3 Stages of Board Deck Preparation

The Long Road to Strategic Insight is Worth the Journey

When I was a mid-level marketer working on board decks, I would get so angry when all the slides I created were never used. I spent so much time on the data, the analysis, the design, and the editing. We spent so many hours reviewing slides as a team with the CMO and the CEO. “Why the heck did I need to waste time on this when I had so much to do (to drive actual performance)?” I would think. Now as a CMO and Advisor, I have a different perspective. I have accepted that there are three really important stages to preparing an outstanding board deck, and that the work wasn’t wasted.

Stage 1: Departmental Analysis

The board meeting is meant to be a review of our strategy, how it’s performing, and how we will change it to get better performance next quarter and in the future. In order for that to work, we have to:
#1 Clarify the strategy
#2 Report on the results
#3 Analyze trends in the results
#4 Evolve our strategy and plans

This is harder than it sounds! It’s not really about the board slides - it’s about having the right strategy and a deep understanding of our numbers and trends. The first step of board slide preparation is to get the team on the same page. You may create a few dozen slides as you try to articulate what you’re doing and if it’s working. Even in creating the slides, the data begs new questions and more slides. Thanks for the pipeline slide. Can we see how it’s doing with these new cohorts we are talking about targeting next quarter? Thank you for this segmented pipeline, but can you show it to me over time? Thank you for this pipeline slide - can you show me a real customer user journey from first touch to buy for each of these two new segments? You get the idea. Tons of slides are created to get insights and answer questions.

Stage 2: CEO Analysis

Once the department lead has created dozens of slides and culled them down to a simplified story (and fewer slides), they will share them with the CEO. The CEO will have lots of questions and may want more slides to answer these questions. For instance, in marketing, you sometimes end up in a deep dive on channel performance because the CEO doesn’t feel like this or that is working even though you thought it wasn’t really ‘board level.’

This can be stressful and frustrating on short timelines when lots of other things are going on, but this is a critical stage of the process with big returns. The preparation of the board deck is the forcing function for strategic thinking, performance management, viewing trends, analyzing different paths forward, and having deep conversations on what really matters. Creating the slides for the CEO is partially about what the board will see and partially about what the CEO needs to see to feel confident in you, your team, your performance, and your plans.

Stage 3: Simplified for the Board

Now it’s time to greatly simplify again. The board doesn’t want to see all your details and work. You may have needed to see it, your CEO may have needed to see it, but now you need to boil down the most salient insights, displayed in the most clear, concise manner with trend graphs, data, and paths forward. The CMO may have had 24, 30, 40 slides from Stage 1, there may have been 5, 10 or more slides created for the CEO, and in the end, you may end up with 5, 7, or 12 slides total for the board. Sometimes, just 1-2!

Each C-Suite member (or a mid-level manager), thinks their function is the center of our universe. For the board, it’s a small part of a whole strategy to drive profits. After all the preparation, NONE of the slides may get discussed because the most pressing topic may be the next financing round, a re-architecture of the product, or a reorganization of the company structure. But the time spent on analyzing and clarifying your strategy can make you more effective at driving the strategy, can inform how you look at the data in the future and can help you perform better - even if the slides are never used.

For instance, with one of my advisory clients, marketing was seeing a big drop in mid-funnel deals. They were confused because the pipeline trend they had been looking at had looked consistent over time - what happened? In preparing for a board deck, we decided to look just at the new pipeline created by week, not the total pipeline. When we charted it this new way, we saw a huge dip because of an all-company meeting, which took sales and SDRs out of the office, and a company shutdown over the July 4th holiday, which further slowed net new outreach. These two weeks in one month decimated new pipeline creation. The data point was hidden in the larger overall pipeline on the regular dashboards, but the act of analyzing the data for the board meeting brought to light a new perspective that changed the ongoing executive dashboard (and out-of-office strategy) for the future.

Preparing & Saving Time

Despite my optimism about the value, there are ways to help your team save some time. First, make sure you give yourself enough space and time to have three stages - they will get forced into whatever time is available, but are more effective if you accept and plan for them all. Secondly, consider waiting on some of the highest fidelity design work until you know where it matters most - you might be able to review a lot of data and ask questions in the performance dashboards and analysis spreadsheets instead of after slides have been created. Lastly, figure out how you can incorporate the key data visualizations that matter into your ongoing dashboards. The dream is that you are already tracking and analyzing what you need for the board, so it’s more about assembling than creating things from scratch.

It’s hard to tear yourself away from getting the actual work that needs to be done to analyze, plan, explain, and build slides. But the goal is that it helps everyone focus on what really matters and steal back time from what doesn’t.

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Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.

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