9 finished slides

Conference talk deck

A nine slide technical talk built to be read from the back row. Big type, chapter dividers, one number per idea, and a takeaway slide the audience can photograph.

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The full deck

Every slide as it was built, in order. All the content was written for this example, so the structure can be judged on real numbers rather than placeholder text.

SRE Summit 2026, Track B

We deleted our own database

on purpose

Nine months of failure drills, what broke, and the four practices we kept.

Jonah Petrides

Platform reliability, Cadence Health

22 August 2026

Slide 1 of 9

1

The outage that started it

Slide 2 of 9

The number that got our attention

One Tuesday in November, and the reason this talk exists.

11h 40m

Time to restore

A routine migration dropped a table on the primary. The backup was fine. The restore runbook had never been run by anyone currently employed, and finding that out took eleven hours.

03

Slide 3 of 9

What the postmortem found

The outage was not the database

What we reported

A bad migration

One statement, one missing guard, one table gone. Easy to write up, easy to fix.

What actually cost us eleven hours

1
An untested runbook

Written in 2022, never executed. Three of its steps referenced a tool we had decommissioned.

2
Nobody owned the decision

Four engineers each waited for someone more senior to authorise a restore that any of them could have run.

3
No practice under stress

Everyone knew the theory. Nobody had done it with an incident channel filling up behind them.

04

Slide 4 of 9

2

Nine months of deliberate breakage

Slide 5 of 9

How we ran the drills

One drill a fortnight, in production hours, with real paging.

1

Pick a failure nobody has practised

Drawn from a list the team writes, not from a vendor catalogue of tidy scenarios.

2

Name one decision maker

Rotates every drill, deliberately including the newest person on the roster.

3

Break it for real

In production, inside a blast radius agreed in advance, during business hours.

4

Measure time to decision

Not time to recovery. The gap before someone acts is where outages actually live.

5

Rewrite the runbook that day

While it still hurts. A drill that does not change a document was a fire drill, not a test.

06

Slide 6 of 9

What nine months changed

Same team, same systems, measured on real incidents.

Measure

Before drills

After drills

Change

Time to first action

46 min

7 min

-85%

Median restore time

4h 10m

38 min

-85%

Runbooks executed

2

19

+17

Engineers who can restore

3

14

+11

Paging escalations

61%

18%

-43pt

Postmortem actions closed

44%

92%

+48pt

Twelve months to November 2025
Nine months to August 2026

07

Slide 7 of 9

Take these home

Six rules that survived every drill

1

Practise in production

2

Name one decider

3

Time the decision

4

Rewrite it that day

5

Rotate the newest in

6

Never drill silently

08

Slide 8 of 9

Break something on purpose this month

Our drill templates and the rewritten runbooks are public. Take them, they cost us eleven hours.

Speaker

Jonah Petrides

Email

jonah@cadence.example

Slides

cadence.example/drills

09

Slide 9 of 9

What makes this deck work

The hook is the title

A specific, slightly alarming claim on the cover does more for attendance than a descriptive session name.

Dividers give the talk shape

Two oversized chapter numbers let the room know where they are without the speaker announcing it.

Takeaways fit on one screen

Six short chips are what people photograph, and photographing the slide is how a talk travels.

Questions people ask

How many slides for a 30 minute talk?

Eight to twelve if the slides carry big ideas rather than notes. This example uses nine for a thirty minute slot.

Should conference slides have lots of text?

No. One idea per slide, large enough to read from the back. Detail belongs in the talk, not on the screen.

Do I need section dividers?

For anything over fifteen minutes they help. They reset attention and tell the audience how far through they are.

Can I export this to PowerPoint for the venue?

Yes. Decks export to PowerPoint or PDF, which covers almost every conference laptop.

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