Nobody Cares About Your Slides
Why we swapped customer slide decks for a plain, honest doc — and why customers started asking for a copy.
There was a customer I was genuinely terrified to disappoint. She'll tell you herself she has high expectations and makes hard calls for financial leaders all over the world, so she has zero patience for any song and dance. For that very reason, I made her my test case: if I can impress her, I can impress anyone. A few calls in, I showed up to a roadmap meeting with a little homemade HTML doc, and instead of dressing anything up I just said plainly "here's what's done, here's what isn't". Her eyebrows shot up, and then a small smile. She asked sharp questions, reprioritized a few things she'd been excited about, and by the end of the call said the last thing I expected: "send me a copy of this, will you?" Not a fancy deck; the brutally honest, kinda ugly doc I threw together in an afternoon.
I don't have resources waiting to build whatever I dream up (does anyone?). So when I decided our onboarding materials had to be a lot better, there was no ticket to file and nobody to file it to. It was just me and my newest buddy, Claude. I vibe-coded it, told it in plain English what I wanted, and we went back and forth — this works, this looks terrible, move that — until the thing existed. It even pushed me toward ideas I hadn't had, like sprint-style updates the way a dev team runs standups: week one, two, three, goals from every department, not just engineering.
We call it the weekly meeting doc, no need to get fancy. And I don't email it over after the fact, I pull it up and share my screen and we edit it together, live, while we're on the call. It shows what we shipped this week, what's in progress with real statuses (and no spin), what I need from them with a who and a by-when, and what's still blocked, carried over week to week so the file becomes the memory of the whole partnership.
And I send it over Slack, not email. I'm done praying my message lands at the top of someone's inbox when I can just talk to a real person in a channel we already share. That shared channel is where real partnership is headed — but that's a rant for another time.
Why are we hating on slide decks?
Because people are so tired of the performance: the pretty stuff that only exists to hide the ugly stuff. Customers aren't just asking for transparency, they're demanding it. A nice deck is usually a business-costume where the bad news goes to hide: we're late on that, we dropped the thing we promised, we're not sure where you're getting value. But a plain, honest doc dropped into that shared channel does the exact opposite. It moves exactly as fast, or as slow, as the partnership really is.
And that's the same reason DataFabrIQ exists at all. Our whole pitch is no black boxes — every number traces back to where it came from. It'd be strange to sell that kind of honesty about your data and then run the relationship on costume design. So, I aimed the same idea at the partnership instead of the data pipeline.
It also just takes me about 30 minutes to build a new one and maybeeee a whole 5 to spin up the next week's. Versus the hour of prep I used to sink into every meeting, for every customer — the time saved is obvious, and the customer is happier.
Turns out change really is the only constant
Customers want two things that sound like opposites: something genuinely different, and something to anchor on while AI keeps evolving. They want materials that keep up with the change and still feel consistent — sounds like it can't be both, but it can.
So try it. Open up Claude, tell it what you actually need, and keep messing with it until it's useful. Then mess with it some more. Change is the only constant now, especially with AI in the mix, so the goal is no longer to build the perfect thing once — it's to stay agile enough to keep reshaping it as fast as everything else shifts… while delivering information your customers actually want and need.
If your week involves continuous data patches and tweaks you're a little afraid to continue touching, come see what we built at datafabriq.co.