Tom Verrilli
speaker
703 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Tom Verrilli’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
Not a thing you probably hear 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 where there's 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.
What does he look for in the folks that you hire?
I can tell you what's definitely trending down.
Folks who spend a lot of their time in their interviews talking about driving alignment and stakeholder management because there's definitely a group of PMs whose specialty wasn't technical.
If you were really successful as a 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 Messi playing for your team rather than trying to have the academy coming along all the time?
Somebody's giving you first time long term?
Not a thing you probably hear from a lot of CPOs.
I mean, I always try and start with like...
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