I've been slowly refining a pitch deck over the past couple years and the feedback from reviews and test pitches has strongly reinforced for me just how important it is for slides to be short and laid out precisely.
You want the most important information in the right places, communicated with as few words as possible, using the most accurate words possible.
You want the key takeaways to be the things that people are most likely to remember from each slide.
You want to minimize distractions and try not to pollute slides with a bunch of vaguely related stuff. A crowded slide risks communicating nothing.
It's a real dramatic change compared to how I am used to using powerpoint for technical audiences or when I had to make presentations during school.
One of the dynamics is that if there is too much text they’ll read instead of listening to you. Another is that if the conclusion is on the deck, they’ll get bored waiting for you to get to the punchline they’ve already read, and that can lose your audience as well.
So you’re better off either opening with the conclusion or putting it on the next slide, but accidentally jumping two slides forward can still ruin your audience’s attention span. So sometimes it’s better for it not to be in the deck at all.
"Kings, heroes, and gods use a short and direct form of speech." -- theater maxim
it's also important to know your audience. If they've spent their career reading technical papers or dense prose, that's one thing.
If they've largely grown up in the social media era and click away from reels/shorts that don't have animated captions, you'd design a very different deck.