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

For example, I don't want to judge if our dev tools have gotten easier or not based on what someone tells me.

I'm going to go and try it and be like, yep, that was easier than last time I did it.

But I do think you can get an awful long way understanding the code base and then talking to somebody who can actually execute well.

Otherwise, you're going to fall afoul of like a thousand classic traps that every other engineer learned how not to do when they were in L4.

I mean, the first one I think by a country mile is data science.

We use hex threads internally and whatnot.

I'm sure there are other comparable products, but I think it's almost hard to remember time as a PM before you had tooling like that where you could genuinely start pulling very nuanced cohorts of data where you could grab an individual user where you've heard a report

actually understand, you know, like let's pull logs, help me understand exactly what this user did and saw, how many other users look like this, you know, what would impact be.

And then all of a sudden you can build pretty meaningful sensitivity models or like forecasts of what might happen, regression models, et cetera, really, really, really quickly, which is like incredibly powerful.

The other thing that we've found is it helps us move much more quickly with shipping things because you can spot regressions and weird knock-on effects of two products into mixing more quickly than you used to be able to.

And I think in really large, complicated systems, that's always one of the things that ends up slowing you down of release trains and all of that versus if you build the right AI tool, you can spot regressions really quickly, which basically lets people just kind of go faster.

So I don't know what the future of data science looks like, but I think as a product manager, I've spent less time in the last year talking to a data scientist than I ever have in my career, even though I've probably spent 10 times more time in data and understanding actually how the product's working than I ever have in my career.

So that one I think is really powerful.

Second one I've already mentioned, which is like stop bothering engineers with how does the code base work and actually just go and talk to Claude and understand it, which is really helpful.

I used to say early on in my career that the goal was always to understand your systems at the boxes and lines level of which system drives which thing.

And now there's no excuse not to understand that or a nuanced layer.

But the other one, and this might be very specific to what not, so I don't know that this will help everyone, but one of the things that I've been lucky to do in my career is basically worked on live products for a decade now.

And so it's always been really cool to be able to ship a product and then watch a customer use it and watch them kind of figure it out.

So like, I think people have just gotten this experience with like Listen Labs and others in that cohort of watching people use your product.

But I've always been able to sit and watch people use a thing for the first time and go through that new user comprehension gap.

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