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.
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history in order to understand kind of things.
And one of the things when you come to product management is if you go all the way back, like product management didn't exist, right?
It was like the business and, you know, very often founder or CEO types talking directly to engineering and design about what we needed to build and then executing it together.
And internet businesses, it turns out, scaled a lot faster than any other businesses in history.
And so at some point, scale meant delegating the specifics of execution to somebody or trusting somebody else to work out what comes next because there's just too many things on for somebody to sit with.
But if you think about most startups or you think about how that evolution worked, that was really a specialist role where somebody was working it out.
It was usually you said less things to the engineer where you had to describe in less detail what you were trying to get done to a designer because they understood or they'd been involved.
And this idea that we need this kind of specialist decision-making class of humans in tech is really a more modern function than it is a pure necessity.
The way I would think about it and the way that Whatnot is always treated is it would actually be way better if engineering and design had the context that they needed to just make great decisions there if they were so in touch with users and what they needed that they could make the same decisions that a product manager is.
The only argument as far as I'm aware for why you would want product management to be a specialist function
is really it's a trade, not a qualification.
And what I mean by that is it's something you get good at by doing.
It's a muscle, for want of a better term.
And as every private trainer has ever told me, muscles are built by reps.
And so the more you do it, the better you get at it.
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.
And so...
I think product management plays a really important role.
And I think you can deploy product management to have a really important leverage on particular things that need to go really well.
And in a lot of ways, doing that lets design and engineering be the best they can be at their craft in those situations.
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