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

You can have kind of core focus, which is the thing we're very big on.

We've also found incubating a lot of smaller teams to kind of go over and sit in the corner and just try and build this thing going, you know, it's not quite prototyping, but it's like go and take a swing at a thing that was historically thought was too hard is getting cheaper and increasingly has very high leverage.

So the idea of like engineering manager light,

for want of a better term, is the thing that I'm definitely think that we'll see more and more of.

It's like not quite the technical member of staff, although that must be lovely, but certainly not the kind of like full-blown EM role, I think is one that definitely will come about more often.

And I don't know that I know what it looks like everywhere.

I think what it'll look like at Whatnot is it probably still looks mostly like it has historically, which is, you know, there are reasons that you would have a specialist designer, specialist engineers, specialist product management.

I think those kind of very concrete teams will largely be reserved for like very specific projects or like things that we have high confidence or conviction that we need to solve, or we're pretty high confidence conviction that we have a path forward on this thing and we want to make good progress.

And I think at the edges around that, there's going to be a lot more free space for people to play on like, hey, I'm reasonably sure I can go and make a meaningful improvement to this thing.

And it doesn't matter if you are a designer, an engineer, a product manager, a data scientist, you can and you should, right?

If you're sitting there on a Friday afternoon and you can't focus on the period of your writing, but you're pretty sure you can go and fix something, go for it.

And so I think it probably doesn't morph

in the more formal sense, but I do think there's just a lot more free space for people who are well-versed in the customer problems, well-versed in the code base, and understand some of that macro context, will just be empowered to do more and more things.

Definitely agree.

Also, props for bringing in the receipts, even with a timestamp, my friend.

Well done.

I think what my only build on that would be to say, I think those core PM skills aren't necessarily the things that we have rewarded PMs for over the last five years versus storytelling, alignment, strategy.

And so I do think you're 100% correct that like, can I genuinely understand the customer?

Can I genuinely understand the business?

Can I genuinely understand the tech?

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