Tom Verrilli
Chief Product Officer, Whatnot. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperator@tdrobbo ↗LinkedIn ↗whatnot.com ↗
Tom Verrilli is the Chief Product Officer at Whatnot, where he oversees product, design, and growth. He previously served as Chief Product Officer at Twitch and held senior product leadership roles at Twitter.
1shows
1appearances
33statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Tom Verrilli said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Optimal to operate without product managers where possible
“Wherever possible, it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager and instead have design and engineering going through those kinds of steps and making sure that their muscles are well repped.”
Overhiring PMs infantilizes engineers and designers capable of making decisions
“Hiring so many PMs infantilizers 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.”
Verrilli: Top-down leadership and one senior PM beat three junior PMs
“Actually top down is pretty good because folks at the top, generally speaking, can make quick decisions and remove all of this alignment debate. They have probably more macro context than most folks and assuming that they are genuinely in touch with ground tru…”
Verrilli: Hex and AI match two weeks of 2017 Amazon L7 work
“You know, you can pull data now on a hex thread. That is basically what it would take a week, two weeks with an Amazon L seven, you know, a data scientist in 2017.”
Hiring PMs who index on stakeholder alignment is an anti-pattern
“Folks who spend a lot of the time in their interviews talking about those like alignment meetings and driving alignment and stakeholder management and those pieces, because There's definitely a group of PMs and I certainly used to be one of them earlier in my …”
Verrilli: Whatnot PM managers spend 90%-plus time on IC work
“There's like, I think four or five people across the team who manage other PMs. All of them would spend 90 plus percent of their time doing IC work. I'm still probably 50% of my time doing IC work personally.”
Companies can pay ICs VP money by cutting middle management layers
“Go and take the comp required to have five L fives reporting to one L seven and then four L sevens reporting to one VP. And now total the comp of that product org and turn around and say, what if I had three people? Why can't I pay them all? You know, D two VP…”
Verrilli: Engineers remember great PMs mostly because most are bad
“If you talk to most engineers or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones.”
Whatnot maps PMs to core problems, not fixed engineering teams
“Rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to kind of problems or kind of like core projects. And that means that there will be a year more where there isn't a PM attached to a particular engi…”
Verrilli: Keeping senior talent in operational weeds increases overall efficiency
“Push your best people to be really in the weeds of stuff. And actually what you find over time is you end up being more efficient by doing that because you actually understand how things work the first time and you make the best decisions.”
Verrilli spends 10x more time in data, talks less to data scientists
“So I don't know what the future of data science looks like, but I think as a product manager, I've spent less time in the last year talking to a data scientist than I ever have in my career, even though I've probably spent 10 times more time in data and unders…”
AI will not cause net headcount drops in PM or data science
“I also think one of the flip sides of we say we need fewer, it's like fewer of for the same output. Doesn't necessarily mean fewer of in macro, because if you are using these systems right, you can just grow more quickly. You can build more things. You can tak…”
Top-down leadership only works when executives master ground-truth details
“Top down works well if leadership is good enough to be in the weeds and be specifically correct. I think where it falls apart is where you don't actually know ground truth, and then you attempt to manage people from above. And that's where I think the term mic…”
CPO-CEO relationships fail when CPOs compete with CEOs over product vision
“A lot of the times I've seen the CPO CEO relationship go badly and ends up with like the CPO is competing with the CEO for vision and they end up at like loggerheads. And I think, you know, that's not your job.”
Multi-year roadmaps waste tech's core advantage of iterative learning
“I think there's a second failure mode, which is people sit down and write up these long roadmaps and strategic vision docs of what we'll do over the next two or three years that kind of loses the comparative advantage we have over every other industry, which i…”
True product-market fit survives even severe organizational dysfunction
“The first one is like, if you truly find product market fit, like if you managed to bottle lightning, doesn't matter how badly you screw up the organization of it.”
Claims that a situation is complex usually mask weak leadership
“What I definitely learned is like most of the time you hear it's really complex. It isn't leadership's just weak.”
Verrilli: Agentic commerce will not replace spontaneous discovery shopping
“And that is why agentic commerce is going to be great, but not all encompassing because I had no intention of buying a spiny California lobster that morning.”
Whatnot operates with only 21 to 22 product managers
“We've just passed 20 PMs. We have kind of, I think, 21, 22 PMs in the building today, which for those following what our trajectory is, is pretty small considering the volume of GMV that our sellers move.”
PMs should query Claude about codebases instead of bothering engineers
“Second one I've already mentioned, which is like stop bothering engineers with how does the code base work and actually just go and talk to Claude and understand it, which is really helpful.
You know, I used to say early on in my career that the goal was alway…”
Verrilli: Tech will see more 'EM light' hybrid tech lead roles
“So the idea of like engineering manager light For want of a better term is the thing that I'm definitely think that we'll see more and more of. It's like not quite the technical member of staff, although that must be lovely. But certainly not the kind of like …”
Whatnot requires hands-on case studies for every single role
“Everyone who gets hired at whatnot in any role has to do an actual hands-on case study”
Verrilli steps out of product areas when Whatnot's founders are involved
“If Grant or Logan are on it, I check that they're watching it.
They're accountable for it.
And I step out.
So there'll be long periods of time where like fully half my team could be working on something.
And I couldn't tell you day to day where it is because y…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tom's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Whatnot | 1 | 33 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |