Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:20:17 · Tom Verrilli
[00:20:17] S0: I mean, I think the skill is exactly the right way to say it. I think you can get good at it from just a mental exercise. So you can do it in small ways. One of the things I ask a lot in product review when someone says, "Hey, we want to run an experiment," is, "Okay, what do we do if it's green? What do we do if it's red?" And if folks are like, "Actually, I don't know how my strategy would change." Cool, we haven't really thought about that. So stop and go and do the mental exercise of how it would work. And then I think it's the same thing of you can build quick local solutions if you have done the mental exercise in your head of say, well, what would happen if we had 1,000 times more usage of this than we expected? Or what are the unexpected knock-on effects that this could have? And how do you just start doing all of that in your head before you get pen on paper, before you get code in the system? And I think it helps actually unblock people to move faster too, because I think the other thing that PMs are often slowed down by is all risk. Oh, legal might, finance might, another team might. And I think one of the monikers we use internally is no, then go. As in just think through all the things that could go wrong, understand where scale will break, understand the things that might happen, and then move on anyway. Because if you've thought through all the things that could happen at scale, you're probably going to preempt a bunch of them. So I really like Elizabeth's quote there, but mine is just do the mental exercise of just playing out, if it gets really widely adopted, if it happens, if there is something that goes wrong, what will it be? You don't have to solve all of them. You've just got to think through all of them and then you end up solving more than you think.
00:21:47 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tom Verrilli
[00:21:47] S1: I love that. So it's essentially don't just focus on, will this be an impactful experiment? Think about what comes next and what comes next if this is true. [00:21:56] S0: Okay, I moved it. Particularly in a higher growth environment, you're not really looking for a 5% Statsig win. You're looking for something that totally moves the business and that has compounding effect over time. And so you just got to think through what that is. [00:22:10] S1: Something else you said that is changing in how PMs operate that you're very excited about is this move to IC work, PMs moving away from this kind of big org management world to actually doing the work. Talk about that and what that means for the role of product management.