From a brief to a deck
Hand over the material and the audience, agree a structure, then build it out.
A deck built from a brief is only as good as the brief. The assistant is good at structure, phrasing and layout. It cannot know what your client said in the room last Tuesday, and it will not invent a defensible number for you.
What to put in the brief
- The audience, and what you need them to decide or do.
- The material: notes, a transcript, a document, or the findings themselves.
- Roughly how long the deck should be.
- Anything that is fixed, such as a structure your client expects or a section you have already written.
Make me a deck about our supply chain findings.
Build a 15-slide steering committee update from the attached findings. Audience is the CFO and two directors. The argument is that the current supplier mix is the cost problem, not volumes. End on three options with a recommendation. Keep the exec summary to one slide.
Build in passes, not in one go
Treat the first version as a draft of the argument rather than a draft of the deck. Settle the story, then the content on each slide, then the look. Reversing that order means polishing slides you are about to delete.