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Description
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.
Learning Objectives
- 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.
About the Speaker
Luke Swartz, Senior Director of PM at Capital One
A Stanford CS and Symbolic Systems grad, Luke Swartz transitioned from serving on U.S. Navy nuclear submarines to a prolific tech career. He spent 12 years at Google as a PM, architecting AI/ML recommendation infrastructure that drove $1B+ in revenue, followed by a tenure as Senior Director of Product at Capital One, leading the mobile UI infrastructure platform. He has a wonderful wife and two kids.