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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) · 2 Aug 2026 podcast

Do I think that's really the best use of my time?

Not really.

You know, I'm certain that quietly somebody reworked most of my code in order to ensure that the linting was correct and the localization worked and all of the nuance that decades of software engineering has taught you that, you know, me and Claude Code did not get right.

But I do think it starts with like, are you literally in the support tickets?

Do you know what customer problems we're having?

Have you pulled all of the data yourself so that you actually understand it?

Have you sat with engineering and design?

You know, have you queried the code base directly in order to understand how things work?

And then have you written the spec?

Are you then running a stand-up in a week?

I think all of that is just like core individual IC work.

I think there are probably still a load of organizations where that is really valuable and that they will go.

My recruiting tends to be the folks who are, oh my God, I used to love product management and I'm so sick of sitting in alignment meetings and I'm out there pitching CPOs and VPs of product to be like, don't you miss actually doing things?

Do you want to come back?

And I think it's okay for us to acknowledge that there will be a bifurcation across the industry.

I do think that there are organizations that are sufficiently large that maybe everyone being hands-on isn't right.

I also think, I mentioned earlier that you have to have a matching culture to kind of go with this kind of environment where that's the expectation, where people are like, I don't want to talk about it.

I want to just, let's go and do that thing.

And in a lot of ways, every startup is a reflection of their founders.

And so that naturally tends to be, how do they think and how do they want to run the organization?

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