Content before structure

The other day I had a potential client on the phone who was under time pressure. She asked me whether I could work on the structure/framework of the presentation (and the template) while in parallel they would start filling things in.

When you start a project and need to cut up work among multiple team members, a skeleton or presentation framework can be really helpful: someone works on the market, someone works on the competition, while someone else takes on the financials.

When you get to the stage where you have to present your conclusions to others (i.e., the analytical work is done), putting structure before content is wrong. As a presentation designer you need to know the content first, translate that into a story, and in the process you come up with a structure which is engaging and convincing, a structure that often will deviate from business school presentation templates, consulting pyramid structures and other logical frameworks.

Problem solving: structure first, then content.
Convincing: content first, then structure.