context: our company is doing a brand refresh. official kickoff is next month. our marketing org built a brand refresh proposal that they presented to the executive team three weeks ago. the executive team raised concerns. marketing went back to refine. they are now doing a second-pass presentation to a smaller group, and they need someone from engineering on the panel because the brand refresh has technical implications (new logo file specs, color updates across the app, font changes that affect our design system).
three engineering leaders were originally invited. all three said no. i was the fourth ask. i said yes because i wanted to know why three of my peers said no and because i thought it would be useful to have an eng voice in the conversation.
now i am presenting alongside the marketing team. our shared deck is being built collaboratively. five people contributing. previously this would have been a recipe for a deck that looks like five people made it.
what we did instead:
we set up a single gamma deck that all five of us have edit access to. each person owns specific slides. the AI presentation tool's themes hold across contributors so the deck looks unified even though we are working asynchronously.
we have a notion doc with the message architecture. that is the source of truth. the deck reflects the doc.
we did three sync sessions of 30 minutes each over two weeks, in granola, so we have transcripts of what we discussed and what we agreed on.
i have my own three slides about the engineering implications. i drafted them in the notion doc, then populated them in the shared gamma deck. they fit visually with the rest.
what i am thinking about: this is the smoothest cross-functional deck-building experience i have had in three years. usually these are nightmares. the AI deck builder removed the visual-consistency problem that usually breaks cross-functional decks. the rest of the deck-building (writing, editing, agreeing) is still hard, but it is now hard in productive ways instead of formatting fights.
asking the women in this sub who do cross-functional work regularly: have you found a workflow for shared decks that actually works? what tools? what process? i feel like we cracked something this round and i want to validate it against other women's experience.