PEDAL Traits - A Tribute to Ranjan Das

Ranjan Das had an extraordinary amount of achievements in 42 years of his remarkable life! He had successfully launched two companies on his own, co-founded the xApps business in SAP, and as the CEO of SAP India was scaling new heights by the time of his untimely death in October 2009.You can read about the tribute from SAP for Ranjan here.

As a close friend and colleague, I had known Ranjan for 22 years. We were roommates in Delhi while going to school there and later in the mid nineties we were roommates again in Boston when we both worked for Oracle. Among the many interactions we had over the years - building innovative products and hiring the right people into the organization were two key topics of discussions. Always a believer of "getting the right people onto the bus", Ranjan had a little acronym for what he looked for in a new hire: PEDAL traits - Passion, Enthusiam, Drive, Analytical Abilities, and Leadership.

So relevant for the product management role!

Passion

As a product manager, your passion for the domain in general and your product(s) in particular needs to be palpable - whether you are dealing with external stakeholders like customers and prospects or internal stakeholders like R&D and customer support, people need to feel that passion. If you are not passionate about the domain your product is in, sooner or later, it will show!

Enthusiasm

Is having passion and showing enthusiasm the same thing? Not necessarily. You can be quietly passionate about something. In the Product Manager role though, you need to be demonstratively enthusiastic about your passion – in this case your product! You need to be seen as the "go to guy" for your product!

Drive

To say that the product management is a demanding job is an understatement. Carrying the mindset of "I-succeed-if-the product-succeeds-and-I fail-if-the-product-fails" means that you carry on your assignments with a lot of energy - whether that assignment is intellectually stimulating or mundane but essential. It ain't no 9 to 5 job ( to be fair, few jobs are now-a-days!)

Analytical Abilities

The obvious one. As a Product Manager you are always dealing with ambiguities. Whether you are doing competitive analysis or prioritizing requirements for a product releases, you need a strong analytical mind to be able to deal with the right kind of trade-offs. Do you always strive to ask the probing questions? Are you able to break  complex multi-dimensional issues into manageable parts and look for optimal solutions?

Leadership

Leadership is about envisioning a future state that is better than today's and leading your team to get there. As a Product Manager you need strong leadership skills - ability to "dream" about a future state for your product,  communicating effectively so that the team and all the important stakeholders can "see" that future state, and leading the team to get there through thick and thin - one release at a time!

Probably one of the most important leadership skills a PM need to possess is being able to influence others effectively. There is a wide range of stakeholders, both external and internal, that you would need to influence on a regular basis. R&D leads do not report to you directly, but you need to convince them about the product roadmap and "what needs to be built when". Working with product marketers you need to influence industry analysts about "moving your product up and to the right" on various quadrants! More about "influencing skills" for a product management role in a future post!