Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:56:40 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tom Verrilli
[00:56:40] S1: I think that's such an important nuance here. The story told is so powerful, this idea of Grant just, okay, I'm going to clear my day. I'm going to spend time going deep on this stuff. That feels like a very necessary ingredient for someone at the top to be making micro decisions. Because to your point, if they don't have all the details, they're not making a decision out of real data. [00:56:58] S0: And we can do that because, as I said, we plan what we're doing and then we allocate, and then we're dividing and conquering. So he's probably trying to nail three or four most important things at a time. And he's the CEO. He's going to call the ball and say, these are the four things I own right now. And I'm going to be like, "Great, I'll be over here then." And then within those, what am I doing with the rest of my day that is more important than nailing the five things I've said we'll get done this half? If it's anything other than maybe hiring, standing meetings, any of that stuff, you can just clear it and set the tone for the team that until we understand it, we can't do anything else. [00:57:34] S1: Say somebody is looking for a CPO role or a first PM role, they're kind of similar, basically working for a founder. What would be your advice for them to land in a place where they're happy and not just super frustrated by this kind of middle layer where they just don't actually have any agency?
00:57:52 · Tom Verrilli
[00:57:52] S0: Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing you've got to work out is why do you want it? There's this idea that the CPO's job, you get to decide all the roadmaps and all those things, and I've got bad news for you. That's not strictly true. But I think it also comes down to spending some time with that person to work out how do we jam on a topic? How do they like to get pushed? How do they not? And then you spend a lot of your time calibrating. So before I joined Whatnot, I think Grant and I had five or six different coffees where we talked about how do you get this type of team to move? How do you work on those things? And then I obviously went through a series of interviews, and actually came down to LA where Grant and Logan were based at the time, and spent a whole day with them just in a room, going through a couple different problems, talking through different things in the roadmap, just really getting into it. And I tried through that to be my most ordinary self as opposed to interview self, if that makes sense. Because you got to ask yourself, do I really want to spend my whole time having this discussion and this debate? But I like being a CPO or a product lead because in a lot of ways what I'm doing is I'm helping translate that vision and that intuition into reality. And then there is an art to learning how to push somebody without competing with them. And I think a lot of the times I've seen the CPO CEO relationship go badly. It ends up with the CPO is competing with the CEO for vision and they end up at loggerheads. And I think that's not your job.
00:59:17 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:59:17] S1: I want to ask more about that, this art of pushing back and nudging things in a direction. Is there one trick or one tip you might share with folks to be good at... Because a lot of people deal with execs and they're always trying to get them to agree to what they want.
00:59:32 · Tom Verrilli
[00:59:32] S0: I think the first thing is don't treat it as a trick. I mean, you're not trying to get an answer and a yes. You're trying to seek truth is my first statement. And so I wouldn't say it's especially common that we start out of alignment, but I do think, part of your role, if you're one of the more senior product folks in the room and the CEO, or if you're a director and it's the CPO in the room, is pushing the team in a way that you don't really expect or you don't really understand, is start from a place of curiosity. Does that person have more context than you or is there a thing that you're not aware of that is guiding it? So I often try and start with like, am I hearing you right that this is your prior? Is there a piece of context or something that I don't have that helps inform that prior? Cool. Make sure everybody's on that same baseline. And I coach my PMs to do this with me all the time too. If I'm coming at you from an angle you don't expect, pause and make sure that you understand why. And then after that, I try and do a couple different things. Obviously just people are people. They have good days, they have bad days. Sometimes it can be as simple as like, is your mind made up on this or are you open to input? If the answer is like, "No, I'm pretty set that this is the answer," shut up. Don't pick a fight for the purposes of picking a fight. If the answer is like, actually, "Yes, you're welcome to push me, but I'd need to see data." If I don't have any data in the room, if it's just my opinion, then the terms of the debate are pretty clear. If I have fresh data, bring it. If I really believe a thing and I don't have data, question why. Or go get it and then go back to them with the data. But if the answer is like, if nobody's got data, it's just two opinions, the CEO's opinion is going to win. And that's okay. Check your ego at the door, get to the answer. But if you've got data, bring it. And then sometimes it's like, just make sure that you're debating for the right reasons. I think it's easy in your PM theater that you're describing of wanting to make sure that you set the framing and the tone. And there are genuinely times in our industry where nomenclature matters, and exactly what word is used can be really important, but a lot of the time it doesn't.
01:01:39 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:01:39] S1: There's a concept that I heard come up a bunch when I talked to people who work with you. The phrase was play the accordion. Explain.
01:01:48 · Tom Verrilli
[01:01:48] S0: So I mentioned earlier, I'm not huge on frameworks, but I do think there's a mental model which is quite useful that goes to the thing that you and I discussed earlier on like think through a problem. Do the mental work even if you're not shipping at all, which is like obviously the magic of code is that you can kind of ship things and iterate really quickly and get data as you go. And I think one of the trappings that comes with that is you're just iterating forward and throwing spaghetti at a wall and you don't really know what direction you're going in. I think there's a second failure mode, which is people sit down and write out these long roadmaps and strategic vision docs of what we'll do over the next two or three years that kind of loses the comparative advantage we have over every other industry, which is learning. AB tests mean that you can update your understanding of a problem and therefore change your direction as you should go. So the point of the analogy of play the accordion is if you think about a piano accordion, before you can play a note, you've got to stretch it all the way out, bring the air in. So what is it we're trying to get done here? But you don't make music until you press the key and push it all the way back into V1. And then when you go to play the next kind of progression, you pull it all the way out again. Okay, given what we just learned, what do we do? And then you go and build the next thing again. And you've got to get used to this motion that says this isn't creating value. Pulling it out doesn't actually do anything. All the value is created here. But until you are going through this motion constantly of saying, well, reevaluate what we understand. How does this change what we're doing? You're probably not playing the right thing. And I know I'm probably bastardizing. Somewhere in the comments, there's going to be a musician who points out to me that this is actually also one of the ways you make music. But I found it just a generally very valuable memory device for PMs to be like, you've got to constantly be zooming out and pushing back in and zooming out and pushing back in.