Srivatsan is an experienced tech professional who leads his team in the product development field and opines that we should try to be ourselves and not imitate others in life. He also follows his passion for teaching by working as a  guest faculty at universities.

Srivatsan Santhanam is a Vice President at SAP Labs and Head of Concur Engineering Development. He has an experience of twenty years in the Information and Technology field and is settled in Bangalore.

Sri, as he likes himself to be referred to, never had an interest to jump into the field of IT. He was more inclined towards becoming a professor of Statistics. However, he thinks it was destiny that pushed him to engineering and then into the product development domain.

However, Sri says that he loves helping and enabling people and that is why he also teaches in industries and universities as a passion. He is a visiting faculty of statistics at many universities and does it on a non-profit basis. Sri says that IT is his daytime job and being a teacher is his passion for achieving self-satisfaction.

Sri shares that though he always turned up late for his classes in college and had late submissions, he was inquisitive to the core. He likes asking questions and dwelling deep into subjects and that is why he was able to get seven US patents to his name. His innovation-driven mindset is what helped him serve in different positions in his company before becoming a vice president.

Sri says that he uses the ‘Three concentric circle framework’ to solve life problems and challenges. Sharing further he says that the innermost circle talks about the ‘why’, the second circle talks about the ‘how’ and the third circle talks about the ‘what’ part of the problem.

When asked about the mistakes in his life, Sri says that he has made many mistakes and, in fact, he loves making mistakes and encourages people in his organization to learn from their failures. Sri says that every six months they have a ‘Failure Summit’ and he rewards the one from the team with the greatest failure. Sri says that he has had product launch failures and products that never made the cut but all these failures taught him much more about the industry than success could have.

Sri shares that his biggest learning in life is to not see a person as a ‘business deal’ but connect with them on an emotional level and to even look at your enemies as allies in life. He says that while hiring employees for his company, he does not look for a person who needs a job but for a person whose beliefs are inclined with his own and the company’s.

Sri says that he follows the culture of ‘Nanosecond celebrations’ at his workplace for he feels that celebrating each and every small success and milestone in life is more important than cheering for the final product.

When asked about his success mantra, Sri says that to be successful in life one has to keep learning as learning keeps us relevant, and it is when you are relevant that people will find new roles and responsibilities for you in their organization.

Talking about his role models in life, Sri says that there are many people, mentors, and guides who have shaped him in life. However, he says that his wife has been the biggest support in his life. He also says that his Professor Padmanabhan from IIT Madras was someone who helped him learn many good things in life like journaling and expressing thoughts in a better way.

Sri says that he is a very spiritual person and likes to nurture that side of himself in his free time. He likes meditating, praying, doing yoga, and traveling to temples with his family.