This CPO Regrets That Product Management Exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)

In two years, 31,832 people applied to be a product manager at Whatnot. They hired one.

Tom Verrilli, their CPO and formerly CPO at Twitch, opened his Lenny's episode with a sentence almost no CPO says out loud: we regret that product management exists.

What he actually means

He is not saying PMs are useless. He phrases it that way to force a discipline. Do not hire a PM to fill a slot. Hire one where there is a specific need. His actual rule is simpler: stop assuming every team needs a PM.

The historical framing is the part that lands. Product management did not originally exist. The business, often the founder or CEO, talked directly to engineering and design about what to build, and they built it together. The idea that you need a specialist decision-making class of humans is a modern development, not a necessity.

The line that made me stop the episode

Hiring that many PMs infantilizes the engineers and designers. They are perfectly capable of making good decisions. They just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.

His distinction underneath it: product management is a trade, not a qualification. You get good at it by doing it. It is a muscle. Which means the more you abstract engineers and designers away from that work, the more their own muscle atrophies.

That generalizes past PMs. Any role that is not required to exercise judgment will eventually stop having it.

What is trending down in interviews

He named it directly. Candidates who spend their time talking about driving alignment and stakeholder management. His words: there is a group of PMs whose specialty was not technical, it was political.

Worth sitting with. Alignment work often reads as competence on a resume. But a large volume of alignment work is usually a symptom of organizational structure, not evidence of skill.

Do not promote your best people out of the work

This is the most portable one. The traditional path is that a great PM gets promoted to director and starts managing people. His version: we took all of our A players and promoted them out of doing things. Why would you want Messi coaching the academy instead of playing?

Three takeaways

Do not default to a PM in every pod. Headcount should come from need, not ratio.
Judgment is a muscle. If someone else always decides, you stop being able to.
Do not promote your best people out of the work.

We collapsed seven traditional functions into four roles: Builder, Reviewer, GTM Operator, Servicer. Same reasoning. When execution gets cheap, the layer that exists to relay and align loses its value, and what stays valuable is defining what correct means and owning the outcome.

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Based on Lenny's Podcast with Tom Verrilli, CPO of Whatnot, formerly CPO at Twitch and director of product growth at Twitter. Quotes are translated paraphrases from the episode.