Whatnot regrets that product management exists
The Whatnot product chief says the job should be a last resort, not a standard hire.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career · This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)Tom Verrilli, the chief product officer at Whatnot, a live-stream shopping platform, built his product team on a premise that caught many people inside the company off guard. It is rare to hear that from a chief product officer, he was told. He put it bluntly.
"We regret that product management exists."
By product management, he means the job of deciding what a team should build, and making sure engineers and designers have the clarity to build it. Verrilli argued that companies should not hire someone to do that job by default, but only when there is a specific need.
He said product judgment is a trade, not a qualification. "It's something you get good at by doing," he said, like building a muscle. The problem, in his view, is that the more you hand that muscle work to specialists, the more the muscles of everyone else get weak.
That happened, he said, as tech companies grew. He described what he called an HR ratio of a pod, his informal shorthand for the standard makeup of a small team, or pod. Every time you hired six engineers, he said, you added a designer, a product manager, and a manager. He said he did not want to pin the idea on human resources. Serve a product used by a billion people a day, and you suddenly have a lot of product managers.
Most engineers and designers, he said, remember the great product managers they have worked with mostly because "they've worked with so many bad ones." In most cases, he said, you probably do not need a product manager, and he pointed to notifications infrastructure as an example, because "Engineers are perfectly capable of understanding how that works."
He said: "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."
Verrilli acknowledged the limit. He said specialization cuts both ways. An infrastructure lead who thinks well about scale may not want to spend time on alignment and documents, and skill at building big mental models of systems does not always translate into hearing what a customer really needs beneath what the customer says.
The discipline behind the regret is that anyone can lead a product effort if that person does the full work and takes it through product review. A product manager is added only when there is a specific need for one, not because a staffing formula calls for one.
Questions people ask
What does a product manager actually do?
A product manager decides what problems a team should solve and what to build first. That usually means talking to customers, looking at data, writing clear plans, and getting engineers, designers, and executives to agree. At smaller startups, founders and engineers often do this themselves.
So when does Verrilli think you actually need one?
When engineers and designers either cannot or do not want to do that decision work well. He gives the example of an infrastructure specialist who wants to focus on scale, not customer interviews and alignment. In that case, he says, hire a product manager for that specific need, not because a staffing formula says so.
Do engineers and designers really want to make product decisions?
Some do and some do not, and Verrilli admits that is the tension. Many enjoy having more control over what gets built, but few enjoy the paperwork, meetings, and debates that come with it. His answer is to let anyone lead an effort, but require them to do the full work of defending it in review.