While working on large and complex projects, how to effectively manage between speed of delivery vs managing and aligning a large number of stakeholders?

Creating the right mechanisms to manage your stakeholders is critical to managing up and across. Allowing your stakeholders to stay on the pulse of your product while having access to updates really helps in building trust. Creating mechanisms like brownbag/learning sessions on a frequent basis (weekly or biweekly basis) also helps in creating an open forum. Then you can focus on protecting your engineering/design team and enabling yourself to scale.

There are a few things I can use here to get things less surprising and more efficient.

First off, you need to streamline decision-making. The RACI matrix is useful here so you can identify who's calling the shots for each project area and empower them to make quick decisions.

Next, overhaul your communication by having daily standups for the core team, bi-weekly updates for key stakeholders, and monthly executive briefings.

You can use tools like Slack and Asana to keep everyone in the loop without constant meetings.

Id consider the possibility of running the project into sprints and have teams work in parallel. Two-week cycles work well. This helps to make rapid decisions, everyone is invloved, and changes are not drastic if any.

Create a doc or something that acts like the single source of truth for everyone to reference to whenever they run into issues. This is good to cut time on time to issue solution.

And perhaps the most key point here - Use rapid prototyping and demos instead of long discussions. Show, don't tell. It's faster and more effective.