Designing for someone with 20 minutes before a meeting

Mar 19, 2026

Design

Designing for someone with 20 minutes before a meeting

summary

The most-used design file at any company is the slide template. Here's how I built one for Amazon Transportation that stays on brand in anyone's hands.

Nine slides from the Amazon presentation template: a title slide, a photo title, a big statement, a Prime Air quote, a big number, a funnel, a layout with icons, a photo grid, and a business model canvas

A slide template is the most-used design file at most companies, and the easiest one to break.

People stretch photos, invent new colors, and paste in old logos. At Amazon, I designed one master template for all of Amazon Transportation Services, dozens of teams that present everything from all-hands meetings to leadership reviews, who were working from several older templates.

The real user wasn't a designer. It was someone with 20 minutes before a meeting.

99 slides, 16 layouts

I built 99 slides on 16 layouts, organized by what people actually need to do:

Start and structure a deck
Say one thing well
Explain with comparisons, grids, and flows
Show the numbers
Think something through, with a business model canvas, a funnel, a competitor matrix, and a user journey

Agendas, a table of contents, and big statement slides in blue, white, and over photos

Agendas and big statements.

Content layouts.

Image grids.

Big numbers, a bar chart, a table, a timeline, a roadmap, and a Gantt chart

Numbers and charts.

A funnel, a competitor matrix, a weekly planner, and a user journey

Planning tools.

Instructions are part of the design

Every layout lives in the slide master, so placeholders snap into place and type and color stay on brand. At the back, how-to slides cover the questions people would otherwise ask a designer: replacing a photo, swapping a background, updating the footer. They did as much to keep decks on brand as the layouts did.