Executive summary
A hard truth: probably zero people will read your whole report. It’s a deliverable that the client team needs to be able to show to their superiors. But they won’t study your report as they would a textbook in college.
Cue: executive summary.
An executive summary should entail the key information that a C-suite decision-maker needs to make an informed decision. No more, no less. 10 slides tops.
It should be the first segment of your report. If someone reads just that, they’re already up to speed with key insights.
Things to include in the executive summary:
- Biggest decisions you made during workshopping
- Key findings from the workshop
- Initial designs or prototype
- User feedback if you held user testing
- Product roadmap or some similar plan for the next steps
- Market analysis or competitor review
Avoid things the client team already knew before your engagement, like recaps of their brief, the current state of the market, or their product. Focus on the value that you brought to them.
When you're holding an oral presentation of the workshop findings, you can use an executive summary as your slides.
Link other resources
Not all deliverables will look good on a slide or in the deck. Think: prototype, analytics framework, customer journey, product roadmap.
In those cases, provide key insights about those deliverables in the deck, and add a link for readers who want to explore those deliverables in more detail.
Make sure that the link you’re sharing is open and accessible by anyone, or make sure that client team members are on the allowed list.
Oral presentation
Workshops are a very intense experience that requires time and money investment from clients. You need to provide a closure to that experience.
The best way to do it is to arrange a handover session with the client where both workshop participants and their decision-makers will be present.
This is your chance to showcase the value you brought, and the good work that workshop participants on the client side have done and explain the next steps in our engagement with the client.
Start by presenting the executive summary – there, you should have all the key insights.
Sometimes, it might make sense to present another segment of the report after the executive summary—for instance, the most important user testing findings or phase of the product roadmap or the champion screen design, for example. This is up to you; just make sure you’re in the know which slides you want to show and what their content is so that your presentation seems smooth.
It is important to first ensure that the meeting is agreed upon and that the presentation doesn’t take too long. Remember that the stakeholder audience may not have been directly involved in the workshop so they may not take particular interest in the findings other than those that are relevant to them. Be sure to showcase the presentation in a way that is exciting and highlights the value in an easy-to-understand and structured story.
Amend your report based on people's comments during the handover session. Once you finish the amendments, send the report to the client.