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.
Appearances
But wherever possible, it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager and instead have design and engineering going through those kind of steps and making sure that their muscles are well-repped.
The funny thing is, I think if you talk to most engineers or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with, mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones.
And I don't mean that as a disheartening pejorative for folks, but I think it's more, you know, if you're being kind of really, really self-critical as a function, does the average PM add a ton of value to folks around them in the way that having really high quality product management can, you know,
disseminate clarity and absorb ambiguity in the ways that they can, or like help people make really timely decisions.
And I think a lot of it is this function of like, as tech companies scaled and we ended up hiring so many engineers, somewhere along the line, and I don't want to pin it on like HR, but somewhere along the line, this kind of HR ratio of like a pod popped into being, you know, every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer, you add a PM, you add an EM and the, you know, the nucleus exists.
And then when you're now serving billion DAU products, you have a lot of engineers.
And so now all of a sudden you've got a lot of product managers.
And in most cases, you probably don't need a PM for notifications infrastructure, right?
Engineers are perfectly capable of understanding how that works.
And in a lot of ways, as we just described, hiring so many PMs infantilizes
the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them.
It's really less glamorous than people think yet.
I think this is where specialization works both ways, right?
It is useful to have folks who are well-honed in making decisions.
It's totally reasonable as well for someone to say, listen,
uh i'm an infrastructure lead and i want to think a lot about scale and i do not want to have to spend my time debating you know alignment or getting those minutiae right and certain skill sets don't necessarily translate super well right if you're really good at building big mental models in your head of how infrastructure should scale you may not have the skill set of listening to a customer and actually understanding the core problem as opposed to the thing that they said which again just a thing that we've built over time so uh
My supposition of we regret isn't to say that we don't want product managers to do this.
We recognize in those situations that you do need to kind of help other functions specialize.
But I think we articulate it that way to kind of force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one.
You hire one where there's really specific need.
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