Ask HN: I am giving my first talk to 200 people at my job. Any tips?

The advice given to radio DJ's might be helpful: you're not talking to 100,000 people. You're talking to one or two people. In this case they're all sitting in the same room, but you can still pick out one or two who appear to be listening closely.

If you have a set amount of time to fill, avoid any anxiety about that by preparing more than enough material, and knowing ahead of time what you'll be sacrificing.

Since you know your subject well, focus on communicating your enthusiasm about it. We've all sat through lectures by people who sound bored by what they've chosen to spend years at.

Be your best self. Talk to people like you already know them (in a good way). The DJ advice mentioned here is great too. Talk with feeling. People want to hear your energy as much as your words. Talk in short sentences, they help line up the next sentence. Don't worry about memorizing your presentation line for line, but more about the major points you want to make, you can trust yourself to make those points in your good style already. If you feel like you stumble or whatever, don't worry about it, you can just pause and go into another sentence or topic.

I am assuming that the intention of the talk is to convince others within the company to use this framework. So, in a sense, this is a sales pitch.

What I would suggest is to take some time and make a list of all the possible objections as to why anyone in the audience would not want to use your framework. Put yourself in their shoes. Try really hard to see from their point of view. Once you've done that, now go through each one and come up with real answers to each objection as to why they should use the framework.

For some of the reasons for not using the framework, you will not have a good answer (ie. its hard to argue too much with "we have million+ line of code and using your framework doesn't add any value") but for a lot of it, given some thought you should come up with a reasonable argument for your framework.

Once you've done this, you can now implicitly incorporate some of the answers to the objections in your presentation without explicitly mentioning the objection. You will also have given yourself a great chance at answering some good questions that will come up that will likely touch upon these areas.

I have to disagree on the Steve Jobs advice. People liked his presentations because they buy into the whole product image and they'd be on the edge of their seat to see what he was announcing.

If your audience actually wants get useful in-depth technical information (e.g., to evaluate an app development framework) or new skills, don't try to come off like Jobs.

Engage the folks there in person - look them in the eye (as many different people as you can).

Try to generate some interaction - ask questions, preferably ones that can be answered with a show of hands.

Breathe.

Know your material, but don't try to memorize it. Work it like a TV sports anchor - know what's going on and the details and ad-lib the specifics.

Smile and seem/be genuinely happy to be sharing this information with your audience. Wanting to be there is obvious, and so is not wanting to be there.