Hiring PMs who index on stakeholder alignment is an anti-pattern
Tom Verrilli · This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) · Aug 2, 2026 · at 18:05
Tom Verrilli, CPO at Whatnot, explains what candidate behaviors he filters against when evaluating product management candidates.
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“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 career whose specialty wasn't technical or customer oriented. It was politics. And so folks who tend to kind of like naturally lean towards like driving alignment, building, building relationships, you know, tell me about a time when you failed and you're like, oh, I didn't keep the CEO up to date with something. And that led to a pivot is definitely kind of a thing that is a bit of an anti pattern that trends down.”
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