The 40-slide problem: cutting a deck without losing the argument
Long decks are not thorough. They are undecided. A method for getting from everything you know to the six slides that carry the case.
The first draft of any deck contains everything the author knows. That is what a first draft is for. The mistake is presenting it, and the reason people present it is that cutting feels like losing information rather than gaining attention.
Start from the ask, not the beginning
Write the final slide first: the decision you want, in one sentence. Then work backwards asking what a sceptical reader needs to believe before that sentence is reasonable. Usually three things. Those are your body slides. Everything else is an appendix.
If a slide does not change what the reader believes, it is costing you their attention at compound interest.
One claim per slide
The headline is the claim. The body is the evidence for that claim. If you cannot write the headline as a sentence with a verb in it, the slide has no claim and should be merged into its neighbour. 'Traction' is not a claim. 'ARR tripled while churn halved' is.
Keep the cuts
Move everything you removed into an appendix section after the ask. You will be asked about two of them, you will jump straight there, and you will look considerably more prepared than the person who left all forty slides in the main deck.
A generated draft makes this easier, not harder, because the cost of cutting drops to nothing when regenerating a section takes eight seconds.
