I Cried Giving a Presentation Again

Express your love before it's too late

Yesterday, I cried giving a presentation. Again.
No matter how hard I tried to hold back the sudden burst of tears, I just couldn't.

To be honest, I had a bad feeling about it since the night before while prepping the deck.

And that ominous(?) premonition was spot on.
The tears burst out on the exact slide I was worried about.

It wasn't because it was "hard."

Usually, tears come when things are brutal and tough, rather than when everything is all sunshine and rainbows. Though extremely rare, I do get a bit melancholy when burnout creeps in. But yesterday's tears weren't caused by hardship. Presentations at DelightRoom generally aim to share the results or lessons we achieved together as a team, and those results and lessons are often born from "hardship." I've given at least 70 of these "sharing the struggle" presentations, yet my eyes have only welled up twice. What did those two times have in common?

The cause was "feeling sorry."

Looking back at those two presentations, there were specific moments where my "tear button" was clearly pressed.

When I looked back at the slides from those moments, the answer became clear.

My first "crying during a presentation" experience was completely unexpected. Since it was a first for me, I surprised myself—I was going through the presentation without a hitch until the very last part, where seeing the "Special Thanks to" slide made a wave of emotion suddenly rise up.

That presentation was about launching "Multiple Missions," a long-awaited project the product team had been wanting to tackle for about two to three years, and sharing the aftermath. It had gone through countless discussions and conflicts, ultimately sitting dormant for a long time without any progress. Around that time, we revived the discussions and managed to wrap it up quickly and nicely with a UI/UX that satisfied everyone. There were only four members left on the project towards the end, including myself, but I made that "Special Thanks to" slide because I wanted to express my gratitude to the other colleagues who had fiercely dedicated themselves to getting us to that outcome. However, the emotion I felt most strongly in that moment was guilt rather than gratitude. I felt sorry because it seemed like they had suffered all the emotional distress behind the scenes, but were ultimately deprived of the glory of the launch. Without their hard work, it wouldn't have led to the results we have now, and I think I just desperately wanted everyone to recognize their dedication and effort.

A culture of cherishing and loving our teammates

Those bursting tears thus became DelightRoom's first official "crying during a presentation" incident. The funny thing is that after nine years without a single tear shed mid-presentation at DelightRoom, a second and third case popped up less than a month after that first one...

Looking back, it seems our unique organizational culture was really showing itself around that time. The product and the business were growing faster than ever, and at the same time, our culture was also maturing beautifully. I think that distinct culture—where we cherish and deeply care for our teammates not just as "people we collaborate with," but as "people we share our lives with"—manifested itself as "tears during presentations." DelightRoom is truly a place where what people call "camaraderie" runs incredibly deep.

Expressing your care and affection

This recent presentation was exactly the same. The tears flowed on a slide dedicated to a teammate who was moving to another team, thanking them for all their hard work with us. It wasn't that I was sad about losing the fun back-and-forth we had while working together. I felt sorry because I was sending them off to another team without having given them the "expression of gratitude" I had kept putting off.

Because this teammate always silently crushed more than their fair share of the work, I had fewer 1:1s with them compared to other members, and they were the person I had to worry about the least during our collaborations. Even so, they trusted me and threw themselves into engineering with absolute dedication, never turning down highly complex or tedious product specs. I gained countless learnings from them, both product-wise and personally, yet I hadn't even properly said thank you using the excuse of being too busy. I delayed and delayed it until I was finally expressing my gratitude at the end-of-quarter workshop. I think it even upset me that I was rushing to make that presentation deck in the wee hours the night before the workshop. Shouldn't I have at least prepared a gift for a teammate who contributed this much? They were a teammate who was sprinting through last-minute QA with me right until the dawn of the workshop day...

So the lesson here is that I shouldn't postpone saying thank you. I need to make more time and put in more effort to match how much I care about and cherish them. Looking back, we humans are fickle—we never fully realize that gratitude when we're together. There's a saying, "You might not notice when someone arrives, but you definitely notice when they leave," and I think this experience made me realize their value that much more desperately. That's probably why I felt even more guilty. I think the tears spilled over exactly at the moment I realized I hadn't expressed my thanks in time, and that this was a teammate I was actually far more grateful for than I had realized.

Phew... The aftereffects are lasting longer than expected. That heavy feeling in my chest just isn't going away easily. Haha.

I'll have to recover by expressing my gratitude time and time again.

I should reach out to everyone I usually feel grateful for -

DelightRoom, where a culture of strong camaraderie prevails. When we look back at these days ten years from now, what kind of memories will we hold on to?