Influence without authority: The quiet skill behind Susanne Abdelrahman’s work - Into the MoTaverse - Episode 14

In this episode of Into the MoTaverse, Rosie Sherry sits down with Susanne Abdelrahman for a conversation that keeps circling back to one quietly powerful idea: influencing without authority. Susanne traces how this skill born out of the structural reality of being a tester, where you can't simply tell developers their code needs to meet a certain bar, became the defining thread of her career as she moved from IC testing to engineering management and now into technical program management. What started as a way to survive in QA turned into her "jam," a practice she now applies across entire product development lifecycles, influencing not just engineering teams but the stakeholders whose decisions shape them.

The conversation digs into how influence actually works in practice: distilling information, surfacing themes, coaching rather than mandating, and earning the kind of trust that only comes from people believing you genuinely care.