When you live minute by minute in problem solving a very detailed, specific thing within a broader goal, you start to think that the detailed, specific thing is

When you live minute by minute in problem solving a very detailed, specific thing within a broader goal, you start to think that the detailed, specific thing is the outcome and is very important. But it is not. To most people. Most people are not knowledgeable about your specific problem or challenge. Most people don't care, or don't have the time to care. If they understood it all, they wouldn't be asking for a meeting. What they need to know is not all the process and challenges you overcame, but the outcome. What did you achieve, what were you not able to achieve, what do you need to finish the problem? If you cannot provide those level of answers (and quite early in the presentation), then people are going to get lost (or turn off) if they don't have the mental / time resources to understand the minute details of what you're trying to tell them. Unless you're giving a purely technical talk, you need to think about the implications of your work, not just give a summary of it. Summary is condensing all the things you did, but staying at the same level of detail. Implications take additional work to think through. Showing lines of code is not telling people the implications and conclusions of your work. It's showing them process. It's boring. Showing them tensorboards (unless something really interesting happened) is also not implications. It takes work. You have to think through, and put yourself into the shoes of someone who has not followed your work at the detail level, and spoon feed them decisions they can make based on your findings, not your process. If you were presenting to the CEO for 5 minutes, would you be talking about your gradient descent optimization? No, you should be thinking, what does the CEO need to know to act on the information I'm providing? You need to do the thinking for the other person, and have thought through that yourself. And just once again, please for the love of god, don't show lines of code.