The Two-Minute Question: Laiba Khan on What Executive Decks Get Wrong
Most advice about executive presentations starts with the slide. Laiba Khan, Founder & Creative Lead at ARTXUURO, starts somewhere else: with a question to the client. Her studio works across executive presentations, corporate reports and brand identity, and much of that work involves decks and documents headed for a board or a senior client.
Asked what she does differently when a dense deck or report resists the usual "clean it up" approach, Khan described a simple diagnostic. She asks the client, "If you had two minutes to talk me through this, where would you start?"
The answer is often revealing. "Often the point they lead with is buried halfway through the deck or report," she said. From there she builds the opening around that point, then works with the client to decide which details the reader needs to see first. The sequence changes; the substance does not.
The Point Is Usually Already There
That approach reframes the design problem. Rather than treating a dense document as something to be trimmed until it looks lighter, Khan treats it as something to be reordered until it reads clearly. The client already knows what matters most — they demonstrate it the moment they are asked to talk through the material without slides in front of them.
The work then becomes editorial: identifying the lead argument, placing it up front, and sequencing supporting detail behind it. For readers preparing board materials or client-facing reports, the practical takeaway is to run that two-minute test before touching layout. If the answer does not match the first page, one of the two needs to move.
What Happens After the Meeting
Khan also pointed to a gap she sees in much published advice on executive presentations and corporate reports: almost none of it addresses what happens to the work once the meeting ends.
"Someone forwards a single slide or pulls a chart from a report," she said. "I try to make sure it still makes sense on its own."
Her example is deliberately small. "Even a small detail, like saying what period a figure covers, can save the next reader a round of questions." It is the kind of fix that rarely appears in guidance focused on visual polish, and it assumes a document will be read in fragments — a forwarded slide, a screenshot, a chart lifted into another deck. Designing for that reality means every element has to carry enough context to stand alone.
That has implications for how teams review their own materials. A useful check is to isolate individual slides and charts and ask whether each one still communicates its meaning without the surrounding narrative. Where it does not, a label, a date range or a short qualifier is usually enough.
Page Counts Get Decided Too Early
On the question of what people settle too quickly, Khan was direct. "I think people settle on a page count too early," she said.
The reasoning behind that habit sounds sensible — "They're senior, so we need five slides" — but, as she put it, it holds up only "until you see what they're being asked to approve." Her alternative is to start with the audience's likely questions rather than a target number. "I'd first ask what questions they're likely to have," she said.
Sometimes that leads to a longer document, not a shorter one. "Sometimes one extra page explaining the assumptions behind a recommendation is worth keeping." For teams accustomed to treating brevity as the default virtue in senior-level materials, that is a useful counterweight. Conciseness serves the reader only when it does not strip out what they need in order to decide.
Practical Takeaways
Three habits emerge from Khan's answers, and none of them require new software:
- Run the two-minute test. Ask the presenter where they would start if they had two minutes. If that answer is not at the front of the document, restructure before restyling.
- Design for the forwarded slide. Assume any single page or chart will travel alone. State the period, the unit and the context so it survives the trip.
- Delay the page count. Ask what questions the audience will bring before deciding how many pages the answer requires. An extra page of assumptions can be more valuable than a tighter deck.
Khan's framing keeps returning to the reader — the board member deciding, the colleague receiving a forwarded chart, the senior audience with questions of their own. The design decisions follow from that, rather than from a template. More of the studio's work is at artxuuro.com.
For teams working on corporate reporting or board materials, the through-line is straightforward: clarity is less about how much you remove than about what you put first, and what you leave in so the document can speak for itself.