This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)

**Tom Verrilli** (0:00)
As tech companies scale, somewhere along the line, there's an HR ratio of a pod popped into being. Every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer, you add a PM. Hiring so many PMs infantilizes the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:17)
Something you wrote online that surprised a lot of people at Whatnot Product Team was built on a somewhat simple premise. We regret that product management exists.

**Tom Verrilli** (0:26)
Not a thing you probably hear from a lot of CPOs. We articulated that way to force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one, you hire one where there's really specific need.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:35)
It is better to not assume we need a PM in every place.

**Tom Verrilli** (0:38)
The only argument for why you would want product management to be a specialist function is really, it's a trade, not a qualification. It's something you get good at by doing. It's a muscle, but the flip side of that is the more you abstract your engineers and your designers from doing the same thing, their muscle gets underdeveloped.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:55)
They also wrote this brutal quote, The last two years, 31,832 people applied to be a product manager at Whatnot. We hired one. What does he look for in the folks that you hired?

**Tom Verrilli** (1:06)
I can tell you what's definitely trending down. Folks who spent a lot of the time in their interviews talking about driving alignment and stakeholder management, because there's definitely a group of PMs whose specialty wasn't technical, it was politics.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:17)
You're very excited about this move to IC work. PMs moving away from this big org management world.

**Tom Verrilli** (1:23)
If you were really successful as a PM, you got promoted into being a director. We took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things. Why wouldn't you want Messi playing for your team rather than trying to have the Academy coming along all the time?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:37)
Today, my guest is Tom Verrilli. Tom is Chief Product Officer at Whatnot, former longtime Chief Product Officer at Twitch, and former Director of Product Growth at Twitter. He's also someone I've been wanting to get on this podcast for so long. Tom has a lot of hot takes and really unique and important insights on the future of the product role, what he's seeing the best PMs doing differently these days, and what he's looking for when he's hiring product people for his team now.
If you're not familiar with Whatnot, it's a live stream shopping platform. It's the fastest growing US marketplace business of all time. At one point, Tom shares how he bought a fresh lobster from a fisherman on the platform. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Tom Verrilli.
Tom, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Tom Verrilli** (2:33)
Thank you so much, dude. It feels surreal after years of watching.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:37)
I hear that. I hear that when people come on the podcast. Here you are.

**Tom Verrilli** (2:40)
Is this the first time in a long time?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:42)
That's right.
I want to start with something that you wrote online that surprises a lot of people and I think will surprise a lot of people coming from a long-time chief product officer, long-time product builder, someone that's built a lot of very successful products and teams. What you wrote is, since its earliest inception, the Whatnot product team was built on the somewhat simple premise, we regret that product management exists.

**Tom Verrilli** (3:09)
Yes sir, not a thing you probably hear from a lot of CPOs.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:12)
No. Talk about why you feel this way. Talk about how you got to this place. Talk about what this means.

**Tom Verrilli** (3:19)
Sure. I mean, I always try and start with history in order to understand kind of things. And one of the things when you come to product management is if you go all the way back, product management didn't exist. It was the business and we're very often founder or CEO types talking directly to engineering design about what we needed to build and then executing it together.
And, you know, Internet businesses, it turns out, scaled a lot faster than any other businesses in history. And so at some point, scale meant delegating the specifics of execution to somebody or trusting somebody else to work out what comes next, because there's just too many things on for somebody to sit with. But if you think about most startups or you think about how that evolution worked, that was really a specialist role where somebody was working it out. It was usually, you said less things to the engineer, where you had to describe in less detail what you were trying to get done to a designer because they understood or they'd been involved. And this idea that we need this kind of specialist decision-making class of humans in tech is really a more modern function than it is a pure necessity. The way I would think about it and the way that Whatnot has always treated it is like, it would actually be way better if engineering and design had the context that they needed to just make great decisions there if they were so in touch with users and what they needed that they could kind of make the same decisions that a product manager is. The only argument as far as I'm aware for why you would want product management to be a specialist function is really, it's a trade, not a qualification. And what I mean by that is it's something you get good at by doing, it's a muscle for one of a better term. And as every private trainer has ever told me, muscles are built by reps.