Stakeholder Alignment

# Stakeholder Alignment - All Guest Insights

*88 guests, 124 mentions*

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## Adam Fishman
*Adam Fishman*

> "How do you manage stakeholders? And this is hard in growth because often growth can be viewed as at odds with really thoughtful and quality craftsmanship and product building, but it's not. Those things go hand in hand. And so you really have to win people over on what it means to do growth."

**Insight:** Growth leaders must bridge the gap between rapid experimentation and product craftsmanship to gain organizational buy-in.

**Tactical advice:**
- Communicate how a series of experiments fit into a larger strategic bet
- Identify the 'currency' different stakeholders trade in to tailor your communication style

*Timestamp: 00:24:06*


## Adriel Frederick
*Adriel Frederick*

> "The hardest part is taking my own shoes off. Basically going, Yo, okay, I came into this, there's something I wanted, I wanted to get rid of that. Now just talk to this person and try to understand what's going on with them... Once I have the empathy, I'm then able to think about what we as an organization broadly want to achieve."

**Insight:** True alignment requires 'taking your own shoes off'—temporarily setting aside your own goals to understand a stakeholder's motivations and fears.

**Tactical advice:**
- Identify common objectives to overcome the 'us vs. them' mentality in cross-functional relationships.
- Ask stakeholders about their life goals and what they are scared of to build genuine empathy.

*Timestamp: 01:01:15*


## Albert Cheng
*Albert Cheng*

> "Surfacing those [experiment wins] across the company... the onus is on them to clearly articulate what their hypothesis is, what they found such that then as a growth leader, I can encourage people to swarm around that and try a bunch of different ideas."

**Insight:** Growth leaders should act as a bridge, taking insights from one team and encouraging other teams to 'exploit' those learnings in their own domains.

**Tactical advice:**
- Create a centralized way to share experiment hypotheses and results to encourage cross-team 'swarming' on winning insights.

*Timestamp: 00:13:58*


## Ami Vora
*Ami Vora*

> "Working with Ami, it was like watching an alien because she could have the most profound disagreement in the world with somebody and they would say something that she thought was not just wrong, but crazy wrong, and she would respond, 'Fascinating, you have to tell me more why you think that.'"

**Insight:** Approach deep professional disagreements with genuine curiosity to dismantle defensiveness and find common ground.

**Tactical advice:**
- Use the phrase 'Fascinating, tell me more why you think that' when you hear an idea you strongly disagree with.
- Assume the other person has information you don't have yet.
- Take a pause before responding to allow your 'primal' visceral reaction to calm down.

*Timestamp: 00:10:17*

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> "Assume that executives have a little tiny dinosaur brain. We all have a little brontosaurus brain and we can really only hold three facts at the same time. We will never be able to go deep in the way that you are able to do on everything that crosses our desk. And so the best service you can do is actually do the work of making a recommendation."

**Insight:** Executives need concise, opinionated recommendations because they lack the bandwidth to process all the raw data themselves.

**Tactical advice:**
- Present the minimal amount of information needed to support a recommendation.
- Own the recommendation while letting the manager/executive own the broader context.
- Use product reviews to calibrate on principles rather than just getting a single 'yes/no' decision.

*Timestamp: 00:17:31*


## Anneka Gupta
*Anneka Gupta*

> "One of the tactics I use is I ask people to present their strategies for things that I think we may need to do a course correction on, and I have them come in and then I ask them questions and then I make suggestion. And I'm