This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)
Tom Verrilli, CPO at Whatnot, discusses the evolving product management role, advocating for fewer, more senior IC PMs and emphasizing core PM skills in an AI-driven world. He shares insights on building high-impact teams and navigating founder relationships.
Deep Dive Analysis
19 Topic Outline
The Premise: We Regret Product Management Exists
The Evolution and Role of Product Management
Why Specialization Can Underdevelop Skills
When PM Specialization Works and Doesn't
Whatnot's PM Org Structure and Planning
Hiring for PMs: Trending Skills Up and Down
Developing Systems Thinking Skills
The Shift to Senior ICs Doing Core Work
Advice for PMs in a Changing Market
How AI Transforms Work at Whatnot
The Data Scientist Problem and Trending Roles
The Future of Product Teams and Durable PM Skills
Getting the Most from Hired People
Navigating the CPO-Founder Relationship
The "Play the Accordion" Mental Model
Agentic Commerce vs. Live Commerce
Lessons from Twitter
Failure Corner: The Danger of Averages
Lightning Round and Final Thoughts
6 Key Concepts
Product Management as a Trade
Product management is described as a skill developed through practice and repetition ('a muscle built by reps'), rather than just a qualification. This implies that hands-on experience is crucial for PMs to excel.
Infantilization of Engineers/Designers
Over-hiring PMs can prevent engineers and designers from developing their own decision-making muscles. When a PM is always present to 'babysit,' other functions lose opportunities to make product decisions themselves.
No Then Go
A mental model for risk assessment where you proactively think through all potential negative outcomes and scale breaks before proceeding. The goal is to anticipate and preempt problems, allowing for faster, more confident action.
Product Theater
A term referring to PMs who excel at communicating frameworks and strategies to leadership, but lack deep technical or customer understanding, or the ability to make concrete decisions. This often involves focusing on alignment and politics over actual product work.
Play the Accordion
A mental model for product development that balances strategic vision with fast iteration. It involves constantly zooming out to define the overall goal, then zooming in to build the smallest thing to test that understanding, and repeating the cycle based on new learnings.
Agentic Commerce
A trend where AI agents autonomously buy goods and services for users, often for low-intent or programmatic purchases like light bulbs or air filters. This contrasts with live commerce, which focuses on social, high-touch interactions.
8 Questions Answered
Whatnot articulates this to remind themselves not to hire a PM just for the sake of it, but only when there's a specific need, and to empower engineers and designers to make product decisions themselves.
Skills related to "driving alignment" and "stakeholder management" are trending down, as these often indicate a PM whose specialty is politics rather than technical or customer-oriented work.
PMs can develop systems thinking by mentally exercising scenarios, such as imagining what would happen with a thousand times more usage or unexpected knock-on effects, before starting to build. This helps anticipate and preempt potential problems.
For a PM at Whatnot, IC work involves being hands-on with customer support tickets, pulling and understanding data, querying the codebase, writing product specifications, and running stand-up meetings. It's whatever is required to most effectively ship a product.
AI tools like Hex Threads enable PMs to quickly pull nuanced data cohorts, understand individual user behavior, build sensitivity models, and spot regressions. This significantly reduces the need to consult data scientists for initial analysis.
While hiring great people is crucial, a purely hands-off approach can lead to a lack of ground truth understanding from leadership. Leaders should periodically go deep into the details to verify and guide, making better macro decisions.
The "two dads problem" refers to the confusion and inefficiency that arises when both a CPO and a product-minded founder are giving conflicting instructions or reviewing the same work, creating an unnecessary extra layer.
Averages can be misleading because they hide the impact on individual users or specific cohorts. A feature used by only a small percentage of the overall user base might be critical for 100% of that specific group, and deprecating it based on averages can destroy their core use case.
10 Actionable Insights
1. Question Experiment Outcomes
Before running an experiment, clearly define what actions you will take if the results are positive (green) or negative (red). This forces thorough strategic thinking and prevents inaction or indecision after data collection.
2. Pre-empt Scale & Failure
Mentally simulate potential problems like a thousand times more usage or unexpected knock-on effects before building. This ’no then go’ approach helps preempt issues and allows for faster, more confident decision-making.
3. Focus on IC Work
As a PM, prioritize individual contributor (IC) work like understanding customer problems, pulling data, querying the codebase, writing specs, and running standups. This keeps you connected to ground truth and enables quicker, more impactful decisions.
4. Avoid PM Politics
De-emphasize ‘driving alignment’ and ‘stakeholder management’ as primary PM skills. Instead, focus on technical understanding, customer orientation, and making concrete decisions to avoid becoming a ‘politics’ specialist.
5. Understand Ground Truth
For leaders, actively engage in the details of how systems work, rather than just delegating. This involves delving into support tickets, data labeling processes, and code logic to make informed macro decisions and strengthen the system.
6. Question Averages in Data
Be wary of relying solely on average metrics, as they can mask critical individual use cases. Always investigate deeper to understand if a small percentage of users depend entirely on a feature before deprecating it, to avoid blowing up core use cases.
7. Calibrate Founder Relationship
When working with product-minded founders, understand their working style for feedback and pushing back. Don’t compete for vision; instead, focus on translating their vision into reality and know when to step back if they are directly involved.
8. Seek Truth, Not Just Yes
When debating with leadership, prioritize seeking the right answer over simply getting a ‘yes.’ Start with curiosity to understand their context, bring data if available, and accept their decision if it’s just two opinions without data.
9. Develop Systems Thinking
Practice mentally playing out scenarios like unexpected scale or negative impacts to develop systems thinking. This helps anticipate problems and unblocks faster movement by preempting risks.
10. Embrace “I’ll Figure It Out”
Adopt a mindset of ‘I’ll figure it out’ for most challenges. This encourages problem-solving and acknowledges that with sufficient effort, most problems are solvable, reducing perceived complexity.
8 Key Quotes
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.
Tom Verrilli
We regret that product management exists.
Tom Verrilli
We took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things.
Tom Verrilli
Why wouldn't you want Messi playing for your team rather than trying to have the academy coming along all the time?
Tom Verrilli
Averages mean nothing to the individual.
Tom Verrilli
Most of the time you hear it's really complex. It isn't leadership's just weak.
Tom Verrilli
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. Like it's huge.
Tom Verrilli
I'll figure it out is probably the closest, you know, like it turns out most things are not as hard as people think like, we'll work it out. I'll figure it out.
Tom Verrilli
1 Protocols
Whatnot Planning Cycle
Tom Verrilli- Every six months, the CEO, CPO, and other senior leads define what needs to be true for the next six months (outcomes and critical projects).
- Go through the defined list and assign a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) who is accountable for each item.
- Allocate PMs to specific problems or core projects based on the DRI assignments, rather than mapping them permanently to teams.