This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)
with Tom Verrilli
2 Aug 20264 min read1h 45m
TL;DR
Tom Verrilli, CPO of Whatnot, argues that product management as a specialist function is overused and actively harmful — hiring too many PMs atrophies engineers' and designers' decision-making muscles. Whatnot runs ~21 PMs across a massive GMV business, maps them to problems not teams, and in two years hired just one out of 31,832 applicants. The future of PM is senior ICs doing real work, not directors running alignment meetings.
Key Moments
Tom Verrilli
“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.”
Tom explaining how the standard pod-ratio model (1 PM per 6 engineers) created a dependency that weakened engineering and design judgment over time.
“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.”
Tom explaining what's trending down in PM hiring — candidates who talk about stakeholder management and alignment as their core skill.
“we took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things. Uh and they spent all of their time in alignment and they spent all of their time kind of like coaching and tweaking what their team was doing.”
Tom critiquing the traditional PM career ladder where promotion into director meant stopping IC work entirely.
Tom Verrilli is Chief Product Officer at Whatnot, the fastest-growing US marketplace business of all time, known for its live stream shopping platform. Before Whatnot, he spent seven years as CPO at Twitch and was Director of Product Growth at Twitter. He is known for his contrarian views on product management, including the premise that hiring too many PMs infantilizes engineers and designers.
Takeaways
1
Hire PMs to problems, not teams Whatnot maps PMs to specific problems identified in 6-month planning cycles rather than permanently attaching them to engineering teams. This forces the org to justify PM headcount on every cycle and prevents PMs from becoming comfortable team fixtures who lose their edge.
2
One senior PM across competing surfaces beats two siloed PMs When Tom arrived at Twitch, the ads and discovery teams were perpetually at war over feed impressions. His fix was simple: assign one PM accountable for both. The natural trade-off — maximize GMV from the feed across organic and paid — gets made automatically, cutting months of cross-team politics.
3
Senior PMs should stay IC, not graduate to management At Whatnot, all PM managers spend 90%+ of their time on IC work, and Tom himself spends ~50% on IC work as CPO. Promoting A-players into pure director roles removes the best decision-makers from doing actual product work, which is the opposite of what high-velocity teams need.
4
The pod-ratio model atrophied engineering judgment The 1 PM per 6 engineers rule that spread through tech companies created a dependency where engineers and designers stopped developing product instincts because a PM was always there to make decisions for them. Tom calls this 'infantilizing' and argues it's the core structural problem with how product management scaled.
5
Stakeholder management as a core PM skill is a red flag Tom explicitly screens out candidates whose interview answers center on driving alignment and managing stakeholders, calling it a form of political specialization rather than product craft. The PMs Whatnot hires show both macro systems thinking and micro urgency — not coalition-building.
6
'Know then go' beats risk-averse alignment loops Whatnot's internal principle is to mentally simulate all failure modes — scale breaks, legal risks, knock-on effects — before shipping, then move anyway. Pre-empting problems in your head is faster and more effective than surfacing them through layers of review meetings.