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

Because you kind of got to ask yourself, do I really want to spend...

my whole time, like having this discussion and this debate.

But like, I like being a CPO or kind of a product lead because in a lot of ways, what I'm doing is I'm like helping translate that vision and that intuition into reality.

And then, you know, there is an art to learning how to push somebody.

without kind of competing with them.

And I think a lot of the times I've seen the CPO CEO relationship go badly and ends up with like the CPO is competing with the CEO for vision and they end up at like loggerheads.

And I think that's not your job.

I think the first thing is don't treat it as a trick.

You're not trying to get an answer and a yes.

You're trying to seek truth, is my first statement.

I wouldn't say it's especially common that we start out of alignment, but I do think part of your role, if you're one of the more senior product folks in the room and the CEO, or if you're a director and it's the CFO in the room, is pushing the team in a way that you don't really expect or you don't really understand.

Start from a place of curiosity.

Does that person have more context than you, or is there a thing that you're not aware of that is guiding it?

I often try and start with, am I hearing you right that this is your prior?

Is there a piece of context or something that I don't have that helps inform that prior?

Cool.

Make sure everybody's on that same baseline.

And I coach my fans to do this with me all the time too.

If I'm coming at you from an angle you don't expect, pause and make sure that you understand why.

And then after that, I try and do a couple of different things.

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