Whatnot

“Something we started doing more recently at both Eventbrite and whatnot is just designating the person on the cross-functional team who drives the project. At Eventbrite, we call it the driver. At whatnot, we call it the DRI, directly responsible individual. B…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“If every seller is now spending three minutes for every listing that they're making, The number of things that can sell per hour is now dramatically, dramatically lower, which means it's bad for sellers.”

“The actual document we use internally to talk about how we build, and it starts with like batting 500. Is like the goal. So like, you're hoping to be right as often as you're wrong.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Everyone who gets hired at whatnot in any role has to do an actual hands-on case study”

“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.”

“One of the monikers we use internally is no, then go as in just like think through all the things that could go wrong, understand where scale will break, understand the things that might happen and then make the like move on anyway, because if you've thought t…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”