Mastering Tech Politics: The Unwritten Rules for Neurodivergent Leaders | Dave Martin

Dave Martin is a leadership coach and founder of Confidence In, where he helps neurodivergent tech leaders thrive. Dyslexic and ADHD himself, he spent two decades in product leadership before coaching: he has been a founder, been through two exits, held C-suite roles and board seats, and authored the Amazon bestseller The Product Momentum Gap. Over the past seven years he has coached a few hundred leaders, clocking six to seven thousand hours, many of them with neurodivergent clients. At Productized Conference 2026 in Lisbon, he took the stage to share the unwritten rules of tech politics: how to plug “recognition leaks” and gain the visibility you deserve in chaotic, side-channel tech organizations.

Watch on YouTube (25 min), or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

1. Why he has spent his career “faking it”: not the work or the outcomes, but pretending to think like everyone else, and the heavy “masking tax” that comes with it

2. The “same brain, same kid, different tool” story: how a word processor and spell check took an F student to straight As, and what that teaches us about tools versus intelligence

3. Why 45 to 50% of tech workers are estimated to be neurodivergent (versus roughly 20% of the general population), meaning half the room probably recognizes these struggles

4. Why standard leadership advice like “be authentic” can backfire badly for neurodivergent leaders, and how Dave learned his team was scared of him

5. “Signal drift”: why executives judge you on how fast and clearly your message lands, not on the quality of your thinking, and how a small gap compounds into “you’re not strategic enough”

6. The three mistakes that quietly kill your influence: not translating for your audience, not defining the signal, and not leading the room

7. The Signal Prep framework: three steps of five-minute preparation that turn any status update into an opportunity to influence

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mrdavemartin

• Website: confidencein.co

• Website: productized.co

• Instagram: instagram.com/productized.co

• YouTube: youtube.com/@ProductizedConference

• Confidence In, Dave’s leadership coaching practice for tech leaders who think differently: confidencein.co

• The 20% Club, Dave’s research report on neurodivergent tech leaders

• The Product Momentum Gap, Dave’s book

• Microsoft and PwC research estimating that 45 to 50% of tech workers are neurodivergent

1. Masking is a tax you pay before the real work starts. Appearing to think like everyone else consumes enormous energy. Dave’s analogy: if brains eat tokens like an AI model, a neurodivergent brain burns five or six times more tokens on “normal” conversations, while spending far fewer on things like pattern matching and abstract thinking.

2. Same brain, different tool. Dave went from F grades to As the moment school let him use a word processor with spell check. Performance problems are often tooling problems. Find the tools that fit how you actually think.

3. You are measured on communication, not thinking. Past a certain level, execs don’t care what you shipped. They care whether your message lands in the ten minutes you have. When the quality of your communication doesn’t match the quality of your thinking, “signal drift” compounds until you’re labeled “the person who gets things done” instead of a strategic leader.

4. Translate into the audience’s language. A product leader’s board dismissed “product discovery” outright. Reframed as “three to four weeks of due diligence before committing investment,” the same activity got enthusiastic support. Same substance, different vocabulary, opposite outcome.

5. Never walk into a meeting without defining your signal. Real-time context-building is expensive for a neurodivergent brain. Five minutes of prep with the Signal Prep framework replaces it: (1) decide what you need from the room, (2) keep the recommendation short and let people pull the detail through questions, and (3) craft the “retell”, a snappy phrase people repeat when you’re not in the room (a client’s “it’s all about minutes, not months” traveled through meetings he never attended).

6. Use AI as a tool, not a delegate. Like spell check was for eight-year-old Dave, AI is a phenomenal influence aid, especially for understanding how your audience thinks. Delegate to it entirely and you produce slop and lose your identity as a leader.

This talk was recorded at Productized Conference 2026, June 18–19, Museum of the Orient, Lisbon.

For inquiries about sponsoring the conference, email info@productized.co.