Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:12:51 · Tom Verrilli
[00:12:51] S0: I don't think it's explicitly because of AI, but I do think AI makes it a lot easier. I think it's two things. I think AI certainly means that there's an enormous amount of leverage for an IC. Now, I don't know how much other people feel this, but I was talking to a couple of our senior leads the other day, and we feel that we're so capable of doing things now with AI that you almost feel a bunch of pressure of the stuff you're not doing because you know that if you carved out a couple more hours, you could move a lot of stuff. It's certainly easier to move fast with AI tooling if you've got well-honed judgment. You can pull data now on a Hex Threads that is basically what it would take a week, two weeks with an Amazon L7 data scientist in 2017. And so if you're empowered and have good judgment, you can basically make really quick decisions and just keep people moving, which is extraordinary. But more than just AI, I think it's also a lot of those ratio pushes also came with a bunch of other cultural pushes like hire great people and get out of their way, bottoms up roadmaps, and all of those pieces where I think there's been a bit of a cultural shift in tech over the last little while, which is like actually top-down's pretty good because folks at the top, generally speaking, can make quick decisions and remove all of this alignment debate. They have probably more macro context than most folks. And assuming that they are genuinely in touch with ground truth and are good enough, it's actually a really efficient model to be able to have senior leadership involved in a lot of those decisions, which means it's not just the tooling that makes them efficient, but you can have one very senior PM across more things and they can be more efficient than having three relatively entry level PMs. But certainly AI makes all of that a lot easier again.
00:14:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tom Verrilli
[00:14:34] S1: So just to coming back to the broad premise, which I think is very important to clarify, this point about regretting product management exists isn't saying we don't want or think PMs are useful. It's that it is better to not assume we need a PM in every place. And it is great to enable other functions to do the PM work. And also just PMs take away the reps from people being able to do the things that PMs do. And if they can do that work, they can actually execute better, build better products for people. [00:15:04] S0: I think it's also better for PMs to not be mapped specifically to a team than it is to say we go where the work is. You will build more and better reps. You can work out more muscle groups by moving around on the things you work on as opposed to saying, I'm attached to whatever this EM owns. [00:15:19] S1: So let's follow that thread. What does the team look like? What does the PM/eng design team look like at Whatnot? What does this org look like in this worldview?
00:15:28 · Tom Verrilli
[00:15:28] S0: Yeah, we've just passed 20 PMs. We have, I think 21, 22 PMs in the building today. Which for those following what our trajectory is is pretty small considering the volume of GMV that our sellers move. We're very loosely organized into three groups, buyer, seller, and what we would call trust and risk. So the folks looking after our standards, payments, safety, et cetera. And then within those broad groups, we basically reassign the PMs pretty regularly. So people have loose alignment. You might be broadly a growth PM or broadly work on discovery. But even amongst those groups, it gets allocated and moved around pretty quickly. And that's because the way that we do planning is every six months, the CEO, myself, some other folks and senior leads, will sit down and just define what needs to be true over the next six months. What do we have to get done as a company, both in terms of outcomes and critical projects? And then we sit down and we go through that list and say, who's the DRI? Who's accountable for that? And that's mostly how we end up allocating PM work. And so quite regularly you'll have something, we've just finished a planning cycle literally this morning, and you'll quite regularly go through those and you'll get to the end and say, "Cool, there's this thing that's second or third priority in a bunch of different teams' roadmaps. That feels really important. Who owns that? We actually don't have an owner for that." And we'll go and grab a PM and be like, "Congratulations, this is the thing we need you to deliver over the next six months." It's rarely you need to build a feature that works exactly this way, that does this thing. It's a little more high level than that. But how do you go and work out what needs to be true? And then you map the human beings that you think can guide that. Not every name is a PM name, but overwhelmingly when you go through that planning process, it tends to be PMs and it tends to be PMs who have the right skillset vis-a-vis what it is, whether it's more financial, whether it's more algorithmic and recommendations-based, whether or not it's core user feature.
00:17:28 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tom Verrilli
[00:17:28] S1: Let me follow that actual specific thread at the end there around what you look for in product managers that you hire. So 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." [00:17:45] S0: Yes, sir. [00:17:47] S1: Brutal. [00:17:47] S0: It's pretty great. [00:17:49] S1: Pretty great. So there's a few things here I want to talk about. One is just what does it you look for in the folks that you hire? Especially these days, what's trending up in what you find you need in really successful PMs and whatnot? And what's maybe trending down?
00:18:03 · Tom Verrilli
[00:18:03] S0: I can tell you what's definitely trending down. It's folks who spend a lot of the time in their interviews talking about those alignment meetings and driving alignment and stakeholder management and those pieces. Because 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. And so folks who tend to naturally lean towards driving alignment, building relationships, tell me about a time when you failed and you're like, "Oh, I didn't keep the CEO up to date with something and that led to a pivot," is definitely a thing that is a bit of an anti-pattern that trends down. What we tend to find really jumps in a PM kind of interview is, over the course of your interviews or your case study, can we see both the macro thinking and the micro thinking? I think the system works something like this and I can describe an end state, but can I almost exude impatience on, and here's how I would validate that very quickly, here's where I would push to get that done, and are you specific about the things that you've built? There's an awful lot of folks who've worked at FANG, Uber, or pick any scale company where they babysat things that existed, and they've maybe polished the edges of it as opposed to the idea of saying, we were given this problem and I had to go and come up with something unique and novel, or I had to really iterate our way through a complicated change. But I made decisions along the way and we moved. Because I think it's easy in a very large organization with inertia to go along with what's happening and not necessarily be an agent of change or be a decision maker, which is ultimately what you need PM to do.
00:19:41 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:41] S1: There's something you said there that I just had Elizabeth Stone on the podcast. She's CPTO at Netflix, and asked her what's the trait that is also most trending up. And she said exactly what you said initially, which was the systems thinking, thinking big picture, thinking about the bigger business, and her advice there to work on this, and I want to ask you if you have any other advice here. Say someone hears this, you're like, oh wow, I got to work on my systems thinking skills. Her advice is take one click back from your problem and think about, okay, for my manager, how do they think about this problem and how does that impact the rest of the business? Thoughts on just how somebody might develop the skill and get better at systems thinking?