[crispyambulance]

Things change all the time. People, including managers, are human and specs aren't something that always can be "carved in stone" in advance and carried out to perfection.

There certainly are pathological situations where people really do need to leave a mark and that's why "the duck" technique that Rachel described works.

This pops up in presentations too. Sometimes you know in advance that your presentation is going to have an audience with one or more "well, actually..." types who will try to poke holes a little too aggressively in your argument.

One technique for handling this is to deliberately leave out some persnickety detail in your deck, but cover it exhaustively in an auxiliary slide that you don't show unless someone points out the omission. It works great. Every. Time.

[sokoloff]

A tip for presentations: in presentation mode in both Powerpoint and Slides, if you type the slide number and press enter, the presentation will jump to that slide.

If you have notes about which auxiliary slide is relevant to which persnickety comment/topic, you can seamlessly warp to it and it hits harder/makes you look more prepared/polished than a bunch of page up/down and "I know it's here somewhere" filler speech.

[wheelinsupial]

I didn't know PowerPoint allows you to navigate that way. I've always used either hyperlinked text or little navigation icons in a corner of the slide to quickly navigate to the relevant back up slides.

[steveBK123]

Sometimes the purpose of those decks is really just to get stakeholders to think out loud and express what they actually want. A lot of these execs seem incapable of doing so without being shown something they don't want first.

So often theres no reason for a deck to be more than 3 slides because it will immediately derail and turn into an airing of actual needs.