How do you influence decisions when you don't have direct authority?

Situation: At a mid-size company, I led a platform team but had no authority over the product or infrastructure teams. We needed to standardize our deployment pipeline across five teams to reduce release friction and incidents. The infra team had their own preferred tooling, and product wanted to keep their current workflow. I couldn't mandate anything—I had to persuade.

Task: I had to influence a cross-team decision without formal authority over the stakeholders.

Action: I started by understanding each team's motivations. I had 1:1s with the infra lead (reliability, security), the product eng lead (developer experience), and the DevOps lead (operational simplicity). I found common ground: everyone wanted fewer production incidents. I gathered data—we'd had 12 incidents in the prior quarter, and 8 were deployment-related. I built a proposal that addressed each group's concerns: standardized tooling with team-specific configs, a phased rollout, and shared ownership of the runbooks. I recruited allies: the VP of Engineering cared about velocity; I showed how the proposal would reduce deployment time. I didn't push my preferred tool—I framed it as "let's pick one standard together" and ran a lightweight evaluation with representatives from each team. When we had a recommendation, I socialized it informally before the formal review so no one was surprised.

Result: We adopted a unified pipeline within three months. All five teams migrated. I learned that influence without authority requires listening first, finding shared goals, using data, and building coalitions—and that informal alignment before formal decisions prevents last-minute surprises.