Promotion doesn't bring influence — it just exposes what you don't have

Jenny Wanger is a founder who just got promoted to VP at Figma, and she's writing about the awkward gap between title and respect. The post is short and pointed: you don't earn influence the way you earn a salary bump. Influence is built slowly, through relationships, through being useful, through people trusting you. You can't buy it with a new org chart line.

What's interesting is the shape of the mistake. She expected the promotion to come with a halo — the kind of deference that makes people listen, that opens doors, that turns a meeting into an actual meeting. Instead, she got the same inbox, the same skepticism, the same small talk. The title changed. The work didn't.

This hits hard for anyone who's moved up without moving in. A lot of us — especially in Brown and Black communities — see the promotion as the finish line. The raise. The corner office. But influence is a different currency, and it's the one that actually matters once you're in the room.

Why this matters for us:
A lot of the people hustling hardest to get promoted are counting on the title to open doors that only open when people already know you.