The IIT Graduate Who Didn't Know What He Wanted — Until RAPD Assessment Changed Everything

The Pressure of Having the Right Answer

When Vikram Anand received his IIT Delhi Computer Science admit card in 2015, his extended family celebrated for three days. His mother wept. Neighbours came to the house with sweets. A local newspaper in Meerut ran a brief item.

The weight of that celebration, Vikram says now, followed him for the next decade.

"When you start with that kind of beginning, there is a narrative that forms around you. Vikram is brilliant. Vikram is going places. Everyone is watching what those places will be. And the last thing you can admit — the absolutely forbidden thing — is that you are confused. Confused people do not get into IITs."

Vikram graduated in 2019 with a Computer Science degree and a placement at a well-regarded product company in Bengaluru. His starting CTC was ₹24 LPA — a number that silenced any remaining questions about whether he had made the right choices.

Four years later, in late 2023, he sat in a Dheya mentor's video call and said, with some effort: "I don't know what I want, and I haven't known for a long time."

Four Years of Competence Without Direction

Vikram was, by every observable metric, good at his job. He wrote clean code, met his targets, received strong performance reviews, and was promoted on schedule to Senior Software Engineer. He was well-liked by his team. He had no reason, from the outside, to appear lost.

But the private experience of the four years between graduation and that Dheya session was one of persistent, low-grade dissatisfaction that he struggled to name.

"I could see that my colleagues were energised by the technical challenges. They'd stay up talking about architecture problems, excited about a new language feature. I could talk about those things. I understood them. But they didn't move me. I was fluent in a language I didn't love."

What did energise him was harder to admit in a tech context. He was most alive in the conversations: understanding what users were feeling when they used the product, facilitating team retros where people talked honestly about what was working, the one time he was asked to present findings to a client team and found himself energised for days afterward.

He had attributed these preferences to personality quirks, irrelevant to his career. He had never considered that they might be pointing toward a different professional identity.

"In IIT, and in the product company culture, the prestige hierarchy is clear. Software architect, ML engineer, technical lead — that's the direction. If you're not excited about those things, you're weak. I genuinely believed for four years that something was wrong with me, not that something was wrong with my direction."

Why He Finally Sought Help

The inflection point came from a conversation with a peer, not a crisis. A batchmate from IIT who had made a successful move from engineering into product management mentioned Dheya almost in passing — "have you tried it?" — and Vikram, with nothing to lose, did.

He took the RAPD assessment in October 2023. His mentor for the debrief session was Dr. Anita Krishnamurthy, who had spent fifteen years in organisational psychology before joining Dheya's mentor network.

The results were stark. Vikram's Relational dimension score was in the 89th percentile — among the highest Dr. Krishnamurthy had seen from an engineering background. His Directive score was also elevated. His Analytical score — the foundation of his engineering work — was present but was the third-ranked dimension, not the first.

"Anita showed me the profile and said, 'This is not the profile of someone who wants to spend their career optimising systems. This is the profile of someone who wants to lead, influence, and build relationships that create organisational outcomes.' She said it matter-of-factly, like it was obvious. To me, it was like being told I'd been wearing someone else's shoes for four years."

Mapping the Options

The second and third mentoring sessions were focused on translating the RAPD insight into concrete career options. Dr. Krishnamurthy identified four paths that align with a high Relational-Directive profile from an engineering background:

Product Management. Building products that users love requires exactly the combination of user empathy (Relational) and strategic decision-making (Directive) that Vikram's profile indicated. His engineering background would allow him to work credibly with development teams.

Technical Programme Management. Coordinating complex cross-functional engineering initiatives — requiring influence without authority, stakeholder management, and systems thinking — is a role where engineering depth and relational strength compound.

Customer Success or Solutions Architecture at an enterprise SaaS company. A client-facing role where technical credibility meets relationship building and commercial outcome orientation.

Organisational Development or L&D roles in tech companies. Less commonly considered from an engineering background, but increasingly a path for technically literate professionals who are energised by developing human capacity.

Vikram was drawn immediately and strongly to Product Management. "The moment she described what a PM actually does on a daily basis — understanding users, defining problems, making judgment calls under uncertainty — I felt that pull I'd been missing for four years."

The Transition: Eight Months of Structured Effort

Dr. Krishnamurthy built a transition roadmap with Vikram. He was not starting from zero: his engineering background was a significant asset for an aspiring PM, and his four years of product experience gave him context that boot camp graduates lack.

The structured plan:

Months 1–2: Theoretical grounding — PM frameworks, product sense development, user research methods. Books, structured online resources, consistent practice of writing product critiques.

Months 3–4: Internal opportunity first. Vikram requested a rotation on the product team within his current company — an internal transfer that would give him PM exposure without a risky external jump. His manager, who knew his communication skills, was supportive.

Months 5–6: Working embedded with the product team, owning a small feature's discovery and scoping. Building a case study from real work.

Months 7–8: External job applications, leveraging the internal rotation as legitimate PM experience, targeting Series B and C startups where the engineering-to-PM transition is more common.

"Anita told me at the start: 'Your engineering degree is an asset, not a liability, if you frame it correctly. A PM who understands code, who can read a sprint board, who can have a real conversation with an engineer — that's valuable.' Hearing it that way changed how I positioned myself."

Where He Is Now

By June 2024, eight months after beginning the transition, Vikram accepted an offer as Associate Product Manager at a Bengaluru-based B2B SaaS company. The CTC was ₹28 LPA — modestly higher than his engineering salary — but more importantly, it came with a career trajectory toward a domain where his natural strengths would compound over time rather than work against him.

By the time this case study was written, in early 2026, he had been promoted to Product Manager and was leading a product area with two feature squads reporting to his roadmap.

"The first quarter in the PM role was the most energised I'd felt professionally since my first semester at IIT — when everything was new and interesting. I realised that feeling hadn't gone away. I'd just been in the wrong role to access it."

What This Case Study Reveals About High-Performing Confusion

Vikram's case is more common than it appears. The Indian education system is effective at producing high performers — people who can optimise their effort for defined outcomes. It is less effective at helping those high performers understand their own orientation before committing to a decade of a specific direction.

The result is a cohort of technically excellent professionals who are functionally misaligned with their careers and lack either the language to describe it or the permission to act on it. RAPD assessment does not solve the career. But it does name the problem with precision — and once the problem has a name, it can be addressed.

Understanding Your Own Career Orientation

If you have ever described your professional life with phrases like "I'm good at this but I don't love it" or "something is missing but I can't say what" — you may be experiencing the same misalignment Vikram lived with for four years.

Dheya's RAPD assessment identifies whether your fundamental orientation is Relational, Analytical, Practical, or Directive — and maps that orientation to careers and roles where it becomes an asset rather than an inconvenience.

Take the assessment and find your RAPD profile →

You do not need to be confused for four years. In most cases, the clarity comes in a single well-facilitated session — if you are willing to look at the results honestly.

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