You don't matter

The first thing my co-presenter told me about public speaking

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at AndroidMakers by Droidcon in Paris. It was a two day Android conference at the Beffroi de Montrouge, a lovely cultural centre with big rooms for the talks across several floors.

I was there because Trade Republic has recently opened an office in Paris, and are hiring engineering talent there to keep up with their growth. I invited a few engineers from the team to come along to help me and the recruiters run a booth across the two days. Between the booth and a talk we ended up speaking to alot of impressive people.

The booth itself was compact, placed in the corner between Maestro and Stripe. We ran an Android quiz and a virtual prize wheel for swag and a few mirror cards.

What I was actually nervous about was the talk.

The Talk

I was partnered with Matthias Baccino. Matthias is a Senior Advisor at Trade Republic, a best-selling author, and well known in financial circles in France. He’s done alot of TV. Polished, well rehearsed, at home on a stage. I’m not so much. The most I have really done is internal talks and some low-key meetups in the past.

The format was a two-voice talk. Matthias was there to tell the story from the business and community side. I was there for the product and engineering side. The whole thing was designed as a back and forth, where each of us would set up the next bit of the story for the other to pick up. It meant the audience got both perspectives on the same events, which is a hard thing to do in a single-speaker talk.

The talk itself was about how the Trade Republic app went from doing one thing well to doing many things at once from the perspective of Android.

One account, one portfolio, one currency in Germany, to multi-account, multi-portfolio, multi-currency across eighteen European markets. The arc of the story? We had a public backlash in the middle: a huge rewrite of the app that, when we launched it, produced 90,000 one-star reviews in two weeks. We then ran a war room to address the biggest issues users were reporting and came up with solutions that scaled. The story was about why we had to do the rewrite, what went wrong, and what it eventually allowed us to do to get to where we are now. We opened the talk with that number. One slide. Just “90,000.” Those were my first words on stage, before any of us introduced ourselves.

The preparation

Leading up to it with Matthias is where I really learned something.

He gave me a kind of crash course in public speaking. The first thing he said was:

“You don’t matter, this talk isn’t about you”

It sounds harsh out of context, but it was exactly what I needed to hear. People new to public speaking make the talk about themselves. They’re thinking about how they look, how their voice sounds, whether they’re going to forget their lines. All of that energy is wasted, because the audience doesn’t really care about you. They care about whether you’re giving them something worth their time. Once you flip the focus from yourself to them, alot of the fear goes away.

That was just the beginning of our conversation, Matthias was full of gems and that's why I'm imparting that knowledge onto you. He mentioned more tips:

The first was about getting on stage. Anyone who walks on stage afraid of public speaking will lose half their IQ in the first few minutes, so you need a way to ground yourself before you go up. Don’t check Slack, don’t scroll, don’t take any inputs. Find a moment to breathe. Learn the first sentence and the last sentence by heart, with clear notes for everything in between.

The second was about finding a place to perform from. Acting, but not in a fake way. More like, find a context where you already feel confident and clear, and bring that energy with you. For me that’s job interviews. I do alot of them at work, probably a couple of hundred a year, and I’m always there to provide value to the candidate. I speak clearly, I think clearly, I have well rehearsed lines about what we’re building and where we’re going. Realising I already had a “good speaking” mode I could pull from gave me something real to work with, I hadn't really connected the two before this.

And finally, he mentioned finding one person in the audience to focus on, someone you keep coming back to when your eyes start drifting around the room. Someone to come back to when your attention scatters.

On the day, the talk was a relief I didn’t really see coming. I felt good on stage. No IQ drop. I think it was because my last public speaking experience was a positive one (internal in the company), so this time I had something recent to go into the room with. The interview mode thing worked alot better than I expected. I spoke clearly, slowed myself down on purpose, and pushed it almost to the point of feeling uncomfortably slow because the audience was heavily French speaking. Slowing down when you already feel fine is harder than it sounds, but I think it made the talk easier to follow than it would have been otherwise.

Having Matthias on stage with me also took some of the pressure off in a way, but I expected that having spoke with him a few times prior. I wasn’t the only voice in the room. Between my sections I could listen, breathe and find myself again before coming back in.

Overall, I’m proud of how it went. We told a story most engineers in the room hadn’t heard before, the back and forth with Matthias worked, and I walked off stage feeling like I’d actually done the thing I’d been nervous about. The feedback we got afterwards was that people who already used the product appreciated finally hearing the story behind it, because to many it was dramatic. That mattered to me.

A few things I’d do differently next time. We went over on time, which caught me off guard at the end. I had a five-takeaways slide I was meant to walk through cleanly, and instead I rushed it and gave my own high-level summary while the slide sat behind me. There were also a couple of moments mid-talk where I said things I cringed at later. And honestly, the talk wasn’t as technical as I’d have liked. It went more into storytelling than into the kind of detail engineers could take back to their own work. I was an EM during the rewrite, shaping the work and jumping into code now and then, but not doing the heavy lifting day to day. That’s why this version had to stay where it did. The next one I’d love to give with an engineer who actually lived in the code, told from a purely technical angle.

If you want the full story behind the 90,000, AndroidMakers will be publishing the video in the near future. I’ll be sure to share the link via my profile when it’s out.

I came home from Paris feeling like I had accomplished something. The fear didn’t go away, but it became something I knew how to handle. Matthias’s advice actually works.

If you like what you read, feel free to subscribe to stay up to date. I post stories on my journey as an engineering leader to help you become a better Human and Engineer in the world dominated by AI.