Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Tom Verrilli, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:00] S0: 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 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. [00:00:17] S1: Something you wrote online that surprised a lot of people, the Whatnot product team was built on the somewhat simple premise. We regret that product management exists. [00:00:27] S0: 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 where there's really specific need. [00:00:35] S1: It is better to not assume we need a PM in every place. [00:00:38] S0: 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. [00:00:55] S1: You also wrote this brutal quote, "In the last two years, 31,832 people applied to be a product manager at Whatnot. We hired one." What does he look for in the folks that you hire?
00:00:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tom Verrilli
[00:00:55] S1: You also wrote this brutal quote, "In the last two years, 31,832 people applied to be a product manager at Whatnot. We hired one." What does he look for in the folks that you hire? [00:01:06] S0: I can tell you what's definitely trending down, folks who spend 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. [00:01:18] S1: You're very excited about this move to IC work. PMs moving away from this big org management world. [00:01:23] S0: 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? [00:01:37] S1: Today, my guest is Tom Verrilli. Tom is 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. [00:02:33] S0: Thank you so much, dude. It feels kind of surreal after years of watching. [00:02:37] S1: I hear that. I hear that when people come with the podcast. Here you are.
00:02:37 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tom Verrilli
[00:02:37] S1: I hear that. I hear that when people come with the podcast. Here you are. [00:02:40] S0: Somebody's giving you first time long time. [00:02:43] S1: That's right. I want to start with something that you wrote online that surprised a lot of people, and I think will surprise a lot of people coming from a long-time chief product officer, long-time product builder, someone that's built a lot of very successful products and teams. What you wrote is, "Since its earliest inception, the Whatnot product team was built on the somewhat simple premise. We regret that product management exists." [00:03:09] S0: Yes, sir. Not a thing you probably hear from a lot of CPOs. [00:03:12] S1: No. Talk about why you feel this way. Talk about how you got to this place. Talk about what this means.
00:03:19 · Tom Verrilli
[00:03:19] S0: Sure. I mean, I always try and start with history in order to understand kind of things. And one of the things when you come to product management is if you go all the way back, product management didn't exist. It was like the business, and very often founder or CEO types talking directly to engineering and design about what we needed to build, and then executing it together. And internet businesses, it turns out, scaled a lot faster than any other businesses in history. And so at some point, scale meant delegating the specifics of execution to somebody or trusting somebody else to work out what comes next because there's just too many things on for somebody to sit with. But if you think about most startups, or you think about how that evolution worked, that was really a specialist role where somebody was working it out. It was usually you said less things to the engineer, or you had to describe in less detail what you were trying to get done to a designer because they understood or they'd been involved. And this idea that we need this kind of specialist decision-making class of humans in tech is really a more modern function than it is a pure necessity. The way I would think about it and the way that Whatnot is always treated is it would actually be way better if engineering and design had the context that they needed to just make great decisions there, if they were so in touch with users and what they needed that they could make the same decisions that a product manager is. The only argument as far as I'm aware for why you would want product management to be a specialist function is really it's a trade, not a qualification. And what I mean by that is it's something you get good at by doing. It's a muscle, for want of a better term. And as every private trainer has ever told me, muscles are built by reps. And so the more you do it, the better you get at it. 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. And so I think product management plays a really important role. And I think you can deploy product management to have a really important leverage on particular things that need to go really well. And in a lot of ways doing that, let's design and engineering be the best they can be at their craft in those situations.
00:05:28 · Tom Verrilli, Lenny Rachitsky
But wherever possible, it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager and instead have design and engineering going through those kind of steps and making sure that their muscles are well-repped. [00:05:39] S1: Do you feel like product management was very helpful early on and was important, and then it kind of went through a period of, wow, there's way too many PMs that are not that amazing. And now there's kind of this coming back to, okay, what is actually an amazing PM and maybe we need fewer of them?
00:05:54 · Tom Verrilli
[00:05:54] S0: Yeah. The funny thing is I think if you talk to most engineers, or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones. And I don't mean that as a disheartening pejorative for folks, but I think it's more if you're being really literally self-critical as a function, does the average PM add a ton of value to folks around them in the way that having really high quality product management can disseminate clarity and absorb ambiguity in the ways that they can or help people make really timely decisions? And I think a lot of it is this function of, as tech companies scaled and we ended up hiring so many engineers, somewhere along the line, and I don't want to pin it on HR, but somewhere along the line, this kind of HR ratio of a pod popped into being. Every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer, you add a PM, you add an EM, and the nucleus exists. And then when you're now serving billion DAU products, you got a lot of engineers. And so now all of a sudden you've got a lot of product managers. And in most cases, you probably don't need a PM for notifications infrastructure. Engineers are perfectly capable of understanding how that works. And in a lot of ways, as we just described, 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. It's certainly less glamorous than people think. Yeah.