Leading at Scale: Stakeholder Management Lessons from Google and Capital One

​Stakeholder misalignment can kill product velocity and suck the life out of product managers. How can you avoid crushing your spirit and your product? In this talk, Luke shares battle-tested lessons for navigating disagreement, breaking impasses, and getting executive buy-in—drawn from product leadership at Google and Capital One.

​3 key takeaways:

• ​Empathy and curiosity are the biggest PM superpowers for stakeholder management: use them to understand deeply before you seek to be understood.

• ​Find alignment at some level, and “friendly escalate” genuine tradeoffs: most misalignments are about how/who (vs what/why), but sometimes escalation is not just a last resort—it’s necessary.

• ​Use head and heart to communicate: great communications (especially to executives) leverage both qualitative stories and quantitative data.