Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)

August 2, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the last two years, 31,832 people applied to be a product manager at Whatnot. The company hired one. That statistic, shared by Chief Product Officer Tom Verrilli, is not a boast about exclusivity. It is the logical endpoint of a conviction he and his CEO hold: that the default assumption in tech—that every team needs a product manager—has created a bloated, infantilized system where engineers and designers lose the muscle of making decisions themselves. Verrilli’s central argument on the podcast is that product management should be a specialist intervention for specific problems, not a permanent layer in every pod. The best way to build great products, he argues, is to keep the number of PMs small, keep them deeply hands-on, and force the rest of the organization to stay capable of doing the work themselves.

The case against the default PM

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What you'll learn

1 (00:55) **"We Regret That Product Management Exists"** - Tom Verrilli introduces the controversial founding premise of Whatnot's product team and explains the reasoning behind it.
2 (05:55) **The Ratio Problem and the Proliferation of PMs** - Tom diagnoses how tech companies ended up with too many product managers who don't add enough value.
3 (08:42) **Addressing the "Engineers Don't Want to Do PM Work" Objection** - Tom explains how Whatnot handles the reality that some specialists prefer to stay in their lane.
4 (11:30) **Why This Shift is Happening Now: Culture, Not Just AI** - Tom separates the structural changes from the AI hype.
5 (15:22) **What the Org Looks Like in Practice** - Tom describes Whatnot's actual team structure and how PMs are allocated.
6 (17:43) **What Tom Looks For When Hiring (31,832 Applicants, One Hire)** - Tom breaks down the specific skills that are trending up and down in his hiring process.
7 (20:00) **How to Develop Systems Thinking** - Tom offers a practical exercise for building this critical skill.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Tom Verrilli is the chief product officer at Whatnot, a live shopping platform that’s become the fastest-growing U.S. marketplace business in history, with over $8 billion in GMV. Before joining Whatnot, Tom was CPO at Twitch and director of product growth at Twitter (during one of the most turbulent periods in the company’s history).

In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:

1. Why Whatnot’s product team was founded on the premise “we regret that product management exists”

2. How AI is reshaping the PM role

3. What Tom looks for when hiring PMs

4. The shift toward senior ICs doing the work

5. How AI has transformed data science at Whatnot

6. Tom’s “play the accordion” mental model

7. Why “hire great people and get out of their way” fails

8. His biggest lessons from his time at Twitter

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