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

As tech companies scaled, somewhere along the line, this HR ratio of a pod popped into being. Every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer, you add a PM. Hiring so many PMs infantiles 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. Something that you wrote online that Surprised a lot of people and what not product team was built on the somewhat simple premise. We regret that product management exists. Not a thing you probably hear from a lot of CPOs. We articulate it that way to force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one, you hire one with this really specific need. It is better to not assume we need a PM in every place. The only argument for why you would want product management to be a specialist function is really. It's a trade, not a qualification. It's something you get good at by doing. It's a muscle, but the flip side of that is the more you abstract your engineers and your designers from doing the same thing, their muscle gets underdeveloped. They also wrote this brutal quote in the last two years, thirty-one thousand eight hundred thirty two people applied. To be a product manager and whatnot, we hired one. What does he look for in the folks that you hire? I can tell you what's definitely trending down. Folks who spent a lot of their time in their interviews talking about driving alignment and stakeholder management because there's definitely a group of PMs whose specialty wasn't technical, it was politics.

You're very excited about this move to IC work. PM's moving away from this big org management world. If you were really successful as a PM, you got promoted into being a director. We took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things. Why wouldn't you want Messi playing for your team rather than trying to have the Academy coming along all the time? Today my guest is Tom Virilli. Thomas Chief Product Officer at Whatnot. Former longtime chief product officer at Twitch. And former director of product growth at Twitter.

He's also someone I've been wanting to get on this podcast for so long. Tom has a lot of hot takes. and really unique and important insights on the future of the product role. What he's seeing the best PMs doing differently these days. And what he's looking for when he's hiring product people for his team now. If you're not familiar with WhatNot, it's a livestream shopping platform, it's the fastest growing US marketplace business of all time.

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