In my experience the slide decks are pretty solid, with occasional exceptions. For whatever reason the folks that work in the financial industry seem obsessed with truly pointlessly large decks that reach over 100 pages.
Otherwise I think the approach is good, clear, and concise.
* page one is a summary of pretty much every major point the deck will make
* if you only read the slide titles you’ll more or less recreate the summary on page one and get the story bit by bit
* if you want to understand that argument or question it you have the evidence for it on the same page
When done correctly it’s very much like reading good doc strings and collapsing or uncollapsing the function definitions to see the implementations
It’s the difference between good comments like
> sort the data by geospatial distance to the user
And classic bad ones like
> sort function
I didn't always present 100% of the "big and dense" slide decks; we could get people into a dialogue early on that would give us an idea of what to show next, a bit like a "choose your own adventure" book.
(Overall our approach was super effective at getting people to talk about their business, my partner got me to read https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Question-Based-Selling-Powerf...; We were always finding out about stuff we weren't supposed to know like the desktop virtualization program at a famously secretive hedge fund, the closely guarded data cleanup pipeline for a real estate data vendor, the time a four letter defense contractor was grasping at straws on a project for a three letter agency, ...)
Here's an example of a slide deck I would present to a general audience, in this case a local startup accelerator
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...
which is not as information dense as one of my sales slides but when I give talks like that they always want me back. (Funny that one felt obsolete by the end of 2017 but I packed in enough neural network stuff that it seems a little prescient now... Like that time I gave a talk at the first thorium energy conference about the computational physics program that would lead to a reactor that was mostly standard stuff out of intro level textbooks but useful and correct if you want to down that path. I took the schedule of reactor development when the project was abandoned in the 1970s and shifted it up to the present. The crowd reacted viscerally that it would take that long to which my answer is "you've got to get started now"; I wound up with a test reactor circa 2025 and sure enough they are building one in China.)
I can’t say I like the linked deck too much. Titles with no thesis. Visuals that don’t demonstrate anything on their own. It can work for speaking over. But it doesn’t actually convey information.
Somebody is going to go a talk like that and receive a bit more than they can absorb. They'll walk out with something that really sticks for them. It won't promote the feeling that "I took four days and spent $X to go to a conference and didn't get my money's worth."
