Just Another Dave

In every product org there’s a “Dave.”

Dave isn’t evil. Dave even likes the idea in theory. But Dave has built a career on the current process, the current reporting line, the current release train. Your shiny new way of working is, to him, a direct threat.

As a product manager and Agilist, I used to treat Daves as blockers to remove. Convince them. Escalate around them. Prove them wrong with data. Sometimes that worked. Mostly, it just hardened their position and burned political capital I needed later.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you’re not going to “fix” Dave.

So stop trying.

Instead, get curious. What is he protecting? Status? Control? Safety? Who is he afraid of disappointing? What keeps him up at night when your roadmap, discovery cadence, or agile framework starts shifting the ground under his feet?

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” isn’t about war, it’s about information and empathy. Sit next to Dave in the steering committee. Ask him to review a risky assumption with you. Give him a small but real piece of ownership in the experiment. Make him part of the change story, not the villain of it.

Sometimes that looks like shaping OKRs together, sometimes it’s letting him define one guardrail for your next increment, sometimes it’s as simple as looping him in early instead of presenting a “done deal.”

The goal isn’t for you to feel better about Dave. That might never happen. The goal is for Dave to feel just safe enough that he doesn’t sabotage the work.

You still hold your product vision. You still move. You don’t wait for universal approval. But you design your moves so that even “just another Dave” can live with them.

Because in complex organizations, progress isn’t about winning arguments. It’s about shipping change in a world full of Daves.