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

I think the skill is exactly the right way to say it.

I think you can get good at it from just the mental exercise.

So you can do it in small ways.

One of the things I ask a lot of product review when someone says, hey, we want to run an experiment is, okay, what do we do if it's green?

What do we do if it's red?

And if folks are like, actually, I don't know how my strategy would change.

Like, cool, we haven't really thought about that.

So like stop and go and do the mental exercise of how it would work.

And then I think it's the same thing if you can build quick local solutions, if you have done the mental exercise in your head of say, well, what would happen if we had a thousand times more usage of this than we expected?

Or what are the unexpected knock-on effects that this could have?

And how do you just start doing all of that in your head before you get pen on paper, before you get code on the system?

And I think it helps actually unblock people to move faster too, because I think the other thing that PMs are often slowed down by is like, oh, risk, oh, legal might, finance might, another team might.

And I think one of the monikers we use internally is know, then go.

As in just like, think through all the things that could go wrong, understand where scale will break, understand the things that might happen.

and then move on anyway, because if you've thought through all the things that could happen at scale, you're probably going to preempt a bunch of them.

So I really like Elizabeth's quote there, but mine is just do the mental exercise of just playing out if it gets really widely adopted, if it happens, if there is something that goes wrong, what will it be?

You don't have to solve all of them.

You've just got to think through all of them, and then you end up solving more than you think.

Particularly in a higher growth environment, you're not really looking for a 5% Statsig win.

You're looking for something that kind of like totally moves the business and that has kind of compounding effect over time.

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