I presented my pitch on Friday and I have a lot of thought on what went well, what didn’t and just general things I need to improve on.
You can find a pdf of my pitch slides here.
Feedback
I got great feed back on the design of my slides as well as my talking points. I tried to handle and provide a solution to an issue being the GP crisis within the NHS that has been particularly pertinent in the news the last few years especially with the pandemic as well a problem that effects that effects non medical people in medical situations of struggling to recall and recite their medical history to new doctors and was commended for that.
That said, it is one of those things that would involve backing and agreement and funding from the UK government since the NHS is involved as well as possibly from various businesses involved in the medical sector and of course hospitals and general practices across the UK. Basically it’s not just a simple problem to be solved. It’s also an issue of morals, that some parties wouldn’t want to make things more efficient and genuinely attempt to solve the Gp crisis if they for-see any potential loss for themselves. There’s a lot of corruption that’s involved in the issue basically. Not sure if that was exactly what was said but it is what I took out of it. As much as I like my idea and thought it could be a real contender to win the box of celebrations, I think what was said makes a lot of sense. It’s not that my product idea was bad it’s just that thats how the world works.
My slides were complimented for my colour choices, illustrations, general design and content presented in them although as I talked about the kind of application it would be they said it would’ve been nice to see so initial sketches and ui wireframes which I completely understand.
I was noticeably very nervous when presenting and did make slip ups, in part as a result of relying to much on my queue cards as but I was told that this didn’t negatively impact my pitch as much as I probably think it did. But in future to remember that I researched all this thoroughly so I should have more faith in myself to be able to talk about it effectively even with out queue cards in my hands (or if I jumble them up accidentally like I did in this time).
My Thoughts
I, believe it or not went to speech and drama for 13 years and I was in a variety of stage productions throughout my teens so I would typically consider presenting in front of an audience easy enough and even though I’m normally quite confident, presenting a product is a completely different ball game and because I’d never done one before and was afraid of superbly messing it up, I started overthinking and stressing out and extremely nervous.
To help me out a bit I wrote out my talking points on queue cards which I normally do anyway just incase I forget what I’m meant to say next, but because I didn’t feel prepared enough I ended up relying on them to heavily. That said I tried to look up and make eye contact as much as I could for the parts I felt I did know.
If I’ve learned anything from going to counselling this year, it’s that focusing on the coulda, shoulda, woulda’s is more often than not counter productive, especially if your a cereal over thinking like myself so, yes there were things I could have done better, like maybe I should have prepared myself more but ultimately I think I did a pretty good job in what was my first ever product pitch. Now if I ever have to do one again I know how to do it and isn’t that the whole point.
So with that, I think that working on this product pitch as well as ultimately presenting it, were very important and valuable experiences to have and I learned a lot from them.