How I Discovered My Imprint

By Rana Chakrabarti

There are people for whom knowing what they are here to do, what profession they're built for is as clear as day. I am not that person. For me awareness of what makes me, me, my natural shape and grain and what that meant for the activities I took on arrived slowly, by doing the wrong things for a long time.

My first job was with Siemens in India. I had a fancy title - Senior Executive and I was creating offers for turnkey projects in South East Asia. These were massive industrial systems — mining and material handling systems, stackers, reclaimers. It was fascinating to learn about the industry that feed the world with power and the complexity of the enterprise pulled me in, but the job itself was tear inducing. It required a sort of mindless precision that I could not find the energy for: understanding the prices of copper bars, estimating sizes and quantities of switchboards, talking to suppliers to negotiate prices of widgets. I couldn't get fired up about any of it.

My general manager at the time however, saw something in me I did not and transferred me to a division that was creating an in-house MIS software the preceded SAP. Even though I had no skills as a software programmer, I loved it! It had complexity and precision but they were making something useful! I spent all my time there. Eventually I moved to another division where I was creating offers for programmable logical controllers and electronic drive systems and I thrived there. I loved software and I saw the point of designing and assembling a PLC system and drive system that would control a plant. It had the kind of complexity and precision that made sense to me. I was also making something I could understand, even if it was making only on paper and really only configuring.

Eventually I left Siemens and joined SAP Labs. It was when I sat through the month long training on ABAP, SAP's proprietary language, having to make a flight application from scratch that I realized that what I truly loved was making. It took five years to get to this understanding of myself.

At SAP I worked on software products for the automotive industry, aerospace & defense industry and supply chain management. Understanding how repetitive manufacturing worked and making software that became a powerful enabler of manufacturing — the factories literally depended on it — gave me a buzz that lasted eight years. I worked across different industries, making applications from scratch and taking over insanely complicated software products that handled production planning and scheduling for factories. All throughout I found myself pushing to make the experience better at all levels. The coding was good but it was the user interface that pulled me in. Without having the language for it, how things looked mattered to me and I would spent inordinate amounts of time fussing over it.

In the hope of making better interfaces by learning more about the customer, I stumbled into the then new process called design-thinking, and eventually became an expert facilitator inside my company ( I've probably done close to 500 workshops and over 1000 interviews). I became skilled enough to re-design the design process, twice. However, even after hundreds of successful workshops inside and outside SAP, I felt a constant sense of frustration. What was the point of these workshops if there was never anything to show for it?

Instead, I passive-aggressively channeled my desire for creating something tangible that would remain past the workshops into creating beautiful high-quality decks , handouts and systems diagrams for my workshops. Being told "Rana, you do beautiful work" did something for me. I was making something, it looked beautiful and that mattered to me. For the first time I acknowledged that aesthetics mattered to me. This was no surprise to anyone who knew me. I dressed in a particular way, has a purist minimalist aesthetic and friends often asked me to come along with them to help them pick clothes. Yet it never occured to me to look for this in my work.

That is , until I jointed the SAP Institute for Product & Engineering. Joining as a founding member of the Institute I found myself applying all the skills I had learned so far to build world-class learning experiences for technology professionals from scratch, physical space included. It had precision, complexity, and even making (of a kind), and created experiences with powerful, transformative flows set in a unique world-class space. I told myself I was making experiences but somewhere inside I knew that wasn't enough. The experience was a collective effort and not mine alone.

I happen to be blessed to work for a boss who is ambitious and visionary. The price of this is being put in the path of things you cannot say no to, ready or not. One fine day I was told that we would be creating an app for the band Coldplay and that I would lead the UX for it. I was sure I misheard on both counts, but both turned out it was true. As I dove in I discovered that the years of practicing my craft in my own way had created the necessary foundation for me to be a good craftsperson. What I needed was a high-stakes project and a fussy but fair client to help me develop a finish in my craft. Coldplay provided both along with the necessary time for me to hone my craft.

The Coldplay Music Of The Spheres World Tour app turned out to be a gorgeous app and hugely popular, with over a million downloads and near perfect ratings across the App Store and Play Store. Coldplay showcased before every show and it even found its way into SAP’s 50th Anniversary showreel. When I looked at, I could finally say — I made this. For better or worse that was my aesthetic in plain sight. I finally felt a sense of peace and balance. I then had four elements I needed in place to feel my full self : complexity, precision, making and aesthetics.

The fifth element of my imprint, the most important one, the one that pulled it all together was not obvious to me because I was so fixated on developing my skills. As I went about helping family and friends uncover their imprint, it took my partner asking me why I was doing this for her for me to say " because its very hard for me to watch human potential being destroyed." and " I enjoy maximizing human potential, starting with mine."

Maximizing human potential finally came into my awareness as the spine of my imprint, with its limbs of precision, complexity, aesthetics and making supporting it. Having uncovered my own imprint I realized that it was present beneath literally every activity I undertook that involved significant expenditure of energy. The type and style of cooking I enjoyed, the type of martial arts I was attracted to, the way my partner and I put our apartment together, the kind of clothes I picked and now want to make, my commitment to learning drumming, my deep interest in house-building and screenwriting. Everything had my imprint beneath, it powering it. I also approached work differently, engaging in different conversations and applying myself to the full extent of my imprint in the projects I took on. I had a conversation with my boss and said "here's five things you should know about me", which made it easy for him to know what works for me in a way no assessment would tell him, I also found myself deploying my energy differently at work: more aligned, less wasteful.

Precision, complexity, making, aesthetics and maximizing human potential. That's my shape.