Three months into my role as CTO at the fintech startup, I walked into a meeting where the product team had already decided on an architecture for a new feature. Nobody had consulted me. Nobody was required to. The company was small and scrappy, roles bled into each other, and the fact that I had “CTO” on paper meant very little when the people in the room had been shipping the product longer than I had. I sat down, listened to the plan, and realized it had a serious scalability problem. But I also realized that saying “this is wrong, I’m the CTO” would be the fastest way to get ignored forever.
So I shut up, asked a few questions, and later that afternoon wrote a one-page doc outlining the bottleneck I saw. I included numbers from our existing traffic patterns. I proposed an alternative that reused most of their work. Two days later the team pivoted — not because I pulled rank, but because the problem was clear once I put it on paper.
That was the moment I understood what technical leadership without authority actually looks like. And honestly, it’s the only kind of leadership that sticks.
Credibility is earned in the boring moments
You don’t become the person people listen to by giving brilliant speeches. You become that person by being right about the small stuff consistently. Fixing the flaky test nobody wants to touch. Jumping on an incident at 2am and writing up the postmortem the next morning. Reviewing PRs with actual thought instead of rubber-stamping them.
At the fintech startup, I had to build credibility from zero. The team was sharp. They didn’t care about titles. What they cared about was whether you could help them solve hard problems without wasting their time. Fair enough.
I focused on a few areas where I knew my experience was strong — system design, infrastructure, and debugging production issues under pressure. I didn’t pretend to know the financial domain better than people who had been in fintech for years. When I was wrong, I said so. When I was unsure, I said that too. Turns out, admitting uncertainty is one of the fastest ways to build trust. People can smell posturing.
The real work is communication
Here is what nobody tells you about influence without authority: it’s 80% communication and 20% technical skill. You can be the best engineer in the room and still get nothing done if you can’t frame a problem in a way that makes people care.
I learned to always lead with the problem. Not my solution. The problem. If I walked into a discussion and said “we should switch to Kafka,” people pushed back instinctively. But if I said “we’re dropping 12% of events during peak load because our queue can’t keep up — here are the numbers from last Tuesday,” suddenly everyone wanted to talk about solutions. Same destination, completely different path.
Writing things down changed everything for me. At the fintech startup we were moving fast, and decisions got lost in Slack threads and hallway conversations. I started writing short proposals — a page, maybe two. Problem, context, recommendation, alternatives, tradeoffs. Nothing fancy. But it forced me to think clearly, and it gave people something to react to on their own time instead of in a high-pressure meeting. Half the arguments I avoided were arguments that never needed to happen in the first place.
Make other people better
The biggest unlock was realizing that my job wasn’t to be the smartest person on the team. My job was to make the team smarter. Pair with someone on a tricky migration. Share the context behind a design decision so the next person doesn’t have to reverse-engineer it. Fix the CI pipeline that wastes 20 minutes of everyone’s day.
These things aren’t glamorous. Nobody gives you a promotion for speeding up the build. But they compound. Every small improvement makes the team a little faster, a little less frustrated. And the people you helped? They remember. When you propose something ambitious later, they are the ones who back you up.
Start small, find allies
When I wanted to push a bigger initiative — say, rearchitecting a service that had become a bottleneck — I never started with a grand plan. I started with a focused prototype. Something I could build in a week that demonstrated the idea was viable. Early wins create momentum. A working demo is worth ten slide decks.
Then I found allies. One person pushing for change is easy to dismiss. Three people aligned on the same problem? That’s a movement. I would share early results with engineers I trusted, get their input, fold in their ideas. By the time the proposal reached a wider audience, it wasn’t just my thing. It was our thing.
The traps that get smart engineers
Being right and being effective are two different skills. I’ve watched brilliant engineers lose every argument because they treated disagreements as contests to win instead of problems to solve together. If you burn a relationship to win a technical debate, congratulations — you won the battle and lost the war. That person won’t support your next idea. Or the one after that.
Pick your battles. Not everything is worth fighting over. Some decisions are reversible and low-stakes, and spending political capital on them is a waste. Save your energy for the things that genuinely matter.
This is the job
I used to think leadership without authority was a stepping stone — something you did while waiting for the “real” leadership role. I was wrong. This is the real thing. The credibility you build, the communication habits you develop, the trust you earn — these are the foundations. If a title shows up later, great. You will be ready. If it doesn’t, you’re still the person who makes things happen. And every team needs that person more than they need another manager.