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

And so you just got to think through what that is.

I mentioned a little bit earlier, but there was this thing in the ratio land where what you did if you were really successful as a PM is you got promoted into being a director.

And then all of a sudden it was like, don't be hands-on anymore.

Your goal is just to coach and guide.

And so we took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things.

And they spent all of their time in alignment and they spent all of their time

kind of like coaching and tweaking what their team was doing.

And you get this really yo-yo development process where somebody does all this work, it goes to review, it gets told no, and you're just kind of going back and forward in reviews.

You can see my scar tissue coming through.

On our team, everybody is like, there are managers.

There's like, I think four or five people across the team who manage other PMs.

All of them would spend 90 plus percent of their time doing IC work.

I'm still probably 50% of my time doing IC work personally.

And I think there's kind of a couple real advantages of it.

The first is if you are a kind of ZP product where you've got a decade plus, maybe 15 years of experience building things, hopefully your instincts as to what's going to work are not fairly well honed at this point.

You can just make decisions more quickly than people.

You can have real impact very, very quickly.

And it's really great for the organization to have somebody who can do that as opposed to the idea of like working through three layers of, you know, we divide the problem up against amongst a couple of PMs.

Those folks need to get into alignment.

There's different engineering teams debating stuff.

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