When I first stepped into product management, I thought my job was to carry every interest on my shoulders.
Market shifts. Executive requests. Customer escalations. Tech debt. Roadmap pressure.
If it mattered to the business, I felt responsible for fixing it: immediately.
But here's what I learned the hard way: not every interest is mine to impact.
Two Circles That Changed How I Work
A mentor once showed me a simple framework that shifted everything:
Circle of Interest: All the things that matter: customer churn, market trends, competitor launches, leadership decisions.
Circle of Impact: The things you can actually influence through your actions, decisions, and relationships.
Most early PMs: including me: spend enormous energy in the Circle of Interest. We worry about things we can't control. We form opinions about decisions we're not part of. We carry anxiety about outcomes we can't influence.
The shift happens when you stop trying to expand your Circle of Interest and start focusing on expanding your Circle of Impact.
What Expanding Impact Actually Looks Like
Expanding your Circle of Impact isn't about getting more authority. It's about building more trust.
Trust comes from a few specific behaviors:
Doing what you say you'll do. Consistently. Even on the small things. Especially on the small things.
Being right about the things you speak up about. This means being selective. You can't be credible on everything, so choose the hills worth dying on and be right about them.
Making other people's jobs easier. The engineers who trust you most are the ones who've seen you remove blockers, write clear specs, and protect them from scope creep. The stakeholders who trust you most are the ones who've seen you deliver on commitments and communicate proactively when something changes.
Asking better questions. Influence in product management often comes not from having the right answers, but from asking the questions that reframe the problem in a way that leads to better decisions.
The Counterintuitive Part
Here's what surprised me: as I focused less on my Circle of Interest and more on my Circle of Impact, my Circle of Interest started to shrink: not because fewer things mattered, but because I got better at distinguishing between what I could actually influence and what I was just worrying about.
And as my Circle of Impact expanded: as I built more trust, delivered more consistently, and asked better questions: I found myself being included in more conversations, consulted on more decisions, and given more latitude to shape the work.
The influence came from the impact. Not the other way around.
The Practical Application
The next time you find yourself frustrated by something outside your control: a leadership decision you disagree with, a market shift you can't respond to fast enough, a stakeholder who won't prioritize what you think is most important: ask yourself: is this in my Circle of Interest or my Circle of Impact?
If it's in your Circle of Interest, note it, monitor it, and let it go. If it's in your Circle of Impact, act on it. Directly. Specifically. With the full weight of your credibility behind it.
That's how influence grows. Not by trying to control more. By doing more with what you can actually touch.
What this looked like in my work
The identity decision system at iPROMOTEu was the project where I learned this lesson most clearly. The technical work was straightforward. The hard work was getting three separate engineering teams, a security team, and a product team to agree on a single identity model. The influence I needed wasn't authority. It was the ability to make the problem visible in terms each stakeholder cared about: support volume for the operations team, security posture for the security team, and developer velocity for engineering.
Read the full case study: Identity Decision System: iPROMOTEu
