Making Risk and Compliance Tools Configurable with Dhiraj Bhat | Episode #15

Dhiraj Bhat describes his path into product through three places and institutions: Bangalore, Bosch, and the Bay Area. Growing up in Bangalore placed technology close at hand. At Bosch, he spent a couple of years as a software engineer in a manufacturing environment with rigid requirements. The experience clarified that he wanted to remain close to engineering while adding a customer-centered, external perspective. Conversations with product managers over lunch and coffee helped him understand the role, and graduate study at Duke brought him to the United States. He later worked in crypto before joining Unit21.

At Unit21, Bhat found a role that combined leadership with access to founders and mentors. The company was growing quickly, and he was learning while helping lead. His account shows what product management looks like in a specialized B2B field where the users, buyers, auditors, and regulators can all shape the product.

What you'll learn

• Why configurable tools can give risk and compliance teams more ownership

• How observation, usability studies, and market experts answer different questions

• How low-, medium-, and high-lift options support practical prioritization

• Why organization becomes more important as a product team grows

Give specialists control of the system they answer for

Bhat explains a misalignment in risk and compliance work. Sales teams commonly own and understand their tools, but risk and compliance systems have often been built and changed by engineers. If a rule performs poorly and suspicious activity passes through, the risk professional still faces scrutiny and potential reputational consequences. Unit21's goal is to provide a platform that lets those teams control more of their infrastructure directly.

No-code configuration is central to that proposition. Bhat describes a customizable rules engine and case-management system. A team can define how an alert moves through its own escalation matrix, directing certain cases to a compliance officer, others to a manager, and resolving another category through a different action. He contrasts that visibility with black-box products where users could switch a rule on or off without knowing its criteria.

The product insight is specific: simplification should not remove the user's ability to understand or adapt the system. In a high-consequence workflow, useful no-code design exposes meaningful control while reducing the engineering dependency required to exercise it.

Match the research method to the stakeholder

Experimentation in this market differs from a typical consumer product. Bhat groups the work around the space, the audience, and market intelligence. To understand the space, the team observes regulators, auditors, and risk or compliance professionals doing their daily work. Acting as a quiet observer helps reveal the real sequence of decisions and constraints without forcing the work into a prewritten feature concept.

For regular platform users, the team uses familiar guided and unguided studies. Mockups can help compare which option feels more intuitive, while customer success and support provide continuing channels for questions and pain points. Bhat also looks for signals through existing surveys, LinkedIn polls, and compliance groups.

Market intelligence fills a different gap. Bhat is candid that a software background does not make him an expert in every part of risk and compliance. Unit21 brings experts into conversations and fireside chats so the team can test its understanding of what the market needs. The broader lesson is to avoid asking one research method to do every job. Observation reveals practice, usability work examines an interaction, and subject-matter expertise tests domain assumptions.

Ship for learning without ignoring constraints

Bhat puts product-market fit ahead of a polished interface. The aim is to get a product into use soon enough to learn, without letting perfection delay evidence. His team frames possible solutions by effort, often presenting low-, medium-, and high-lift options, then choosing according to current priorities and resources. That makes scope a deliberate decision instead of an unspoken compromise.

The hardest stakeholder answer is often not whether something can be built. Given sufficient time and resources, Bhat says the answer is usually yes. The practical answer is often yes, but not now. A PM has to connect requests to constraints, urgency, scope, and the product's longer-term direction. He finds the work especially rewarding when a delivered feature gains use and solves a problem stakeholders recognize.

Rapid growth also changed the importance of organization. Bhat joined among roughly the first 30 employees and discussed the company passing 100. As new people arrived, repeatable processes became essential. He identifies organization as a skill he has had to develop because PMs must keep conversations, decisions, and execution coherent as the team expands.

Listen to the full conversation: Episode #15 audio.

Bhat's approach is practical for complex B2B products: observe the work, give accountable users meaningful control, bring domain experts into the room, and choose a scope that creates evidence without pretending resources are unlimited.