Slide deck

slide-deck

Build a deck where every slide earns its place. One idea per slide. The headline is what the audience should conclude, not what the slide is about.

Audience

People in a room (or staring at a Zoom tile). They will read the headline in two seconds while you're still talking. The body exists for the person reviewing the deck later, or the one in the back row who tuned out for thirty seconds. The slide is your scaffold; you are the presentation.

When to use

Trigger on any of:

• "make slides" / "slide deck" / "deck" / "presentation"
• "turn this into slides" / "slidify" / "for a presentation"
• "PowerPoint" / "Keynote" / "Google Slides"
• The user is preparing to present to a group and asks for help

Do not trigger when:

• One slide is enough — write a one-pager instead.
• The content is fundamentally a narrative argument best read in order. A deck flattens; prose threads.
• Slides are decorative wrapping for a memo. If the audience could read it as a memo, send a memo.

The arc

A deck is not a pile of slides. It is a three-part structure:

1. First slide states the answer. BLUF. The decision, the recommendation, the finding. Not "Q3 Review" but "We should kill Project Atlas. Three reasons follow."
2. Middle slides build the case. One reason per slide, in the strongest-to-weakest order — your audience may stop paying attention before slide five.
3. Last slide states the ask. What you want the audience to do. Not "Thank you / Questions?" — those are decoration. "We need $200k by end of month. Sign-off today, or we lose the window."

If you cannot write the first slide and the last slide in one sentence each, you are not ready to write the middle.

Rules

1. One idea per slide. If a slide has two arguments, split it. Two thin slides beat one fat one.
2. Headline is the takeaway, not the topic. Wrong: "Q4 Results." Right: "Q4 revenue beat target by 8%, driven entirely by APAC." The headline is a sentence with a verb.
3. Body supports the headline. Up to three bullets, or one chart, or one image. No body that doesn't reinforce the headline.
4. Speaker notes ≠ slide content. Body shows the facts and numbers; notes carry the reasoning. If both say the same thing, the audience reads instead of listens — and they read faster than you talk.
5. No filler slides. No "Agenda", "Thank you", "Questions?", "About me". Every slide pays its way with a takeaway.
6. Cut by half. Whatever your draft length is, halve it. The slides you delete are the ones no one missed.

Format

Emit each slide as a small block.

---
# Slide N

**Headline:** [one sentence, has a verb, states the takeaway]

**Body:**
- [bullet — supports headline, ≤10 words]
- [bullet — supports headline, ≤10 words]
- [bullet — supports headline, ≤10 words]

**Speaker notes:** [2–4 sentences — the story, the caveat, the segue.]
---

Example

Bad (topic headline, body that overlaps speaker notes):

# Slide 3
**Headline:** Project Atlas Status
**Body:**
- Project Atlas has been running for 18 months
- We've spent $1.2M so far
- We expected to launch in Q2 but slipped to Q4
- Customer interviews suggest weak demand
**Speaker notes:** I'll walk through the Atlas status.

Good (takeaway headline, tight body, notes carry the story):

# Slide 3
**Headline:** Atlas is 6 months late, $1.2M in, and customers don't want it.

**Body:**
- 18 months in, Q4 slip from Q2
- $1.2M spent, $400k more to finish
- Customer interviews: weak demand signal

**Speaker notes:** This is the slide where I lose the room or keep it.
The timeline and spend are facts — they'll see those. The thing they
won't see unless I say it: the customer interviews we ran in October
told us the wedge isn't there. That's the reason to kill it, not the
spend.

Handing off to a renderer

You produce structured slide blocks. The actual deck is the host's job — keep this clean separation, because every audience wants a different format and you'd otherwise be in a rendering arms race.

The block shape — headline, body, speaker notes — is the intermediate form. It maps cleanly to any slide tool:

• If a presentation renderer is available (in the host, as a sibling skill, or in the user's environment), pipe the blocks to it and let it produce the deck.
• If not, the user transfers each block by section: headline into the title, body into the bullets, speaker notes into the notes pane. Tool-specific; not your concern.
• For an async audience that doesn't need slides at all, the headlines alone read as a numbered argument. Often enough.

What you are not doing

• You are not writing a document with slide breaks. A deck is a talk; a doc is a read.
• You are not decorating. Icons, photos, motion — render-time choices.
• You are not writing the whole talk on the slides. The slides are what survives without you. You are what makes the deck land while you're in the room.
• You are not building a "comprehensive" deck. Comprehensive = long. Long = unread. Cut.