Paweł Niedermaier

I’ve fallen in love with public speaking

I have had 5 public speaking appearances in 2022. Once when I worked in a corporation I liked to train and show my papers to clients. My presentations were technical, sometimes very long. Mostly about the noise, vibration - NVH engineering. I never had the opportunity to prepare a presentation in the form of a startup pitch, a product pitch, a sales pitch, a marketing pitch, for a product that is not yet there and to speak in front of a large group of people.

I had my first two presentations in May in Katowice and Gdańsk. I found out that I was supposed to make a presentation 3 days before the presentation for 90 people. I took up this challenge. I love preparing a presentation. Through the linkedin portal, I accosted Kamil Kozieł, who is an expert in public speaking. I asked him for some materials I could use to prepare myself. Kamil gave me a very nice cheat sheet, thanks to which I wrote the script and thought about the presentation plan. Only at the very end did I make slides. The first time I did slides at the very end and I was shocked at how bad I was doing it before. The best thing about all this is that I was doing a product presentation when I didn’t have a product yet. I didn’t know what and how exactly my clients were thinking.

I must have retrained the first presentation 100 times. Good thing I did. I was so stressed that when I left, it cut me. At some point I remembered that I had practiced this so many times that it was enough to start. Well, I did it on autopilot, but I don’t remember anything. I had another presentation for 50 people in Gdańsk, it was a bit better.

I had my last two presents in October. Over 100 people gathered in Wieliczka and around 80 in Warsaw. The last presentation went quite well. Because I had a more or less prepared product and I had hundreds of conversations with potential customers. I knew what and how my clients think, so I optimized my presentation in this respect. I had a short preparation for the last speech, because I practiced it only a few times. I didn’t give the presentation from memory, I just approached the topic loosely. At the last minute I decided not to wear a shirt and perform in a T-shirt. It was a good decision because my audience was also at ease and I felt at ease.

It was a very interesting experience in the form of learning how to create presentations for a speech while simultaneously researching the needs of clients and the presentation itself. The fifth time, in a smaller group, I made it almost on the go.

automotive

As NVH engineer I tested at least 21 models of cars

I have had the opportunity to test the noise and vibration (nvh) of many different cars, at different stages of development. Some were early prototypes and others were series cars.

2022-02-02 No Comments

automotive

Designed in Rzeszów, Made in Germany

The automotive business looks like that in Germany they have research and development of products, and in Poland these products are manufactured. In this post I describe an interesting example showing the reverse trend in the automotive industry. Polish doesn’t mean it’s worse…

2021-05-22 No Comments

problem solution

automotive

Intuitive creative process vs algorithms

🥱 Bored with “Lean” and “Six Sigma” – methods common in Automotive, I was looking for knowledge on how to approach problem solving innovatively. Methodological optimization and “nibbling” percentages is not always the right solution, when it’s begging to be “turned upside down”. My creative approach in problem solving was ‘somehow’ intuitive, based on ‘some’ experience, being ‘somehow’ more open to solutions and ‘somehow’ having flashes of ideas. Often this approach led me to come up with ‘some’ solution. However, I was also often left with an idea and the thought “what next?”.

2023-05-09 No Comments