcome than last year. Possibly an injury.

What changed is that I learned to listen to my coach and asked her a personal plan, instead of a generic one (this of course costed more, but it was an investment in me).

What I paid Kaisa for, and what she actually delivered

I assumed I was buying a training plan.

What I actually bought was the absence of
decisions I am not qualified to make.

Every morning when I open the calendar, the workout is already there. I don't sit and weigh whether today should be intervals or zone two. I don't bargain with myself about whether the long ride should be five hours or six. I don't listen to half an episode of a Norwegian-method training podcast and start wondering if I need to buy a lactate meter. (I asked Kaisa about that one once. She told me not to bother.) Someone with twenty years of doing this professionally has already made all of those decisions for me, in the context of who I am, what I am building toward, and what week of the year it is.

That is what removes the noise.

A first-time CTO has the same problem.

You wake up on a Monday and the calendar is empty. You do not know whether this is the week you sit down with the founders about the hiring plan, or the week you finally do something about the production incident pattern, or the week you go heads-down on the rewrite question that has been hanging over you for a month. There is no syllabus. There is no plan. There is only the volume of decisions you do not yet have the experience to make confidently, and the volume of time that gets eaten by you re-litigating them with yourself.

A mentor does not solve your business for you. A mentor sits next to you for the hour a fortnight when you stop and look at the calendar honestly, and asks the question that makes the next three weeks obvious.

That is a smaller intervention than people imagine. And it is the entire job.

The boring stuff is the strategy

If you had asked me a year ago what would make me faster, I would have said something about FTP, threshold intervals, learning to suffer.

What actually made me faster was sleep. Hydration. One hundred and twenty grams of carbs per hour on the bike, sixty-seven on the run — clinical numbers I checked the way other people check the time. Saunas after long sessions, because in Finland you can grow your plasma volume by sitting still in a hot room, and that is the kind of compounding nobody posts on Strava. Doing the same long ride, the same Saturday morning, that I had done the Saturday before. Boring, fundamental, repeatable.

It turned out that the exciting workouts — the interval sessions everyone posts about — were the smallest part of the actual gains. The big part was the unsexy compounding of the basics, done consistently, for a year.

In leadership it is the same.

Your one-on-ones are the long ride. Your hiring process is your nutrition. Your planning rhythm is your sleep. None of them is exciting. None of them is the thing you brag about at the conference. They are the substrate on which everything else either works or doesn't. It's what is called the endurance base.

As a first-time CTO you might come to me with the exciting questions. The architecture rewrite. The AI strategy. The reorg. We talk about those — of course we do. But four times out of five, the actual blocker is that the one-on-ones are status meetings, the hiring funnel is broken, and there is no planning rhythm to speak of.

The strategic work, in other words, is not the work that sounds strategic.

Why I hired a coach at forty-five

This part is short, because it deserves its own post.

I hired Kaisa before I had even committed to my first triathlon. Many people spoke highly about her and at the end I gave in and wrote her an email.

I was forty-five years old and I had had this crazy thought for a while already — vaguely, the way you think about things when you're not yet honest about wanting them — about doing an Ironman. And the thing I knew, with the kind of clarity you only earn by being forty-five, is that signing up for an endurance event of that scale without someone overseeing how I prepared was not ambition. It was a way to hurt myself. Possibly seriously.

That is the part senior people understand and beginners do not. The skill is not pushing harder. The skill is recognising — early, before anything has gone wrong — that you are about to walk into a domain where you do not know what you do not know. And then hiring the person who does, before you take the first step.

As an experienced leader, you know you want someone in your corner when you do not know what you are doing. That instinct is most of the career skill. Trust it earlier than feels comfortable.

The first-time CTOs, CPOs, VPs who reach out to me before the wheels come off are not weak. They are doing the senior-person thing. The ones who wait until they are six months into a crisis to ask for help are not braver. They are just paying a higher price for the same lesson.

In sport, nobody argues about this

Here is the thing I find genuinely astonishing.

If you decide to take up tennis, you join a club. There is a coach there waiting. You pay the membership and a slice of that is the coach's salary. You don't get a say in the arrangement, and nobody thinks it strange. Same for football, volleyball, cycling, swimming. Curling, even.

The idea that you would learn the sport by reading some book about it or watching some videos on YouTube, alone, in your garage, is faintly absurd. Of course you have a coach. Everyone has a coach. The only question is which one and can you find the best one that your money can buy.

In business, the inverse holds. The default assumption is that you can figure out how to lead — people, capital, technology, expectations, your own ego — by reading a few books, going to a conference once a year, and watching the senior people around you do it badly. University is treated as the end of training. It is barely the start.

The executives who break this default — who actually pay for a coach, a mentor, a thinking partner — are not the ones who needed the most help. They are the ones who understood, earlier than the rest, that the sport they are playing is harder than the one most people give it credit for, and that nobody in the room is going to coach them by accident.

Everyone else is figuring it out alone. Slowly. Expensively. And the cost shows up in their teams long before it shows up in their own performance reviews.

What you are actually buying when you hire a mentor or a coach

You are not buying answers. If you wanted answers, you'd hire a consultant (by the way I do that too if you are really interested in answers :D )

You are buying:

• A second pair of eyes that has already seen this movie. Not in your specific company — that is not possible — but in a company like enough that the patterns rhyme. Most of the things you think are unique to your situation are not. That is, paradoxically, a relief.
• The removal of one category of decisions. Like the workout already being in the calendar on Monday morning. You stop relitigating questions that someone with twenty years of context can settle in ten minutes.
• Honest pushback from someone with no skin in your political game. Your founders, your boss, your team, your investors — they all have stakes in your decisions. A mentor does not. That makes them one of the very few people in your professional life who can tell you the unflattering version.
• Permission to slow down. You think you are hiring someone to make you faster. Often the most valuable thing they will tell you is that the thing you are sprinting toward isn't the thing.

That last one is the one nobody warns you about. I expected to be pushed harder. What I learned instead was the opposite — and it is the lesson most endurance athletes have to swallow before they get any good.

Most of the work happens at very low effort. The training model elite endurance athletes follow — Norwegians included — is roughly 80/20: eighty percent of your training is easy. Boringly easy. The kind of easy where you feel like you are not really training. The remaining twenty percent, the hard intervals everyone posts about, is what gets all the attention — but it only works because of the eighty that doesn't.

Beginners, including me, want to invert that ratio. Every session has to count. You feel that you have little time to waste. You push when you should glide. You turn the easy day into a moderate day, and the moderate day into a hard day, and you wonder why you are constantly tired, don't manage to push hard when you should and you are not getting any faster. The base is what makes the hard efforts hard, and most amateurs never build it.

Most of the CTOs I mentor do exactly the same thing in their work. They are optimising for the wrong scarce resource. They think their bottleneck is hours. It is almost always judgment, thinking, decision making. More hours, applied at the wrong intensity, makes the situation worse, not better.

Almost effortless is the goal. But don't confuse it with easy.

The race in Aix was the closest I have come to feeling that I knew what I was doing. Not as a pro — I am not a pro and never will be — but as a person who had done the work, with the right help, for long enough that the right things had become automatic.

It felt almost effortless. That is not the same as easy.

It cost a year and a half of consistent, unspectacular training, a coach I trusted, and the discipline to do the boring thing on the days I felt like doing the exciting thing.

That is also what good leadership feels like, when you finally have it. Not heroic. Not dramatic. Almost boring. Right pacing. Right decisions. The right amount of energy still in reserve when it matters (because you will need it).

The first time it happens to you in your career, you will not believe it is happening. You will look for the catch. You will assume you are missing something. You will think you are cheating almost. Or maybe that this is a candid-camera.

You are not missing anything. You have just done the work. Relax.

That is the result of coaching and mentoring. It is what I am trying to give to the CTOs and CPOs I work with. And it is, quietly, the most valuable thing I know how to deliver.

The most important presentation you'll give probably isn't at a conference. It's the board meeting where you need to explain why the rewrite is necessary. Or the all-hands after a hard quarter where your team needs to trust the direction. Or the investor update where technical complexity has to become a business narrative in twelve minutes. The stakes are different. The mechanics of storytelling are the same. Here's what actually works.

The Power of Storytelling

Stories have been a part of human culture for centuries, and for good reason. They have the power to engage, entertain, and inspire us. When it comes to presentations, storytelling can be an effective way to grab your audience's attention and keep them engaged. According to research by Jennifer Aaker, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, stories are up to 22 times more memorable than facts alone.

One example of a presentation that effectively used storytelling is Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. In his speech, Jobs used personal stories to convey his message and inspire his audience. He talked about his experiences dropping out of college and being fired from Apple, and how these setbacks led him to where he was that day. By sharing his personal story, Jobs was able to connect with his audience on an emotional level and create a lasting impact.

Elements of a Compelling Story

So, what makes a story compelling? There are several key elements that make up a good story, including plot, characters, and conflict. The plot is the sequence of events that make up the story, while the characters are the individuals or entities involved. The conflict is the problem or challenge that the characters face.

When it comes to presentations, these elements can be applied to create engaging and memorable stories. For example, you can use a personal story to illustrate a point, or create a fictional story that relates to your message. By incorporating these elements into your presentation, you can create a story that resonates with your audience and helps them remember your message.

One example of a presentation that effectively used these elements is Brené Brown's TED Talk on vulnerability. Brown's presentation was centred around a personal story about her own struggles with vulnerability, and how it led her to a greater sense of connection and belonging. By sharing her personal story, Brown was able to connect with her audience on an emotional level and make her message more memorable.

The Importance of Emotion

One key reason why storytelling is effective in presentations is because it appeals to our emotions. Emotions play a powerful role in how we perceive and remember information. According to research by Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, emotions increase the likelihood that information will be shared and remembered.

When it comes to presentations, incorporating emotion into your story can help you connect with your audience and make your message more memorable. This doesn't mean that you need to make your audience cry or laugh hysterically. Instead, it means finding ways to tap into their emotions in a meaningful way. For example, you can use a personal story to convey a sense of empathy or understanding, or use humour to lighten the mood and make your message more approachable.

In conclusion, storytelling is a powerful tool that can help you engage your audience, make your message more memorable, and create a lasting impact. By incorporating key elements of a compelling story — such as plot, characters, and conflict — and tapping into your audience's emotions, you can create a story that resonates with your audience and helps them remember your message.

The Power of Metaphors and Analogies

Metaphors and analogies are powerful tools for creating memorable presentations. They help your audience understand complex ideas by comparing them to something familiar. For example, if you're trying to explain a new product or service, you can use a metaphor to help your audience understand how it works by comparing it to something they already know. This can make it easier for them to remember and relate to the information.

One famous example of a metaphor used in a presentation comes from Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford University. He compared life to a journey and used the metaphor to inspire the graduates to follow their passions:

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

By using a metaphor that everyone can relate to, Jobs was able to inspire his audience and leave a lasting impression.

Another way to use metaphors and analogies is to help your audience remember specific information. For example, if you're giving a presentation on cybersecurity, you might use the analogy of a fortress to explain how firewalls and other security measures work. By comparing cybersecurity to a fortress, you can help your audience remember the importance of protecting their digital assets.

The Power of Emotion

Emotion is a powerful tool for creating memorable presentations. When your audience feels something, they're more likely to remember the information you're presenting. There are many ways to incorporate emotion into your presentations, from telling personal stories to using visuals that evoke strong emotions.

One example of a presentation that used emotion effectively is Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk, "My Stroke of Insight." In the presentation, Taylor shares her experience of having a stroke and the profound insights it gave her about the nature of consciousness. By sharing her personal story, Taylor was able to connect with her audience on an emotional level and leave a lasting impression.

Another way to use emotion is to use visuals that evoke strong feelings. For example, if you're giving a presentation on climate change, you might use images of polar bears stranded on melting ice caps to help your audience feel the urgency of the issue. By using visuals that evoke strong emotions, you can help your audience remember the importance of the information you're presenting.

The Power of Practice

Finally, one of the most important keys to creating memorable presentations is practice. The more you practice your presentation, the more comfortable you'll be delivering it, and the more confident you'll feel in your ability to connect with your audience.

There are many ways to practice your presentation, from rehearsing in front of a mirror to recording yourself and watching the playback. You can also practice in front of friends or colleagues and ask for feedback on your delivery and content.

One technique that can be especially helpful is to practice your presentation in different settings. For example, if you're giving a presentation at a conference, you might practice in a conference room to get a feel for the environment. By practising in different settings, you'll be better prepared to adapt to different situations and feel more confident delivering your presentation.

The board doesn't remember your slides. They remember whether the argument felt true and whether they trusted the person making it. Everything else is technique in service of that.

You're about to walk into a board meeting where someone will ask a question you're not ready for. Or you're presenting the quarterly engineering review and three of the slides are about why things took longer than planned. Or you're the new CTO and this is your first all-hands. The nervousness is real. It's also not the problem — what you do with it is.

The stakes in executive communication are different from conference talks or sales pitches. When your board loses confidence in your ability to communicate clearly, it doesn't show up as applause or silence. It shows up months later as micromanagement, pressure to "bring in a more experienced team," or questions directed at your CEO instead of you. Understanding where your nervousness actually comes from is the first step toward doing something useful about it.

Understanding the Source of Your Nervousness

Nervousness can stem from various sources, including a lack of preparation, fear of judgement or failure, or personal insecurities. Recognising what triggers your nervousness is the first step towards overcoming it. As noted by Tony Robbins:

"The first step in solving any problem is recognising there is one."

Once you understand the source of your nervousness, you can address it more effectively.

For example, if your nervousness stems from a lack of preparation, you can take steps to ensure that you're thoroughly prepared. This includes researching your topic, gathering necessary information, and practising your presentation in advance. According to legendary football coach Vince Lombardi:

"The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win."

By preparing thoroughly, you can boost your confidence and reduce your nervousness.

If your nervousness stems from fear of judgement or failure, it's important to remember that everyone makes mistakes, and even the most experienced presenters have moments of imperfection. As noted by writer and speaker Brené Brown:

"Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change."

By embracing your vulnerability and acknowledging your imperfections, you can overcome your fear of judgement and present with greater confidence.

Preparing Thoroughly

One of the most effective ways to overcome nervousness is to be prepared. Thorough preparation includes researching your topic, gathering necessary information, and practising your presentation in advance. This allows you to anticipate potential questions or challenges and feel more confident in your ability to address them.

Researching your topic involves gathering as much information as possible to ensure that you have a deep understanding of your subject matter. This can involve reading relevant books, articles, or studies, as well as conducting interviews with experts in your field. By becoming an expert on your topic, you can deliver a more confident and engaging presentation.

Developing a clear and concise outline is another important aspect of preparation. Your outline should include a clear introduction, main points, and conclusion, and should be tailored to your audience. This can help you stay on track during your presentation and ensure that you cover all of the necessary information.

Finally, practising your presentation in advance can help you feel more comfortable and confident. This can involve practising in front of a mirror, recording yourself, or giving a practice presentation to friends or colleagues. By rehearsing your presentation, you can identify areas that need improvement and refine your delivery.

Practising Relaxation Techniques

Relaxation techniques such as deep breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, and visualisation techniques can help calm your nerves before and during a presentation. Deep breathing exercises, for example, can help regulate your breathing and lower your heart rate, which can help you feel more relaxed. As stated by author and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg:

"Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile."

Progressive muscle relaxation involves tensing and relaxing different muscle groups in your body, which can help reduce muscle tension and promote relaxation. Visualisation techniques, on the other hand, involve imagining a calm and peaceful scene, which can help reduce feelings of anxiety and nervousness.

Incorporating these relaxation techniques into your preparation routine can help you feel more confident and relaxed. For example, you could practise deep breathing exercises before your presentation, or use visualisation techniques to calm your nerves.

Engage Your Audience

One effective way to reduce nervousness when presenting is to engage your audience. When you engage your audience, you shift the focus away from yourself and onto your message, which can help reduce feelings of self-consciousness and anxiety.

To engage your audience, you could ask questions, encourage participation, or include interactive elements in your presentation. For example, you could ask your audience to raise their hands in response to a question, or have them participate in a group activity that relates to your presentation.

By engaging your audience, you can create a more dynamic and interactive presentation, which can help you feel more comfortable and confident.

Use Positive Self-Talk

Another effective strategy for conquering nervousness when presenting is to use positive self-talk. Positive self-talk involves using affirming statements and thoughts to build your confidence and reduce anxiety.

Before your presentation, try to focus on positive thoughts and statements, such as "I am well-prepared and knowledgeable about my topic" or "I am a confident and engaging speaker." By focusing on positive thoughts and beliefs, you can help build your confidence and reduce feelings of nervousness.

Embrace Imperfection

Finally, it's important to remember that no one is perfect, and that making mistakes is a natural part of the learning process. Instead of striving for perfection, try to embrace imperfection and focus on doing your best.

If you make a mistake during your presentation, don't dwell on it or let it undermine your confidence. Instead, take a deep breath, acknowledge the mistake, and move on. Remember that mistakes can actually help you improve and grow as a presenter.

The goal isn't to feel no nervousness. The goal is to walk into the room prepared enough that the nervousness has nowhere useful to go except through you — and out the other side.

Your board is in three countries. Your engineering team is distributed across four time zones. The investor update goes on Zoom. The all-hands is a recorded Loom that gets watched at 1.5x speed. Most executive communication now happens on a screen — and most of the techniques people use for in-person presentations don't transfer cleanly. The fundamentals of compelling communication don't change. The mechanics do, and underestimating that gap is how you lose the room without knowing it.

The Unique Challenges of Virtual Presentations

Virtual presentations present a unique set of challenges. One of the most significant challenges is the lack of in-person interaction. Without the ability to read body language or gauge audience reactions, it can be difficult to determine if the message is resonating with the audience. Technical issues, such as poor audio or video quality, can also detract from the presentation's effectiveness. Finally, distractions, such as interruptions from family members or pets, can make it challenging to maintain focus and engagement.

Despite these challenges, it's essential to adapt to the virtual environment to deliver a compelling presentation.

Preparation for a Virtual Presentation

Preparation is critical to delivering a compelling virtual presentation. Best practices for preparing for a virtual presentation include:

Technical setup and testing

Ensure that all necessary technology is set up and working correctly before the presentation, including testing audio and video quality, internet connection speed, and any necessary software or tools.

Designing visual aids for a virtual setting

Visual aids, such as slides or graphics, can be effective in enhancing a virtual presentation. However, design them with the virtual setting in mind. Visual aids should be easy to read and understand, with clear images and text that can be seen even on a small screen.

Rehearsing and timing the presentation

Rehearsing the presentation and timing it helps ensure that it flows smoothly and that the message is delivered effectively. Practice with the technology and equipment that will be used during the presentation.

Minimising distractions

Distractions can be a significant challenge during virtual presentations. To minimise distractions, find a quiet, private space and inform family members or roommates of the upcoming presentation. Turning off notifications on electronic devices can also help.

Tips for Delivering a Compelling Virtual Presentation

Delivering a compelling virtual presentation requires a different approach than in-person presentations. Best practices include:

Engaging the audience with eye contact and body language

Eye contact and body language are essential components of engaging the audience during a virtual presentation. Although the audience cannot be seen in person, make eye contact with the camera and use body language that conveys confidence and engagement.

Using a clear and dynamic speaking voice

The speaking voice is a crucial component of a compelling virtual presentation. The voice should be clear and easy to understand, with appropriate volume and pacing. Using a dynamic speaking style, such as varying tone and inflection, can also help keep the audience engaged.

Encouraging audience interaction through chat and other virtual tools

Virtual tools, such as chat functions, can encourage audience interaction and engagement. Encouraging questions or comments during the presentation can help keep the audience engaged and provide valuable feedback for the speaker.

Incorporating storytelling and other engaging techniques

Storytelling and other engaging techniques, such as anecdotes or humour, can help make the presentation more memorable and effective. These techniques help convey the message in a way that resonates with the audience and keeps them engaged.

The Importance of Post-Presentation Follow-up

Post-presentation follow-up is an essential component of delivering a compelling virtual presentation. Following up with the audience can help gather feedback, address any outstanding questions or concerns, and maintain the connection with the audience. Some best practices for post-presentation follow-up include:

Sending thank-you notes

Sending thank-you notes to the audience can help show appreciation for their time and attention. It can also provide an opportunity to reinforce key messages from the presentation.

Gathering feedback

Gathering feedback from the audience can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the presentation. This feedback can be used to improve future presentations or to tailor the message to specific audiences.

Addressing outstanding questions or concerns

Addressing any outstanding questions or concerns from the audience can help maintain the connection and engagement. It can also provide an opportunity to reinforce key messages and ensure that the audience has a clear understanding of the content.

The screen creates distance. Every choice you make — setup, pacing, eye contact, follow-up — is either closing that distance or widening it. Most people widen it without noticing.

Every CTO eventually has to present to a non-technical board. Every CPO has to make the case for a roadmap cut to people who think in revenue, not velocity. The tool you use — PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, Notion — matters far less than people think. And yet the discourse around presentation tools has become its own genre of bad advice. Let's look at what the evidence actually says.

There's a post circulating (again) these days which claims that "PowerPoint Is Worse Than Useless — intuitively, anecdotally, and scientifically, PowerPoint may be the worst business tool ever created." The article claims that "Harvard just discovered it" (spoiler alert: it's clickbait — the team from Harvard published the study already 5 years ago).

The article picks this information from a Forbes post from 2017 (I am writing this in 2021) which itself reports data from a research article published in 2016: "Does a presentation's medium affect its message?"

Why is all of this simply untrue?

What Does the Article Say, Really?

"[…] participants evaluated PowerPoint presentations comparably to oral presentations, but evaluated Prezi presentations more favourably than both PowerPoint and oral presentations."

What that means is not that PowerPoint is worse than useless — it's that in a set of 2 experiments Prezi was perceived more favourably than PowerPoint. No conclusions about the uselessness of PowerPoint could be made (in fact there is also research that points out that having PowerPoint slideware is better than not having it, if you want to persuade people).

The researchers are careful to say:

"Like others, we caution against technological determinism: presentation medium is but one of many factors that determine presentation success, and presentations that rely on any given medium can succeed or fail."

And they are so right in saying that.

Picking a single element in preparing a presentation and generalising that "X is BAD" is not just dangerous, it's plain idiotic.

It's like saying that Microsoft Word is bad because one book written using Word has bad reviews.

Or like saying that all emails written with Microsoft Outlook are bad because someone pressed "reply all" and shared confidential information with the whole company.

Why Is Prezi Perceived as Better Than PowerPoint? (Hint: Animations and Structure)

If we zoom in to why the researchers think that Prezi (or how they call their UI: ZUI) is perceived more favourably than PowerPoint, we find that the main reasons are:

1. Proper animations — specifically zooming and panning animations that draw the listener's attention to the right things. Opposed to the animations of PowerPoint: "Slideware, on the other hand, encourages the use of superfluous animation in slide transitions and object entrances/exits, despite evidence that adding such 'seductive details' to multimedia presentations can be counter-productive."
2. A better structure (Prezi comes pre-filled with structure and templates).

The interesting thing is that, if you know how to use PowerPoint, you can achieve the exact same zooming and panning effect that Prezi is built on.

Conclusion

Of course a presentation medium affects its message. As much as the weather, the presenter themselves, the venue, how you dress, the mood of the audience and who came before.

Everything affects the message you are sending in a presentation, not just the tool you use to build the slides.

You can be the best Prezi (or PowerPoint, Keynote, Canva…) presentation builder of all time, but if your content is poorly organised and you speak with a monotone voice, it won't matter.

That's why we have created the Presentation Design Canvas — a practical tool to help you take everything into account when preparing a presentation.

Photo by Rodeo Project Management Software on Unsplash

At some point in your career as a CTO or CPO, you will be in a room where a decision is being made. A real one — about strategy, about money, about direction. And you will realise, with a quiet sinking feeling, that you were not really invited to that room. You were summoned to explain something technical and then politely managed back out.

That's when you know the managing up isn't working.

The fundamental misunderstanding

Most non-technical leaders don't think tech people are stupid. Let me be clear about that. They know exactly how smart you are. They've seen what you can build.

What they believe — and this is the part nobody says directly — is that smart and business-savvy are two different things. And that tech people, however brilliant, live in the first category. So when the real conversations happen — the ones with the board, the ones about market positioning, the ones about where the company is going in three years — those are handled by the grown-ups. You'll be briefed on the outcome.

This happens in 110% of companies. I'm not exaggerating.

And here's what makes it maddening: they're not wrong about a lot of tech people. There are plenty of brilliant engineers and product leads who genuinely don't think in business terms. But if you happen to be different — if you actually do think about the market, the competition, the revenue model, the board pressure — you still get lumped in with the crowd. Because until proven otherwise, you're the tech chap.

What managing up actually means

Managing up is not about politics. It's not about schmoozing or being liked or playing the game.

It's about making sure the expectations placed on you, your team, and your work are grounded in reality. About earning the right amount of trust — enough to move fast — and the right amount of challenge — enough to stay sharp. About making clear to the people above you that they are as much part of the problem as they are part of the solution.

You are the umbrella protecting your team from the rain. That's part of the job, and you should take it seriously.

But you are not a hole that people can shovel anything into and expect you to smile. Knowing the difference — and being able to hold that line without blowing up the relationship — that is the actual skill.

The language problem

When managing up goes wrong, it rarely looks like a confrontation. It looks like two people in a room who aren't quite having the same conversation.

The non-technical founder is thinking about growth, about investors, about the competitive landscape. The CTO is thinking about architecture, technical debt, team capacity. Both are right. Neither is being heard. And because the CEO controls the agenda, the CTO eventually stops being invited to set it.

This is not a technology problem. It is a language problem.

And the fix is not to become less technical. It's to become genuinely bilingual.

The cost of not doing this

Here's what nobody tells you when you're heads-down building: careers don't stall dramatically. They stall quietly.

You stop getting invited to certain meetings. The interesting problems go elsewhere. The company makes decisions that affect your team without really asking you. And one day you look up and realise your job has become execution — pure, clean, bounded execution — with none of the ambiguity, none of the stakes, none of the parts that made you want to lead in the first place.

That is the cost of poor managing up. Not getting fired. Getting sidelined.

And the thing about being sidelined is that it feels like everyone else's fault. The CEO doesn't listen. The board only cares about numbers. Nobody understands what the tech team actually does. All of that may be true. But none of it changes your situation.

If you are not at those tables, your career will not move forward. And your job — however well you do it — will feel increasingly small. You will be used as a variable in other people's equations. Plugged in when needed, optimised for cost, replaced when inconvenient.

The alternative is becoming part of the equation itself. Having a say in what gets built and why. Being the person in the room who shapes the direction, not just executes it.

That is worth fighting for. And managing up is how you fight.

How to earn your seat at the table

Show — every time, without exception — that you understand tech as a business function and business as a technical constraint.

Think the way a CEO thinks. Not instead of thinking like a CTO or CPO, but in addition to it. When you walk into a room, bring the board's question with you, not just the engineering answer. Make them feel that you understand the pressure they're under, the constraints the investors are imposing, the thing that keeps them up at night.

And then shape the conversation so that tech is not a department that executes decisions — it's a function that makes them.

That's how you stop being the poor tech chap who gets briefed on outcomes. That's how you get into the room where the decisions actually happen.

Photo by Walter Olivares on Unsplash

Someone walks into your office. Or opens a Slack thread. Or books a meeting with a vague title.

And they ask: should we rewrite this?

Here's the question you have to ask before you answer that.

Why are you asking me this now?

Not "what's the technical debt?" Not "how long would it take?" Not "what does the team think?"

Why. Now.

Because the timing of the question tells you almost everything about the real problem. Someone asking after three consecutive missed sprints is telling you something different from someone asking after a competitor just shipped a better product. Same question. Completely different answer.

The golden pot at the end of the rainbow

Rewriting is romantic. I get it.

The clean slate. The chance to finally do it right. No more legacy code held together with duct tape and the prayers of engineers who left three years ago. Just clean, elegant architecture and the wisdom of everything you've learned since the last time.

It's a beautiful dream. And sometimes — sometimes — it's real.

But "let's start from scratch" is also one of the easiest ways to avoid doing the hard work of finding an actual solution. Because the hard work is figuring out whether your problem is really a technology problem at all. Does the rewrite solve something real? For whom? Does it solve it now, when your users actually need it? Or in eighteen months, when the competitive window may have already closed?

Can you buy a solution instead of building one? Use open source? Iterate on what you have while the team ships features that pay the bills?

These are uncomfortable questions because they lead somewhere slower and less satisfying than "let's rewrite." But they're the right questions.

If it ain't broken, don't fix it. But sometimes it's broken.

I don't have a default bias toward rewriting or iterating. Neither should you.

What I do have is a mental image I come back to: a train travelling at full speed toward a wall that's a hundred miles away. You can see it clearly. You have time. That's not an iteration problem — that's a course correction. The rewrite is the right call, and the earlier you make it, the cheaper it gets.

But if the wall is three miles away? You don't rip out the tracks. You brake.

The signal I look for before recommending a rewrite isn't technical. It's cumulative. It's when every attempt to fix something breaks something else. When the tech debt isn't just slowing the team down — it's demoralising them. When capable engineers start describing their own codebase like it's a crime scene. When every conversation about a new feature starts with the same sentence: "well, first we'd have to..."

If every road leads back to the same fork, and the sign at the fork keeps saying rewrite — maybe it's time to listen.

The one thing people don't say out loud

We are the people making these decisions. And motivation matters.

A team that no longer believes in their own solution will not iterate their way out of it. They'll patch. They'll complain. They'll leave. That's a cost too, even if it doesn't show up in a sprint estimate.

I've seen teams come alive after a rewrite decision — not because the new code was better on day one, but because someone finally acknowledged that the old thing wasn't working. That acknowledgement alone is worth something.

I'll also say the thing nobody with a VC badge wants to hear: with AI, rewriting is now significantly cheaper than it used to be. That changes the calculus. The expensive part was always the hours. When the hours compress, some decisions that used to be too costly to make become genuinely viable.

Though I'd gently note: anyone telling you AI does the whole rewrite for you is either lying or has invested in AI. The judgment calls — what to build, how to structure it, when it's actually done — those are still yours.

The honest version of my own track record

I've probably erred more on the iterate side than I should have. There were a few times I held on too long to things that were fundamentally broken, trying to fix what needed to be closed.

Closing a book is hard. Opening a new one is scary. But sometimes that's the job.

Photo by Paymo on Unsplash

The meeting starts at 10. The CEO comes in, drops a date on the table — "we need this live by March" — and leaves. The room goes quiet for a moment. Then everyone looks at you.

And you start building a roadmap.

This is the most common mistake I see first-time CPOs and CTOs make. Not the technical decisions. Not the hiring choices. It's this: confusing a roadmap with a delivery plan.

A roadmap is not a Gantt chart. It's not a list of features with dates attached. A roadmap is a negotiation — about priorities, trade-offs, and what you're willing to not do. And like all negotiations, it only works if the right people are in the room.

When the CEO walks out after dropping a deadline, they haven't given you a roadmap. They've given you a constraint. Those are different things. A constraint tells you the destination. A roadmap is how you decide what to put on the truck.

The two meetings that will kill your quarter

The first is the one I described. Key stakeholders missing. A date on a whiteboard. Everyone nodding. Nobody actually agreeing on what "done" means, or what has to give to get there.

The second is more insidious. It's the monthly reset — where everything agreed last month gets thrown out and rewritten from scratch. The team that spent three weeks designing a feature finds out it's been deprioritised. Again.

Both meetings share the same root cause: the people with decision-making authority aren't doing the work of deciding. They're delegating a negotiation disguised as an execution problem.

Roadmap is negotiation. Not delivery.

Say it out loud in your next planning meeting and watch the faces. Half the room will nod. The other half will look confused — because they've been trained to think of roadmap planning as a scheduling exercise.

It isn't. When you sit down to build a roadmap, you're making bets. You're saying: of all the things we could do, these are the ones we believe will matter most. That belief has to be shared — by product, by engineering, by the business. If the CEO isn't in that room, their priorities aren't in that room either. And they will show up later, usually at the worst possible moment.

Every yes is a hidden no

There's something nobody tells you when you step into your first product or tech leadership role: your capacity for decisions is not infinite. Every time you say yes to a feature, a project, a sprint goal — you are simultaneously saying no to something else. Usually to a lot else.

The problem is we are wired for yes. We want to help. We want to grow. We want to show stakeholders we heard them. No feels like failure; yes feels like progress. So we keep adding things to the roadmap without removing anything, and we call it ambition.

It isn't. It's avoidance.

The best product leaders I know treat the roadmap as a budget. Not a budget of money — a budget of attention. And like any budget, it is finite. When you add a line, something else gets less. You can pretend otherwise, but the team knows. They're the ones staying late to service the debt of all the yeses nobody wanted to revisit.

This is what leadership actually looks like

Anyone can walk into a room and collect requirements. You open a Confluence page, you write down what everyone said, you leave. That's administration. That's not leadership.

Leadership is walking into that same room, listening to everything everyone needs — really listening, not waiting for your turn to talk — and then making the call. Here is what we are going to do. Here is what we are not going to do. Here is why.

And then — this is the part most people skip — bringing everyone with you on that decision. Not issuing a decree and moving on. Explaining the reasoning. Acknowledging what you're leaving behind. Giving people enough context to understand why their priority didn't make the cut this time, and what would need to change for it to.

That last part is what companies most often get wrong. They have plenty of people willing to make hard calls. They have far fewer people willing to do the slow, uncomfortable work of taking others along for the journey. Of saying "I know this isn't what you wanted, and here's what I need you to understand about why." Of sitting with the discomfort of someone's disappointment instead of avoiding the decision altogether.

The best leaders I've worked with didn't come in with the answer. They came in with questions. They sat quietly while others talked. They listened in a way that made you feel genuinely heard — not processed. And then, after the room had aired everything out, they said something that stopped everyone. Not because it was new. Often it was something someone else had already said, twenty minutes earlier, buried in a longer point. But they said it in a way that suddenly made it obvious. Clear. Agreed.

That's synthesis. That's the skill nobody puts on a job description but every good team desperately needs at the top. Not the loudest voice. Not the fastest decision. The person who can hold the whole mess in their head, find the signal in it, and hand it back to the room in a form everyone can move on.

You can't do that if you're the one talking the whole time.

When everyone wants everything

Eventually you will be in a room where every stakeholder has a number one priority. Sales needs the enterprise features. Marketing needs the integrations. The CEO needs the thing they promised the board. Engineering needs to pay down the debt that's been slowing everyone down for six months.

This is not a roadmap problem. It's a prioritisation problem. And there's only one question worth asking:

What is the single thing that requires the least amount of work and delivers the most results?

This is the intuition behind Weighted Shortest Job First — a methodology from lean product development that formalises what good PMs already know intuitively. The value isn't always in the biggest feature. It's often in the small thing that unblocks everything else. The API integration nobody demanded loudly but that three teams have been waiting on for months. The performance fix that makes the sales demo not embarrassing.

Best bang for the buck isn't a compromise. It's a strategy.

How to run the meeting that actually works

Three things. First: no roadmap meeting without the decision-makers. If the CEO can't come, reschedule. If they won't come, that's a conversation you need to have before the meeting — not after.

Second: make the trade-offs explicit. Don't just say "we're building X." Say "we're building X, which means we're not building Y until next quarter." Put both on the slide. Force the discussion.

Third: document what was decided — and what was deliberately left out. The monthly reset happens when people forget what they agreed to deprioritise. Write it down. Send it out. Make the implicit explicit.

The no is not a failure of ambition. It's the thing that makes the yes mean something. And the roadmap that sticks isn't the most detailed one — it's the one everyone in the room actually agreed to.

Visual aids are an essential component of effective presentations. They provide a means to support and enhance the verbal message, increasing audience engagement and comprehension. However, not all visual aids are created equal, and choosing and using the right ones can be a challenge. This blog post will provide an overview of the importance of visual aids in presentations, the types of visual aids commonly used, and their benefits.

Understanding the Role of Visual Aids

Visual aids are any form of visual content used to enhance the audience's understanding of the speaker's message. They can take many forms, including slides, videos, handouts, props, and more. Visual aids are an essential component of effective presentations for several reasons.

First, visual aids increase audience engagement. They provide a visual break from the speaker's voice and offer a chance for the audience to see the speaker's message in a different format. Additionally, visual aids can help to break up long speeches or dense content, making it easier for the audience to digest.

Second, visual aids improve audience comprehension. Studies have shown that people retain information better when it is presented both verbally and visually. When a speaker uses visual aids, they can help to reinforce the key points of their message and make them more memorable.

Finally, visual aids can help to improve the speaker's delivery. By taking some of the attention off the speaker, visual aids can help to reduce nervousness and improve confidence. They can also provide a cue for the speaker to remember key points, ensuring that the message is delivered in a clear and concise manner.

Choosing the Right Visual Aids

Choosing the right visual aids can be a challenge, but it is an essential step in delivering an effective presentation. Several factors should be considered when selecting visual aids, including audience, content, and venue.

First, consider the audience. Who will be in attendance, and what are their needs and interests? Are they likely to respond better to a visual or verbal message? Understanding the audience's needs and preferences can help guide the selection of appropriate visual aids.

Second, consider the content. What are the key messages to be conveyed, and how can visual aids enhance those messages? Are there complex ideas or data that can be better explained visually? By selecting visual aids that support the content, speakers can help to increase audience comprehension and engagement.

Finally, consider the venue. Where will the presentation take place, and what resources are available? Is there a screen for slides, or will handouts be more appropriate? By selecting visual aids that are appropriate for the venue, speakers can ensure that their message is delivered effectively.

Avoid Overloading Your Slides with Information

While visual aids can be a great way to help your audience understand complex information, it's important to avoid overloading your slides with too much information. If you try to include too much on a single slide, your audience may become overwhelmed and miss your main points. Instead, focus on the most important information and use visual aids to highlight key points. Use bullet points or short phrases instead of full sentences, and make sure that the font size is large enough to be read from a distance.

Use High-Quality Images and Graphics

Visual aids are only effective if they are visually appealing and easy to understand. Using low-quality images or graphics can make your presentation look unprofessional and can also make it difficult for your audience to understand your message. When choosing images or graphics, make sure that they are high-quality and relevant to your topic. If you're not sure where to find high-quality images, there are many websites that offer free stock photos and graphics, such as Pexels and Unsplash.

Practice Your Presentation with Your Visual Aids

Before giving your presentation, it's important to practice with your visual aids to make sure that they are effective and that you are comfortable using them. Practice with the same equipment and lighting that you will be using during your presentation to ensure that everything works properly. Make sure that your visual aids are easy to see and understand, and that they are relevant to your message. If you're using a slideshow, make sure that you have enough time to switch between slides smoothly and that you know how to troubleshoot any technical issues that may arise.

Conclusion

Using visual aids effectively can greatly enhance your presentations and help your audience better understand your message. By following these tips, you can create visual aids that are engaging, informative, and easy to understand. Remember to keep your visual aids simple, use high-quality images and graphics, and practice your presentation with your visual aids to ensure a smooth and successful delivery. With these strategies in mind, you can make your next presentation a visually stunning and impactful experience for your audience.