Whatnot PM Tom Verrilli Critiques the Average Product Manager Role
Tom Verrilli argues that the product manager role has degraded since the hiring boom, citing 31,832 applicants for one Whatnot PM job. He contends that many PMs became process managers rather than product owners.
Original post · 12 min read
X ArticleBuilding, and Whatnot
In the last two years, 31,832 people applied to be a Product Manager at Whatnot. We hired one. You're twice as likely to hit a hole in one as you are to get a job by simply applying.
That’s not a process failure. I’ve been building products – and product teams – for over a decade and one of the biggest factors in deciding to come to Whatnot ~3 years ago was the very deliberate product culture. No one knows what it means to be a PM in the world of AI, but everything I see says the industry is moving towards us and how we build here - because no tool will make you useful if you aren’t doing the right job.
First we have to acknowledge: the average PM is deeply average.
The product function emerged in response to scale – engineering teams got too big for CEOs or GMs to manage directly, so a business <> tech conduit was needed. Over time we lazily generalized the role to “every time you hire an Engineering Manager you hire a PM”. But where an Eng Director managed 30-40 people through their EMs a PM Director just managed five. Incentives govern the world, so those Director’s jobs became “justify growing my eng partners headcount” so they could, in turn, grow theirs to become a VP. Slowly the role of junior PMs shifted from “CEOs of the product” to “babysitters of buttons” and product-minded engineers to infantilzied order takers.
Then COVID hit and the industry hired a mind-boggling 500,000 new software engineers in just four years and ~80,000 new PMs were minted to match. That’s 80,000 PMs buried within gargantuan teams at FAANG, far from any customer, 50 layers from the zoom where it happens, taught paint-by-number PM’ing at a product school, in an era of unearned engagement growth where seemingly anything worked.
The likelihood of someone emerging from that with great product instincts, experience and grit actually feels less likely than hitting a hole in one.
Second: we made our best, worse.
When your job is supervising five people, all you can do with your day is get in other people's work. They dislike that and label it micromanagement in an anonymous survey so you back off. How then do you spend your time? You story-tell, shepherd things through review so your teams are ‘succeeding’, justify resources. But you don’t know what story to tell so you stand up a user research team to tell you the jobs to be done, then a PMM function to tell that story to customers. The function that came to be strategically important because it gathered context and disseminated clarity abstracted itself out into increasingly ivory towers.
But the actual truth is in the data models of your systems, in sales calls, CX tickets, in the analytics – not in the pretty 2x2 made to simplify it all.
All the time you spend playing management means your innate understanding of the issues is getting stale, your instincts for your customer duller, the likelihood you’re right is dropping.
Our batting average as a function dropped both because the denominator expanded AND because its expansion meant everyone who was good at product seven years ago was promoted out of doing any actual work (or got rich enough that the incentive to stay and play politics was low).
The Whatnot Way
Since its earliest inception, the Whatnot product team has been built on a somewhat simple premise: we regret that product management exists. Sales and engineering got on just fine before we were hired, so where they can, they should just ship without procedural gatekeeping or nonsense paperwork. Product is a trade, not a qualification. Anyone who does it well learned by doing and by being around great people doing.
I was in an interview recently where someone told me Whatnot felt like Twitch and eBay had a baby - culturally it couldn't be more wrong, but in terms of the product span it's a decent comp. A conservative estimate says those two organizations combined have >400 PMs. We have 20. 20 PMs for 1200+ total employees.
Our PMs are mapped to problems, not to EMs. Those two often overlap, but aren’t the same thing. If you’re building a new sales format for fashion sellers you’re going to be pretty hand in glove with the EMs who own how listings and inventory works, but equally with the logistics and payments EMs.
Having to work across multiple stacks and weigh impacts to different customers isn’t easy – it requires broad context of the business, the ability to foresee downstream impacts of changes to any feature, prowess at context switching, the ability to build and spend trust across a whole org rather than with one partner. That’s why we hire almost exclusively senior PMs. PMs who are over endless alignment meetings and itching to build again. Or, we convert promising sales or ops folks and let them learn by doing. We're always looking for the hole-in-one mid-career L5/L6 hire, but the stats don’t lie about how often we find them.
Finally, everybody ships, including me. I am always working directly with a team of engineers and designers to ship features as an … continue on X ↗
That’s not a process failure. I’ve been building products – and product teams – for over a decade and one of the biggest factors in deciding to come to Whatnot ~3 years ago was the very deliberate product culture. No one knows what it means to be a PM in the world of AI, but everything I see says the industry is moving towards us and how we build here - because no tool will make you useful if you aren’t doing the right job.
First we have to acknowledge: the average PM is deeply average.
The product function emerged in response to scale – engineering teams got too big for CEOs or GMs to manage directly, so a business <> tech conduit was needed. Over time we lazily generalized the role to “every time you hire an Engineering Manager you hire a PM”. But where an Eng Director managed 30-40 people through their EMs a PM Director just managed five. Incentives govern the world, so those Director’s jobs became “justify growing my eng partners headcount” so they could, in turn, grow theirs to become a VP. Slowly the role of junior PMs shifted from “CEOs of the product” to “babysitters of buttons” and product-minded engineers to infantilzied order takers.
Then COVID hit and the industry hired a mind-boggling 500,000 new software engineers in just four years and ~80,000 new PMs were minted to match. That’s 80,000 PMs buried within gargantuan teams at FAANG, far from any customer, 50 layers from the zoom where it happens, taught paint-by-number PM’ing at a product school, in an era of unearned engagement growth where seemingly anything worked.
The likelihood of someone emerging from that with great product instincts, experience and grit actually feels less likely than hitting a hole in one.
Second: we made our best, worse.
When your job is supervising five people, all you can do with your day is get in other people's work. They dislike that and label it micromanagement in an anonymous survey so you back off. How then do you spend your time? You story-tell, shepherd things through review so your teams are ‘succeeding’, justify resources. But you don’t know what story to tell so you stand up a user research team to tell you the jobs to be done, then a PMM function to tell that story to customers. The function that came to be strategically important because it gathered context and disseminated clarity abstracted itself out into increasingly ivory towers.
But the actual truth is in the data models of your systems, in sales calls, CX tickets, in the analytics – not in the pretty 2x2 made to simplify it all.
All the time you spend playing management means your innate understanding of the issues is getting stale, your instincts for your customer duller, the likelihood you’re right is dropping.
Our batting average as a function dropped both because the denominator expanded AND because its expansion meant everyone who was good at product seven years ago was promoted out of doing any actual work (or got rich enough that the incentive to stay and play politics was low).
The Whatnot Way
Since its earliest inception, the Whatnot product team has been built on a somewhat simple premise: we regret that product management exists. Sales and engineering got on just fine before we were hired, so where they can, they should just ship without procedural gatekeeping or nonsense paperwork. Product is a trade, not a qualification. Anyone who does it well learned by doing and by being around great people doing.
I was in an interview recently where someone told me Whatnot felt like Twitch and eBay had a baby - culturally it couldn't be more wrong, but in terms of the product span it's a decent comp. A conservative estimate says those two organizations combined have >400 PMs. We have 20. 20 PMs for 1200+ total employees.
Our PMs are mapped to problems, not to EMs. Those two often overlap, but aren’t the same thing. If you’re building a new sales format for fashion sellers you’re going to be pretty hand in glove with the EMs who own how listings and inventory works, but equally with the logistics and payments EMs.
Having to work across multiple stacks and weigh impacts to different customers isn’t easy – it requires broad context of the business, the ability to foresee downstream impacts of changes to any feature, prowess at context switching, the ability to build and spend trust across a whole org rather than with one partner. That’s why we hire almost exclusively senior PMs. PMs who are over endless alignment meetings and itching to build again. Or, we convert promising sales or ops folks and let them learn by doing. We're always looking for the hole-in-one mid-career L5/L6 hire, but the stats don’t lie about how often we find them.
Finally, everybody ships, including me. I am always working directly with a team of engineers and designers to ship features as an … continue on X ↗
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