How to Build an Executive Presentation When the Story Is Still Changing

If you’ve ever worked on an executive presentation, you know that the content rarely arrives perfectly organized and ready to design. More often, you have to extract the thinking, find the story, and shape it into something the presenter can react to.

For comms teams, presentation partners, and anyone supporting an executive, that work often begins off the slide, outside of the slideware. At Studio E6, it usually starts with conversation. The presenter may know what they want to accomplish and have plenty of ideas, but the story itself is still taking shape. The job is to get that thinking out of their head, organize it, and give it enough form to start moving forward.

Executives are busy, and in my experience, they are usually much better at reacting to something than creating a presentation from a blank page. You are developing the presentation with them, providing outside perspective and helping guide the process. And while the presenter ultimately owns the story, the presentation is being created for the audience. The goal is to move them from one place to another.

At a high level, that process looks something like this:

• Start with the outcome. Get clear on what the presentation needs to accomplish and where you need to take the audience.
• Get the ideas out of their head. Start with a script if you have one. If you don’t, have a conversation, record it, and get the raw thinking out where you can work with it.
• Give them something to react to. Turn those ideas into an outline, script, storyboard, or rough deck that is specific enough to generate useful feedback.
• Keep the rough draft rough. It is called a rough draft for a reason. Stay at the right level of fidelity while the narrative is still evolving.
• Expect the story to change. Presentations are inherently iterative, especially when strategy, leadership feedback, and business priorities are moving at the same time.
• Provide outside perspective. Simplify, challenge, organize, and identify the places that need more explanation.
• Keep the audience at the center. Every decision should ultimately make the presentation clearer, more relevant, and more useful to the people receiving it.

That is the work. Do this right, and the design should fall into place later. Let’s break down these steps in more detail.

Start With the Outcome

Starting broad means understanding the destination before you start mapping every step of the journey. Before you worry about individual slides, you need to understand what the presentation is supposed to accomplish and what should be different for the audience when it is over.

A few questions I come back to again and again:

• What is the goal of the presentation?
• What does the audience believe today?
• What do you want them to believe afterward?
• Where are you trying to take them?
• What do you want them to do, understand, or feel differently?
• If they could remember only one thing from the presentation, what should it be?

That last one is a go-to question of mine because it forces you to prioritize. The answer is not always obvious, and sometimes you have to ask the same basic question a few different ways to get there. What do you want people talking about afterward? What absolutely has to stick? What is the one idea everything else should support?

Once you understand that, you have a destination. Then you can start figuring out the story that gets you there.

Get the Ideas Out of Their Head

Ideally, you have a script to work from. Many of the executive communications teams I work with will develop an early script with the presenter, gather feedback, and then bring us in to help shape the narrative and determine how the presentation should support it.

When there is no script, a conversation is often the next best place to begin. Sit down with the presenter, record it, and let them talk through what they are trying to say. Ask questions, follow the ideas that seem important, and dig into anything that feels unclear. At this point, I am less concerned with whether everything is in the right order and more interested in getting the raw material out where we can see it.

Once those ideas are out in the open, you can start to see what works, what doesn’t, where the gaps are, and where the opportunities are. You begin to identify the key messages, the big ideas, and the places where the thinking still needs work.

Maybe something makes perfect sense to the presenter but needs more context for everyone else. Maybe an idea is too complicated, or there is a jump in the logic that needs to be filled in. Those are the places where you can start determining how to make the idea clearer, whether that is through a better explanation, a story, a visual, a concrete example, or some combination of them.

I use the same process myself. If I am struggling to organize an idea, I will sit down with ChatGPT or Claude and talk through it. Once the thinking is out of my head, it becomes much easier to see the building blocks, identify patterns, and start organizing them into an outline.

A presentation can develop the same way. The conversation gives you the raw material, and from there you can start shaping the narrative.

Give Them Something to React To

Once you have enough of the story to work with, put something in front of the presenter. It might be an outline, a rough script, a strawman, or an early storyboard. It does not need to be polished, and it definitely does not need to be right.

This is also where we start defining the relationship between what the audience hears, what they read, and what they see. Those things should work together, each adding something to the idea, so the whole becomes more meaningful than any one piece on its own.

A blank slide is a blank mind.

Give someone a blank page and you may get very little back. Put an idea on the page, even if you know it is provisional, and suddenly they have something specific to respond to.

Maybe the message is too complicated. Something needs to come earlier. The language does not sound like them. An idea needs an example. A section that seemed important turns out not to matter at all.

That is useful feedback.

The first version is there to help move the conversation forward. It gives everyone something tangible enough to respond to so you can start narrowing in on what the presentation actually needs to become.

Keep the Rough Draft Rough

It is called a rough draft for a reason.

For me, an early presentation usually looks more like a storyboard than a designed deck. I want to see what the presenter is saying alongside a rough representation of what the audience might see. That could be a section of script paired with a simple black-and-white sketch, a rough image, a headline, or some basic text placement.

There is very little visual polish at this stage because the story is still being refined. I generally want the narrative to be about 60 to 70 percent there before we start investing heavily in design. That gives us enough structure to start thinking visually without spending hours perfecting slides that may disappear after the next conversation.

The feedback at this stage should still be about the story:

• Does this make sense?
• Is it in the right order?
• Is something more complicated than it needs to be?
• Are we missing an important idea?
• Would a story or example make this more concrete?
• Does this actually sound like the person who is going to present it?

Those questions matter much more at this point than whether someone likes a particular image, font, or layout.

Expect the Story to Change

Presentations are inherently iterative, and executive presentations rarely develop in a vacuum. The presenter may be getting feedback from their boss. A leadership team may change direction. New information comes in. Sometimes the strategy itself is still being developed while the presentation is being built.

I have worked on plenty of presentations where the team is effectively developing the strategy and the deck at the same time. That can create a lot of churn because a decision happening somewhere else in the organization can suddenly change what belongs in the presentation.

An entire section may move into the appendix. A message that seemed essential a week ago may no longer matter. Slides that took hours to create may never see the light of day.

Some of that is unavoidable. What you can control is how much you overinvest before the story is ready.

Start broad, work in smaller iterations, and keep gut-checking the narrative as you go. As the story becomes more certain, the design can become more specific. The deck itself should also be built with change in mind so that content can be reordered, removed, or replaced without forcing you to rebuild the entire presentation every time something shifts.

How you build that flexibility also depends on where and how the presentation will be delivered. A deck designed for a large event or keynote stage has different considerations than a presentation someone is advancing themselves in a conference room. Show flow, builds, transitions, screen format, speaker cues, and who is actually operating the presentation can all affect how the final deck should be constructed.

That deserves its own conversation, and we’ll cover it separately in our guide to Event Presentation Design.

Provide Outside Perspective

One of the most valuable things you can bring to an executive presentation is distance from the material.

The presenter knows the business. They know the context, the history, the acronyms, and all the conversations that happened before anyone ever opened the deck. The audience probably does not.

That gap matters.

Part of our job is identifying the places where something makes perfect sense internally but will be confusing to someone hearing it for the first time. Sometimes that means simplifying an idea. Sometimes it means pushing back on something the presenter feels strongly about. Sometimes it means asking for a story, an example, or a visual that makes an abstract point easier to understand.

You are there to help the presenter communicate more clearly, not simply document everything they want to say.

Build It for the Audience

It is easy for an executive presentation to become overly focused on the executive. What do they want to say? What do they need to cover? What does leadership want included?

Those things matter, but the presentation is ultimately being created for the audience.

A good presentation should take people somewhere. They walk in knowing, believing, or feeling one thing, and the job of the presentation is to move them toward something else. That transformation should guide the story, the information you choose to include, what you leave out, and eventually how you design the slides.

If the story is strong enough, the design can usually be pretty simple. When the central idea is clear, every slide has a more obvious job because you know what the presenter needs to say, what the audience needs to understand in that moment, and what needs to appear on screen to support it.

That clarity tends to create simpler, stronger presentations because the design is supporting a story that already knows where it is going.

The presenter owns the story, but developing it is a collaborative process. Get the thinking out of their head, give them something useful to react to, keep the early work rough enough to change, and provide the outside perspective they need along the way.

Most importantly, keep building it for the people on the other side of the presentation.