Solutions Architect presentations in job interviews: common mistakes

It’s very common for a Solutions Architect (or Cloud Architect or Enterprise Architect) to have to give a Work Sample presentation in an interview. The reason that employers ask you to give a presentation is that these roles are both technical and customer facing, and communication and presentation skills are critical in customer-facing jobs.

What are the interviewers evaluating in your presentation?

The interviewers are checking your ability to speak on your audience’s level, exhibit strong executive presence, and demonstrate emotional intelligence and conflict resolution skills. Also of course they are checking your technical ability and how you communicate technical information to your audience.

Part of my job is listening to my clients’ presentations and giving them feedback. I don’t love giving presentations myself, so I can empathize with the stress of presenting in front of a panel of people who are going to decide your career future.

I’m not a technical person so I listen to presentations and think about them from the perspective of communication. I think about things like structure, clarity, word choice, etc. I can see where things don’t make sense or where you need to give more information. When I get confused about your meaning, your audience probably will too.

How to avoid mistakes in your presentation

In the prep work I’ve done with my clients, I’ve realized that many clients make the same mistakes in their presentations. To avoid those mistakes, follow these guidelines:

Target your audience

This is an interview, not a real customer visit, so you aren’t going to have the CIO in the room. You will probably have mostly technical folks but maybe someone in another department who isn’t technical, like someone from Product or Marketing.

Presenting for an interview is different from presenting to a customer. At a customer presentation – assuming the audience is primarily executives – you would need to show how the technology (your product solution) could positively impact the business. You would want to make your language and content less technical and more business. If the audience was technical people, you would want to show in detail how the solution worked.

For an interview, however, create your presentation for both senior tech and business people. In other words, assume your audience will be a mix of the two. You need to prove to the technical people that you understand the tech, while simultaneously making sure the business people are seeing the big picture of how the solution will help (or did help, since this is a past project).

Possible mistake: Many of my clients make their presentation too technical. Yes you need to convince the audience that you can build a great solution, but you also need to convince them that you can sell the solution to clients. Being technical is only 50% of selling – the rest is communication. Make sure you give the listener the big picture of the problem and solution and connect the dots for them about business impact.

Use a logical structure for your slides and speech

A 40-minute presentation should have between 10-20 slides. These are some slide ideas in the order you should use them. You can also add more if you need them to explain your ideas well.

Intro 1: Your name and the project title.

Intro 2: Your photo and previous client logos. This slide should give you a chance to talk a little bit about your background and skills as related to the job. If you were doing a presentation at a client, you might not need to include this slide, but since this is an interview it’s a good idea. Think of this as a short version of the answer to the “Tell me about yourself” interview question.

TOC: The agenda for your presentation.

Executive summary: A very brief overview of the project, problem, and solution. This quick overview should orient your audience to the topic so they can know ahead of time what you’ll be telling them. Adding this makes it easier to follow you, even though you’ll be re-stating this info and going into detail about it later.

Scenario: Describe the customer engagement where you contributed technical expertise that supported forward progress of the engagement. You’ve already given the executive summary, but start again at the beginning with the project. Explain the project and this time give more detail.

Technical details: Details on specific technical characteristics, recommendations, and expected results. As appropriate, include architectural diagrams and other visual aids. Most of these presentations include at least one slide with architecture diagram.

Challenges/risks: Describe any identified challenges and risks, and the process of identification. Also include how they were addressed as part of the engagement.

Results: Describe the results of the engagement and your contribution to those results. See my recent blog post on how to create a great “Results” section. While the post is about STAR storytelling, all of the advice I provide there is applicable in this context, too.

Q&A

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Possible mistake: Too much stuff crammed onto your slides – I see this a lot. I almost never have to tell someone to add more to a slide; usually, I need to tell them to remove it. This correlates with too many details and not enough connecting the dots. Don’t give me so many details that I get confused and can’t follow your project journey. You need to provide the big picture before diving into the details.

Stay positive

This presentation is a test of your technical competency, but also your customer support skills. There are a million people out there with technical skills, but strong communication will set you apart. If you can deal with different personalities while explaining a complicated idea to them, that makes you unusual and outstanding.

If they ask you a mean question, stay positive. Don’t show any negative emotion. Just answer the question. If you show you can remain calm, that’s a great insight into your customer service skills.

Practice

The last step in preparing for your presentation is practice. You should practice your speech at least 10 times and record yourself. You’ll be able to pick up on new things you can change if you see yourself on screen.

If you’d like me to listen to your speech and give you feedback, email me at jennifer@interviewgenie.com