The all hands meeting presentation, run as a room your company joins

What an all hands is for

An all hands — a town hall, in some companies — is a whole-company meeting where leadership shares direction, numbers and whatever has changed, and the rest of the company gets to respond. It is the one recurring moment when everyone is nominally in the same room at the same time, from the founders to the person who started on Monday.

A typical one runs in two halves. First, leadership walks through where the business is going, how it is performing against the plan, and any news that affects people’s work — a reorg, a new customer, a shift in priorities. Then a team or two present what they have shipped, and the floor opens for questions. The purpose is a kind of alignment you cannot get from a written update: people hear the reasoning, not just the decision, and they get to push on it. Whether an all hands actually works comes down almost entirely to that second half.

Why the deck is the smallest part of it

So here is the argument this page turns on: the presentation is the supporting artifact, and the room is the actual product. The slides are on screen for forty minutes and then they are gone; what people remember is whether the awkward question got asked and answered. Optimising the deck while ignoring the room is optimising the wrong half.

Be candid about one thing straight away: there are no templates in this tool at all. You start from a blank canvas with real motion tools — keyframes, motion paths, morphing, masks, blend modes — which is a genuine cost in setup time. If you came looking for an all-hands template to fill in, you now know this is not that. What you get in exchange is the half that decides the meeting: a live room built on your own deck, which a deck file on its own can never be.

Everyone joins with a code, nobody installs anything

At company scale the access story has to be trivial, and here it is. Post a code, a join link or a QR in whatever chat tool your company already lives in; people type a display name and they are in — on a laptop, on a phone, or on the screen in a meeting room where a team is watching together. There is no account to create and nothing for IT to roll out ahead of time.

Early arrivals wait in a lobby with a countdown and get moved in when you start. What the product does not do is email anyone a reminder — nothing is ever sent for you, so the code in your company channel is the whole invitation. It is honest to add that there is no published capacity figure and no attendee ceiling to set; the room is not something we will quote you a proven headcount for, so treat the usual all-hands size as untested rather than guaranteed.

The question nobody will ask in public

This is the strongest thing the room does, and the real reason to run an all hands this way. Alongside the public chat, any employee can open a private 1:1 thread with a named person on your leadership or comms team who is on duty for that meeting. Every one of those threads lands in a single shared staff inbox, so a question does not sit unseen while whoever it was aimed at is mid-sentence on stage — someone else on the team can pick it up.

Be precise about what this is, because it is easy to oversell. These are private messages to a named member of staff, visible to your team, not an anonymous question box. Whatever the person typed as their display name rides along with the message. And a raised hand carries no text, so the private thread and the public chat are the two places written questions actually live.

Hands instead of a free-for-all

For live questions, hands beat a free-for-all. People raise a hand, you work the queue in the order it formed, and you mark each one handled as you go — and if your console reloads mid-meeting, the queue is still there rather than lost. In a whole-company room that ordering is the difference between a Q&A and a scramble.

One limit to be explicit about: there is no upvoting and no ranked Q&A queue, because a raised hand carries no text — it is a signal that someone wants to speak, not a written question with votes attached. If you want the question itself in writing, that is what the public chat is for. Take the raised hands in order, read the chat for the wording, and you have a workable structure without a voting widget the product does not have.

Handing over between speakers

Most all-hands meetings have four or five speakers, so handover has to be clean. A per-meeting invite link makes each of them a cohost who can drive the slides and the chat when their section comes up, or a moderator who watches the chat and the hands only. You can see who is on duty and online, and your own microphone and camera run alongside the deck with whoever is speaking highlighted in the strip.

The mechanics are worth stating plainly. The link is scoped to that one meeting, and you paste it by hand rather than the product sending it. And once a cohost has used their link there is currently no way to remove them, so hand the cohost link only to the people who are genuinely presenting — give everyone else the moderator link, which cannot move your slides in the first place.

Captions, a transcript, and the people who could not make it

One button turns subtitles on for the whole company, and at all-hands scale that matters twice over — for anyone who relies on captions to follow along, and for the large share of a global company working in a second language. The meeting also keeps a searchable transcript you can read inside the product afterwards.

Then be straight about catch-up, because someone always misses an all hands. There is no recording, no replay and no deck to circulate — the only artifact that survives is the caption transcript, in-product. Anything you want the absentees to have beyond that has to be written up by hand. And the captions are shown in the language spoken, with each person free to pick another language to read them in.