Tell me about a time you had to influence someone without authority.

Every user of every product I've built.

I had no authority over the therapists who use Tiny Thoughts. I couldn't mandate adoption. There was no corporate directive. There was an enterprise platform they were already using that cost $3,000 a month, and I was asking them to switch to something a college student built.

The influence came from building something that was obviously, immediately better at the thing they cared about most: speed. A therapist in a session with a child needs to record a trial result in under five seconds. The enterprise tool made that hard. I made it easy. Auto-confirm ring. Keyboard shortcuts. One-tap recording. Sub-five-second interactions.

I didn't persuade them with a presentation. I persuaded them with the experience of using it. Twenty-seven out of thirty-seven users were active monthly. Seventy-three percent MAU. They chose to use it because it was better, and that choice spread organically from the first few users who tried it.

The lesson: you influence without authority by making the right decision so clearly good that adoption becomes self-evident. People don't need to be convinced. They need to be shown.