Scaling Smart: Strategies for Product Development | Semgrep’s Adam Berman

**Adam Berman** (0:00)
Product development is so much fun. And I think it makes every engineer better to have an opportunity to work on a product team or to think of themselves as building products. I talked a lot to our infrastructure team, too, that the reason our infrastructure team has been so successful is they also think about themselves as building products, but for the other engineers of the company. That everyone, if you put on your PM hat, if you think about who are my users, how is what I'm building gonna bring them value? It's so much fun to build something, get it into someone's hands, see them use it, and then keep on iterating. See if you can really stretch that value, make things easier, make things better.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:36)
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**Adam Berman** (1:27)
Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:29)
And obviously great to have you on the show because we have a producer named Adam. So, you know, like clearly there's some synergy happening here. But I think the real reason we're bringing you on is that over the last 18 months, you've had the opportunity to build the second product line at Semgrep. And this is a unique opportunity that happens at a lot of startups. A lot of new organizations were saying, hey, we're going to start this new line. And throughout that process, you had to decide the shape of how the product development organization at Semgrep functions.
And so, through research, conversations with our managers, lots of trial and error, I'm sure, you helped evolve this organization. And I think it's a really interesting perspective, because usually we talk to leaders who are maybe farther along. They're like, oh, I've built six product lines now. I've done this thing. Or I came into an established organization. Or we talk to leaders who are just starting, who are saying, we're doing this first product. So you're at this interesting transition point. Let's start there. What's the process you took to build and launch this new product?

**Adam Berman** (2:23)
Yeah, when a company goes from a one-product company to a two-product company, it's this huge change in what the organization has to be responsible for. When there's one product, every engineer at the company is singularly focused on the one product, on the one mission, on the one goal. As soon as you move to a two-product organization, you start to see the organization needing to function a little bit differently. You start to think about platforms. You start to think about systems and services that can serve multiple products. And you also start to think about, okay, who is actually serving the products themselves? How can we make sure that there's singular ownership? Make sure that there's really core direction for each of the products. And then eventually, you start having to start to think about, okay, how do we make sure these products aren't too siloed as we start to keep focus? You're trying to do this thing really scrappy at the beginning and then think long term about if this takes off, what does this look like when it's successful? How do we make sure that we don't end up with some product that's totally different, has totally different primitives? We don't want a totally different sales and marketing organization for a second product because it's so different from the first.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:27)
So that brings up a few interesting questions. The second product line, is it the same ideal customer profile? Is it a related customer profile? How have you approached that?

**Adam Berman** (3:35)
Yeah, and I talked to a lot of other engineering leaders as we were starting to build the second product to think through, like, hey, how do you decide, what do you decide to split out into something that is really cross-functional and singularly focused? Where do you draw the platform approach? So, the ideal part here is like, hey, we're still, we're a security company, we're focused on static analysis of code. So, we're trying to take static analysis and apply it to a second domain. So, our initial product looks at the security of your first-party code, the code that your developers are providing themselves. This second product, Semgrep Supply Chain, focused on your supply chain, the packages that you're pulling in.