Tom Verrilli

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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.

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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.

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if it nobody's got data, it's just two opinions, the CEO's opinion is going to win.

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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.

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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.

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we tend to live in a verify then trust land as opposed to a like totally trust or even trust but verify

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.