Meet the Product 50 Winner: Brian Elmi

Brian Elmi’s career has taken him from startups to enterprises and back again.

Each experience solidified what has become one of his core beliefs: An organization is only as good as its culture.

That’s why as SVP of Product at Drata, a security and compliance automation platform, he sees one of his greatest priorities as ensuring the company remains a place where all employees can thrive—even as it rapidly expands.

That outlook is one of many reasons he was named among our Product 50, winning the title of “Most Admired Product Leader.”

Learn more about Brian in the latest installment of our Product 50 interview series, which explores the winners’ career paths, inspirations, and challenges, as well as their insights into the trends shaping the digital product landscape.

Brian, welcome! To start, tell us about your career path. How did you get to where you are today?

When I started out, product management wasn’t really a function at many organizations, so I started my own business. Though we went through a couple of fundraising rounds, our startup didn’t succeed as well as I had hoped. But I learned a ton of lessons from that experience—including that I didn’t know how to scale a business. That’s why I decided to switch to an enterprise software company that served all the major insurance carriers by automating the claims workflow.

After several years there, I returned to entrepreneurship and joined a company to help scale its product. My second attempt also didn’t work as well as I had hoped.

That’s when I went the business-to-consumer (B2C) route, with the goal of learning how to build scalable B2C products. I joined Intuit to build the TurboTax Live product line from the ground up. It was a massive success. The product is one of the best I’ve ever had the experience of working on and there were so many super smart people that I learned from.

When the Drata opportunity came about, I told myself I would take another shot at the startup world, bringing all the learnings from my career and just going for it. And that strategy has worked super well so far.

Give us some insights into your day-to-day work

At Drata, we have three different functions under the product. One is product management, and another is product design. And then we have a unique group called the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) office. That group essentially creates the compliance standards that feed into the rest of the product.

I’m responsible for product strategy, people, and processes. That means ensuring that:

• The product strategy is implemented correctly.
• We have an organizational structure that enables people to thrive.
• We have the right processes in place to grow and do our best work.

Can you tell us what you’re working on or excited about now?

I always say we’re building two kinds of products. We’re building the product we offer to solve our customers’ problems. But we’re also building our company as a product—our team. And that gets me up every day. It’s extremely rewarding but also really hard, especially given the scale at which we operate and the number of changes we’re going through.

What challenges keep you up at night?

There’s always the challenge of being able to innovate and remain competitive in a very crowded space. But even more important for me is building a strong and resilient culture—one that doesn’t break as you scale. When you have that in place, you can overcome any of the challenges the market throws at you.

What do you see as the biggest trends shaping or impacting the industry?

Generative AI is going to impact many companies and industries, and I’m excited to see how product leaders build with this in mind. For us specifically, it opens the door to rethinking how we solve customer problems.

I’ve always believed that you can’t build products on a hype cycle because they don’t last long, and you’re not empathizing with customer problems and building products that solve those problems. But I think generative AI can help us do that, for instance, by helping customers comply with privacy regulations such as the GDPR and CCPA.

How does data or digital analytics play a role in your work?

It’s the foundation of what we do. Of course, product maturity and data go hand in hand. If your product isn’t mature and you don’t have a lot of customers, data can’t give you many answers. But as your product matures, data plays an incredibly important role in the insights that you can generate and the decisions you make.

Data might not give you a yes or no answer—it’s not always binary. But it leads you to ask and follow questions. And it can help you validate your hypotheses as you talk to your customers. Data really removes emotion and subjectivity from the equation. I don’t think any product leader can make decisions without a digital analytics platform like Amplitude.

What advice do you have for aspiring product and growth leaders?

You don’t know all the answers. Surround yourself with really smart people—people who are smarter than you. That’s our rule at Drata, and I think it’s absolutely right. Bring smart people onto your team, create a culture for them to thrive, and provide the tools they need to do their best work.

The other piece of advice is to practice being a good storyteller because at the end of the day, that’s what we are. We are telling a story about how we solve a pain point for our customers. And your data and customer insights can help tell that story.

What do you like to do outside of work that keeps you inspired?

I’ve recently picked up gardening. Sometimes, I’ll spend two or three hours working in my backyard and it’s very relaxing. We’re behind screens all day, so this hobby lets me turn off my brain and focus on something different. I get to work with my hands and build a different kind of product—one that I can see come to life!