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

They're almost certainly in a better position than me to understand the nuance of how any of those individual features work.

If somebody quizzed me today on exactly all the weightings in the whatnot discovery model, I would definitely be wrong vis-a-vis any of the engineers on that team, vis-a-vis any of the PMs on that team.

But like, it's actually kind of incumbent on me to learn that and understand that over time because I'm asking them to make decisions and I am proving things that they're doing.

And so time spent actually working alongside those teams, like in the trenches, trying to solve something really, really powerful.

One of the things that I saw earliest when I joined Whatnot that I've seen kind of Grant, who's our founder CEO do, is you'll sit in a review and be like, I don't think this is right.

And then he'll pause and say, I'm going to clear the rest of my day.

Let's sit and figure it out.

And he'll actually end up sitting with the team and going through, again, easier with AI data tools.

Let's literally pull up the tickets.

Let's literally pull up the code.

Let's go through the data line by line and understand what's actually happening so that we can make a decision there.

And it means he's very up to date with what's going on, kind of very culturally sets the tone for the team that we're just seeking truth.

And it makes it very much a us versus you.

Reviews got very into listen for yes for a little while there, where all you're trying to do as a PM is just get a green light so that you can go back to your engineers and say, I have some credibility.

I can get the CPO to approve what we're building, as opposed to this idea that says, we're just trying to find out the right answer.

And in theory, everyone wants us to come up with the right answer.

You know, we use planning to align the company on like what are the really important things we have to solve.

That's mostly a resourcing discussion, right?

Like if we pick the right things, stack rank them all, ultimately I'm most accountable for making sure that we have the right resources in the right places to hit things.

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