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

I've saved now a kickoff meeting, an alignment meeting, a week writing PRDs, experiment time, all of that by just having somebody who's kind of empowered to go and make a decision.

Start doing IC work in the role you're in would be my push.

Get back to the basics of make sure that you're taking on practical work because I just think it's good to make sure that you're keeping those muscles well honed.

I think it also starts with pushing internally for those things.

I would bet that if you started bringing that level of productivity back into the role that you're in, it probably helps you where you are in addition to help you where you might move to.

But I think...

There's a lot of chatter online, obviously, about like PMs or engineers now.

And I think that's all well and good.

Like it's a great muscle to go and hone.

As I said, I've pushed some production code because I wanted to go through the exercise of understanding it.

But I think there's also, before you get to like building things, it's like how quickly can you get back into the muscle of scoping the correct thing, understanding the problem, being able to define what good looks like.

And like take advantage of the scale and the scope that you've got that you can see more and bring more to things.

Like...

I think most folks who've sat in a director plus role will know the pain of sitting there and watching a junior PM yo-yo back and forth on the same PRD back to review where you kind of know what the answer is.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that lead a horse to water as opposed to kind of help them understand the answer and then keep moving.

And I think there's like something in our coaching styles that we can get back to of like,

help somebody understand what good looks like relatively quickly, as opposed to just endless review yo-yo.

I mean, this sounds really silly, mate, but it takes me substantially longer to go through the minutiae of getting Git

commit and all of the kind of like pieces that are second nature to engineer aligned, then it does to actually work out what the problem is and be able to describe it.

So yes, like good practice to try and make sure you're doing something.

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