Lenny's PodcastThis CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Rethinking product management: fewer PMs, more IC work, AI leverage
- Whatnot uses “we regret product management exists” as a forcing function to only hire PMs when there’s a clear, specific need rather than defaulting to PM-per-team ratios.
- Over-specializing PM work can “infantilize” engineers and designers by removing decision-making reps, while the best orgs keep product judgment close to builders and customers.
- Whatnot runs a lean PM org (~20+) and assigns PMs to high-priority problems every planning cycle, not permanently to engineering teams, to maximize leverage and learning.
- Hiring signals are shifting away from “alignment/stakeholder politics” toward systems thinking, fast validation instincts, and concrete evidence of building/iterating real products.
- AI is increasing IC leverage (especially in data work and codebase understanding), pushing orgs toward senior ICs doing hands-on work and changing which roles and skills compound over time.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasDon’t staff PMs by ratio; staff PMs by necessity.
Verrilli argues the default “pod ratio” (e.g., 6 engineers = 1 PM) creates PM bloat and reduces builder ownership; instead, add PMs only where the work truly needs a specialist to drive decisions and clarity.
Over-abstracting PM work weakens engineering/design judgment.
PMs can become “babysitters” if they absorb all customer context and decision-making; keeping engineers/designers closer to those reps builds stronger product instincts and faster local decision-making.
Map PMs to problems, not to teams, to follow the highest-leverage work.
At Whatnot, PMs are reassigned regularly based on six-month priorities and DRIs, which prevents role stagnation and ensures PM time is spent on the company’s most important outcomes.
The hiring bar is shifting from politics to craft.
Whatnot screens against candidates who lead with “alignment” and stakeholder narratives, favoring those who can show macro+micro thinking, rapid validation plans, and specific examples of decisive building in ambiguous environments.
Systems thinking is a learnable muscle—practice outcome-contingent planning.
A simple training loop is asking “What do we do if it’s green? What do we do if it’s red?” plus mentally simulating scale and second-order effects before writing docs or code, then moving anyway (“know then go”).
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesHiring 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.
— Tom Verrilli
We articulate it 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.
— Tom Verrilli
There's definitely a group of PMs whose specialty wasn't technical, it was politics.
— Tom Verrilli
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?
— Tom Verrilli
Sometimes things aren't actually that complicated. It's just weak leadership.
— Tom Verrilli
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
