Negotiation & Influence Without Authority

A foundational distinction from negotiation theory, most closely associated with Roger Fisher and William Ury's Getting to Yes: a position is what someone says they want ("I need your team to prioritize this integration next Sprint"); an interest is the underlying reason they want it (a genuine business need, a personal incentive, a concern about risk). Negotiating over positions tends to produce adversarial, zero-sum dynamics — if two positions directly conflict, one side must "win" and the other "lose." Negotiating over interests frequently reveals that two seemingly conflicting positions are actually compatible, or that a creative solution exists serving both parties' underlying interests better than either party's original stated position.

A PM negotiating for another team's engineering time who leads only with their own position ("I need this prioritized") misses the opportunity to discover the other team's actual interests (perhaps their own roadmap pressure, a concern about scope creep, or an incentive structure that rewards different outcomes) — interests that, once understood, might reveal a way to reframe the request so it serves both parties, rather than framing it as a zero-sum competition for the same scarce engineering capacity.

BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) describes what each party would do if the current negotiation fails entirely. Understanding your own BATNA clarifies how much you should be willing to concede — a strong BATNA (a good alternative path if this specific negotiation fails) means less pressure to accept an unfavorable deal; a weak BATNA means correspondingly more pressure. Understanding the other party's likely BATNA is equally important: a counterpart with a strong alternative has little incentive to make concessions, while a counterpart with a weak alternative has more genuine reason to find an agreement with you specifically.

The overlap between what each party would accept, given their respective BATNAs, is sometimes called the Zone of Possible Agreement (ZOPA) — the range within which both parties' interests can genuinely be satisfied. A PM entering a negotiation without having thought through either their own BATNA or a reasonable estimate of the counterpart's is negotiating blind, unable to judge whether a given proposal is actually a good outcome or simply the first option presented.

A framework developed by Allan Cohen and David Bradford for influence without formal authority identifies several distinct "currencies" a person can offer in exchange for another's cooperation, even without positional power over them:

The core insight this model offers: influence without authority is fundamentally an exchange, not a request — a PM asking for cooperation should think concretely about what currency they can genuinely offer in return, rather than assuming goodwill or organizational obligation alone will be sufficient motivation for someone who has no formal reason to prioritize the PM's request over their own.

A specific, high-leverage practice: rather than attempting to persuade a key decision-maker in a single, isolated conversation, experienced PMs frequently build broader support incrementally beforehand — discussing the idea informally with a few relevant peers or stakeholders first, incorporating their feedback, and allowing genuine consensus to form gradually, so that by the time a formal decision conversation happens, the outcome feels far less like a surprise or an imposition and far more like a natural continuation of conversations the decision-maker may have already heard about from multiple directions. This approach respects the reality that influence compounds through pre-existing relationships and prior exposure to an idea, rather than depending entirely on the persuasive power of one single moment.