The day · Page 55
Q&A is the second act
Give this to the room
Five of your ten minutes are questions from the judges. Teams treat this half as the danger zone. It is the opposite: it is where the decision actually gets made, and Jenny Lindblad's writing on it changed how I coach it.
Her observation, from watching investor rooms: silence after a pitch is not approval. "Silence isn't a standing ovation. It's a flatline." No questions means no interest, and no interest means no decision worth having. A judge leaning forward to poke at your prototype is not attacking it. They are investing attention in it. If they are asking, you are winning.
This flips how you should build the pitch. The instinct after a hard question is to stuff the answer into next time's pitch, and Jenny names this the trap that slowly kills pitches: they get longer, the story drowns, and the audience loses the thread. Do the reverse. Keep the five pitch minutes on the story: user, demo, finding, ask. Deliberately leave depth out, and prepare it for Q&A instead. Anticipate the three questions you most want, and hold sharp answers ready. Detail lands better as an answer than as a monologue, because an answer arrives exactly when the judge wants it.
And this is where the technical depth belongs. If a judge probes how the prototype would handle real data, that is your moment to show fluency. Depth in Q&A proves competence. Depth in the pitch buries it.
For you only
Coach the judges' side too. Judges default to opinion statements ("I don't love the layout"), and Nielsen Norman Group's guidance on design critiques has the fix: reformulate opinions into questions tied to the goal. Brief your judges to ask "how does this get her to an outfit in 90 seconds?" instead of announcing taste. Same scrutiny, and it produces answers the rubric can actually score.