Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
As tech companies scaled somewhere along the line this 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. Something that you wrote online that surprises a lot of people at whatnot product team was built on the somewhat simple premise. We regret that product management exists. Not a thing you're probably here from a lot of CPOs. 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 with this really specific need. It is better to not assume we need a PM in every place. 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. They also wrote this brutal quote. In 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 hire? 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. You're very excited about this move to IC work. Kim's moving away from this big org management world. If you were really successful at the 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 messy playing for your team rather than trying to have the academy coming along all the time. Today my guest is Tom Verily. Tom is Chief Product Officer at whatnot. Former long-time 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 product in the world available exclusively to lennys newsletter subscribers with that and bring you Tom Verily. Tom thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much dude. It feels kind of surreal after years of watching. I hear that. I hear that when people come with a podcast. Here you are. Someone's given you first time a long time. I want to start with something that you wrote online that surprises a lot of people and I think we'll 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 has built was built on the somewhat simple premise. We regret that product management exists. Yes sir. Not a thing you probably hear from a lot of CPOs. No talk about why you feel this way. Talk about how you got to this place. Talk about what this means. 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 like product management didn't exist. It was like the business and you know we're very often founder of CPO types talking directly to engineering and 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
Transcription truncated.