Welcome to another edition of “Product Profiles”, where product leaders share everything from how their teams are structured to how they release new features.

In this edition, we have the privilege of shining the spotlight on Jason Hatchett, a Senior Product Manager at Drata, which offers a top-ranking compliance automation platform. 

You can read on to learn more about Jason and the product team at Drata!

Related: How Gong's product team operates

Can you walk us through how your product team is structured?

We’ve divided our product org into three distinct areas of focus. 

• Democratization: The PMs are focused on making sure that non-customers can easily absorb and make sense of our content, such as our trust center or self-help guides.

• Risk and compliance: The PMs are tasked with ideating new modules that can help users gather evidence, establish compliance frameworks, among other tasks.

• Effortless (my group): We’re focused on providing an effortless experience to users. Each PM within the group has their own focus area, but our overarching goal is to determine ways to leverage automation as effectively as possible. This involves helping users access information within the product, building connections with 3rd-party applications, and syncing data across different features in Drata.

What are some of the benefits of having your team structured by different areas of focus?

One of the big benefits is that there’s complete transparency on who should perform specific types of work. For instance, if someone is kicking off a big project and they need to designate a feature owner(s) from a product and technical level, they know who to include from the get-go.  

This structure also allows each of us to cultivate deep expertise in specific areas. We can then use this expertise to offer unique, thoughtful perspectives to projects both within and outside of our designated groups. This ultimately translates to positive outcomes over time, whether that’s avoiding potential pitfalls or identifying value-add ideas. 

What are some things that make Drata’s product team best-in-class?

Something that comes top of mind for me is that we consistently perform retrospectives post sprints. 

While retrospectives help us in a number of ways, the biggest benefit they’ve brought is allowing us to identify specific stakeholders who can help us, the capacity in which they can help us, and understand when it makes sense to loop them in. This enables continuous improvement on our features and on how the entire team operates to achieve our goals.

We’re also extremely flexible and responsive to any insights we glean mid-sprint or project. We’re not afraid of pivoting, assuming the dev team can accommodate the changes and the projected final outcome is firmly based on customer feedback and research.

Related: A deep dive on how TravelPerk's product team runs sprints and manages retrospectives

How do you measure the ROI of your work?

It obviously depends on the area of focus. For my group, we pay close attention to integration adoption; how support tickets are trending; the velocity and volume of customers that are adopting specific product features and how that translates to bottom-line metrics; and how quickly customers move away from specific features (e.g. how quickly clients disconnect an integration).

That said, Drata’s overarching goal is to help companies become audit-ready as quickly as possible. So, if possible, we try to track the extent to which our efforts accelerate audit-readiness. We can try to track this by interviewing customers and seeing which tasks are the most time-intensive, and by viewing product usage metrics around how long it takes customers, on average, to get all audit evidence into a ‘Ready’ state.

How does your team approach integrations?

I may be slightly biased here, but integrations are absolutely core to Drata’s platform. The data needed to audit a system will always be sourced from different vendors, whether it’s a core infrastructure platform like AWS or an MDM platform like Jamf. Having one system reach out and gather all of this information for someone can save hours of manual effort.

To help our users realize the full potential of Drata, we offer several categories of integrations, including cloud identity providers, background check providers, HRIS solutions, and ticketing applications. 

We’ve decided that we’d like to keep some integration categories in-house for now, such as observability and background check solutions. But for other categories, like HRIS and ticketing, we’ve decided to partner with Merge. 

Merge’s Unified API approach makes scaling integrations incredibly easy. Once we’ve connected to one of Merge’s Unified APIs, adding another integration within that unified API's category simply involves a few low-lift changes on our front-end and activating it in the Merge dashboard. In other words, after we build to Merge's Unified APIs, there’s basically zero development work involved!

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