Tom Verrilli
Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.
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Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 24 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
A company should hire a product manager only against a specific need, never by default.
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 with a really specific need.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
The only real case for product management as a specialist function is that it is a trade, not a qualification — something you get good at by doing.
The only argument as far as I'm aware for why you would want product management to be a specialist function is really it's a trade, not a qualification.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Hiring product managers by ratio infantilizes engineers and designers who were perfectly capable of deciding for themselves.
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.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
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The engineer-designer-PM pod ratio was an HR artifact of scaling, not something anyone showed a product needed.
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 or you add a PM, you add an EM
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Product managers should be assigned to problems, not attached to engineering teams.
rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to kind of problems or kind of like core projects.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
AI gives an individual contributor so much leverage that one very senior product manager beats three entry-level ones.
you can have one very senior PM across more things and they can be more efficient than having, you know, three relatively entry-level PMs.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
A whole class of product managers built a career on politics rather than on technical or customer skill, and that skill is now worth nothing.
there's definitely a group of PMs and I certainly used to be one of them earlier in my career whose specialty wasn't technical or customer-oriented, it was politics.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
The industry's promotion ladder took its best product people and promoted them out of doing the work.
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 goal is just to coach and guide. And so, we took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
People who manage product managers should still spend almost all of their own time doing individual contributor work.
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.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
A few senior individual contributors can be paid VP money and still cost less than the layered product org they replace.
go and take the comp required to have five L5s reporting to one L7 and then four L7s reporting to one VP and now total the comp of that product org and turn around and say, what if I had three people?
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
A product leader writing production code is not the best use of their time, even though they should be able to read the codebase.
have I personally shipped some production code and whatnot? Yes. Uh do I think that's really the best use of my time? Not really.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
AI data tooling has cut the product manager's need for data scientists while multiplying the time they spend in the data themselves.
as a product manager, I've spent less time in the last year talking to a data scientist than I ever have in my career, even though I've probably spent 10 times more time in data and understanding actually how the product's working than I have ever have in my career.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Needing fewer people per unit of output does not mean a company ends up employing fewer people.
if you are using these systems right you can just grow more quickly you can build more things you can take on more stuff so you know I would be surprised actually if we ended up with like net fewer
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Core product skills are the most durable in an AI world, but many people holding the PM title spent five years building the wrong ones.
absolutely agree that product skills are probably the most durable. My build would just be there's a lot of people who have the title PM who haven't spent a lot of time building those skills in the last 5 years, but have gotten really good at communicating frameworks to leadership.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Interviews reward presentation; only a hands-on case study shows how fast a candidate's thinking decays.
the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
The right posture toward your own team is verify then trust, not trust but verify.
we tend to live in a verify then trust land as opposed to a like totally trust or even trust but verify
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
You cannot make good macro decisions without the micro, which means a leader has to sit alongside the individual contributors.
if you don't actually push yourself down to sit alongside your IC engineers and your IC designers and your IC PMs, you don't actually know that stuff. So you can't make good macro decisions without the micro.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Top-down product leadership works when the leader is in the weeds; what people call micromanagement is a leader directing work without knowing ground truth.
Top-down works well if leadership is good enough to be in the weeds and be specifically correct. I think where it falls apart is where you don't actually know ground truth and then you attempt to manage people from above and that's where I think the term micromanagement comes from.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
When nobody in the room has data, the chief executive's opinion should win, and that is fine.
if it nobody's got data, it's just two opinions, the CEO's opinion is going to win.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Roadmapping and pure iteration are both failure modes; a product team has to keep stretching out to strategy and compressing back into shipping.
there are people who are really big on road maps and there are people who are really big on iteration. I I think the honest answer is you've got to do both. You can't over-index on either.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Agentic shopping will not take over commerce, because most shopping is low-intent — e-commerce has never passed twenty percent of American retail.
most of commerce in America isn't actually high intent. Like how many years are we into e-commerce now? Like 30 years into e-commerce and e-commerce has never exceeded 20% of retail spend in America.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Live commerce works at audience sizes that would be uneconomic for live entertainment, because commerce does not run on CPMs.
commerce has totally different economics to entertainment and CPMs aren't the thing that you have to worry about.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
When a decision is called too complex to make, the real explanation is almost always weak leadership.
what I definitely learned is like most of the time you hear it's really complex. It isn't. Leadership's just weak.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
Deciding on averages is how product teams destroy the small group for whom a barely-used feature is everything.
there are real downstream impacts to people's businesses that often come from just like a lack of nuance in understanding metrics, particularly averages.
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) Said 2 Aug 2026
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