What Our Outage Taught Us
Conference talk deck
A nine slide conference talk deck for a thirty minute reliability engineering slot, titled with the claim that the team deleted its own database on purpose. It follows the shape most good talks use: one incident, what the postmortem really found, nine months of deliberate failure drills, a before and after table, then six rules the room can take home.
Every slide, in order
The whole deck as it renders, one slide after another. Read it the way the audience would.
What makes this deck work
The hook is the title
The cover says the team deleted its own database on purpose, which is more alarming and more specific than a session called lessons from an outage. Chris Anderson of TED advises opening with the story that earns attention, and this deck puts that story on the first slide.
Dividers give the talk shape
Two chapter slides split the talk into the outage and the fix, each just a huge number and a short title. The audience always knows how far through they are, and the speaker gets a natural pause before the drill slides.
Takeaways fit on one screen
Slide seven shows time to first action falling from 46 minutes to 7 and median restore from over four hours to 38 minutes. The six chips on slide eight only get photographed because the evidence has already been shown, and slide four models the blameless postmortem from Google's SRE book by looking past the bad migration to the untested runbook.
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: two of them are chapter dividers, one is a single number, and the rest hold the postmortem, the drill method, the results table and the takeaways. That works out at three or four minutes a slide, with the speaker, not the screen, doing the explaining.
Should conference slides have lots of text?
No. Each slide here makes one point that can be read from the back of the room: 11h 40m on slide three, five drill steps on slide six, six rules of three or four words on slide eight. The story of the outage, including why four engineers waited for permission, belongs in what the speaker says, not on the screen.
Do I need section dividers?
For anything over fifteen minutes they help. This talk has two, one before the outage and one before the fix, each just a large number and a short title. They mark the turn from problem to method, give the audience a sense of how far through they are, and give the speaker a natural pause for water before the drill slides.
Can I export this to PowerPoint for the venue?
Yes, on a paid plan: the deck exports as PowerPoint or as editable PPTX with native text boxes. PDF export costs about 1 credit per 10 slides, but it places each slide as an image, so the text is not selectable. Bring the PDF as a backup on a USB stick, and check the venue's screen ratio, because the slides are built at 1920 by 1080.
How should a conference talk open?
With the claim, not the agenda. The cover here is the assertion that the team deleted its own database on purpose, then a chapter divider, then the single number the talk is built on, eleven hours and forty minutes to restore. Three slides in, the room knows what is being argued and why it should stay.
What should a before and after table in a talk compare?
Measures the audience already tracks, with the change in its own column. This deck compares six of them across the nine months of drills, so the claim in the title can be checked rather than believed. Tables in the builder hold up to twenty rows and eight columns, which is far more than a talk slide should ever use.
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Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked .