Grow your influence by helping others

A critical skill for any PM is the ability to influence.

That sounds obvious.

What’s harder is explaining how someone actually gets better at it.

Interestingly, there’s an influence technique you’ve probably used hundreds of times without realizing it.

I started noticing it years ago while living in NYC.

If you’ve lived in a densely populated city, you’ve probably experienced this:

You’re walking into an apartment building and the person in front of you holds the door open.

A few seconds later, there’s another door.

What do you do?

Most of us instinctively hold the second door for them.

And when someone doesn’t?

You notice.

I had a friend who would get genuinely annoyed when he held the first door for someone and that person walked through the second without returning the favor.

It’s a tiny interaction. Neither person owes the other anything.

So why does not returning the favor somehow feel… wrong?

There’s a reason.

In Robert Cialdini’s Influence, he describes the principle of reciprocity: when someone does something for us, we naturally feel some obligation to return the favor.

And I think great PMs use this principle constantly without realizing it.

PMs are often the ones holding the first door.

They jump into problems that aren’t theirs.

They help an engineer find context.

They connect someone with the right person.

They take on the mundane task nobody wants.

They make someone else’s job a little easier.

None of these things seem particularly important on their own.

But over time, they build goodwill.

And goodwill is incredibly valuable in a role where you constantly need things from people you don’t manage.

Eventually, you need an engineer to prioritize a bug.

You need compliance to squeeze in a review.

You need sales to get you customer feedback.

You need a designer to make one more iteration.

The PM who only shows up when they need something is trying to build influence at the exact moment they need to use it.

The PM who consistently helps others has been building it all along.

That doesn’t mean keeping a mental ledger:

“I did this for you, so now you owe me.”

That misses the point.

It means recognizing that small acts of helpfulness compound over time. People remember who makes their job easier. And when that person eventually needs help, there’s a natural desire to return it.

That’s why becoming aware of these principles matters.

Once you can put a name to them, you can notice when they happen, understand why they work, and become more intentional about using them.

Because influence isn’t built when you make the ask.

It’s built in all the small interactions that happened before it.

Sometimes it starts with something as simple as holding the door.