This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)

Tom Verrilli: 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. 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 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 know, you can deploy product management to have really important leverage on particular things that need to go really well. Um, and in a lot of ways doing that lets design and engineering be the best they can be at their craft in those situations. But wherever possible it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager uh and instead have design and engineering going through those those kind of steps and making sure that their muscles are well repped.

Tom Verrilli: as tech companies scaled and we ended up hiring so many engineers somewhere along the line um and I don't want to pin it on like HR but somewhere along the line this kind of HR ratio of like a pod popped into being you know every time you hire six engineers you add a designer you add a PM you add an EM... In most cases, you probably don't need a PM for notifications infrastructure, right? Engineers are perfectly capable of understanding how that works. And in a lot of ways, you know, 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.

Tom Verrilli: Actually a lot of shopping is low intent. I I'm going to the mall. I might be because I've got a wedding coming up and I don't have anything to wear and I'm going to wander around and see what people have available because I don't actually know specifically what I want... What I think live commerce does is it's the first time that we've ever managed to kind of like bring together scale and convenience of the internet and also that same kind of like social cultural experience uh of physical shopping... I think it's not really in kind of like competition with aic. I think it's a completely different kind of like customer need.

Tom Verrilli: there probably is a really common thread to it and I think it's probably an easy trap for for any PM to fall into which is like um averages mean nothing to the individual is probably the thing that I've like really scarred by. uh in any sizable population, it's really attractive to go and look at like average utility or average adoption of something and then you find that like you know only 3% of people use something and you're like cool we can probably get rid of that feature. It's not used widely but if you don't go a layer deeper and be like actually for like you know it's only 3% of something but there's a group of people for whom that's 100% of what they do... this is their core use case and for expediency's sake because somebody doesn't want to maintain a feature anymore you're just going to deprecate it and then it turns out you like blow up the use case of that group of humans... I think, you know, I've probably screwed up in all of the ways in my career, but most of the time I've made genuinely like I'm disappointed in myself levels of decisions. It's typically that I've relied on averages without thinking about the individual use cases that that are hidden underneath.