What is an action title on a slide?

The headline is the conclusion

A topic title tells the audience what a slide is about. An action title tells them what to think about it. The difference changes how a slide is read: with a topic title, the reader studies the chart to work out the point, and different readers reach different points; with an action title, the reader checks whether the chart supports the stated point, which is faster and focuses any disagreement on the claim itself. Action titles are usually one or two lines, written in plain language, and contain a verb and, where possible, a number or a direction. They also make disagreement productive. When a director objects to a slide titled freight now costs more than the product it carries, the meeting debates freight costs, which is the useful argument, instead of spending five minutes establishing what the chart was meant to show.

Where the habit comes from

The practice is most closely associated with management consulting, and particularly with the writing discipline Barbara Minto developed while editing reports at McKinsey between 1963 and 1973. Her Minto Pyramid Principle holds that ideas are easiest to grasp when presented as a pyramid under a single point, with each point above summarising the ones below. In a deck, each slide's action title is a point in that pyramid, and the titles read in order become the storyline. Consultants often draft these titles first in a ghost deck, before any charts exist. In science and engineering, Michael Alley's assertion evidence approach reaches the same place independently, with sentence headlines over visual evidence.

How to write one

Look at the slide's evidence and ask what a busy reader should conclude. Write that conclusion as a sentence with a subject and a verb. Add a number if the evidence has one. Check the title against the chart: every word should be supported by what is shown. Then read all the titles of the deck in order, without the slides. If they tell a coherent story with no gaps or repetition, the deck's structure is sound. If two titles say the same thing, merge the slides; if the story jumps, a slide is missing.

Common mistakes

The first is a sentence that is still a topic, such as this slide shows revenue by region. The second is overclaiming, where the title says more than the evidence supports, which invites the audience to distrust the whole deck. The third is titles so long they wrap to three or four lines and push the evidence down. The fourth is jargon and abbreviations that make sense only to the author. The fifth is inconsistency, with action titles on some slides and topic titles on others, so the storyline breaks when read in sequence. The sixth is writing titles last, after the charts, when they should shape which charts get made.

When a topic title is fine

Not every slide makes a claim. A cover, an agenda, a section divider, a team slide and an appendix index are navigation, and a plain topic title serves them well. Some audiences, such as a regulator or a scientific committee, may expect neutral headings on data slides so that they draw their own conclusions first. Judge by the reader: if the slide's job is to persuade or inform a decision, write the conclusion; if its job is to organise, name the section.

Where it shows up in the product

Slide titles here are free text within each template's character budget, so an action title fits any role. When a deck is generated, a planning step first writes a title and a one sentence summary for every slide, and a fill step then writes the content to deliver on that title, so a brief that asks for conclusion headlines shapes the whole deck. There is no step to review those titles before slides appear, but each title can be edited in place afterwards or rewritten by the AI assistant. The case study example on this site puts its headline result in the cover title rather than the customer's name.

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