Hiring so many PMs infantilizes engineers and designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them.
As tech companies scaled, an HR ratio emerged — for every six engineers you add a designer and a PM. Verrilli argues this default ratio produced too many PMs and infantilized engineers/designers who no longer needed to make decisions themselves. ✦ AI generated
Tom Verrilli · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-08-02 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 9:13
“Do you feel like product management was very helpful early on and was important and then it kind of went through a period of wow there's way too many PMs that are not that amazing and now there's kind of this coming back to okay what is actually an amazing PM and maybe we need fewer of them.”
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.
verbatim transcript · starts at 9:13
9:08actually want to be doing that work >> I think this is where like specialization works both ways right it is useful to have folks who are well honed in making decisions it's totally reasonable as well for someone to say listen uh I'm an infrastructure lead and I want to think a lot about scale and I do not want to have to spend my time debating you know alignment or getting
9:24those minutiae right and certain skill sets don't necessarily translate super well right if you're really good at building big mental models in your head of how infrastructure should scale you may not have the skill set of listening to a customer and actually understanding the core problem as opposed to the thing that they said which again just a thing that we've built over time so uh my supposition of we regret isn't to say
9:45that we don't want product managers to do this we recognize in those situations that you do need to kind of help other functions specialize. But I think it's we we articulate it that way to kind of force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one. You hire one where there's really specific need. And I think what goes with it, Lenny, is like you have to
10:04build the culture of the organization around that. So for example when we say you know we regret product management exists uh every time we write documents about how we ship or what we're doing we're very kind of clear that anyone can bring you know change forward that we can have DRI of new product development that is an engineer or is a designer but that everybody goes through that same
10:25level of function of like you've got to go through product review you've got to actually do the work because it is real work and if people don't want to do that if they kind of want to do something else we can always move product management And so rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them
10:44to kind of problems or kind of like core projects and that means that there will be a year more where there isn't a PM attached to a particular engineering team even though there's lots of ongoing product work to do. What I love about this is we often hear uh people at likeoriented products talk like this uh like developer tools where we don't need PMS. Why do we need PMs? uh and it's often
11:05comes from companies like linear and anthra like companies that are building developer tools where you could see why engineers are enough and so it's really interesting to hear from your perspective because you've built very consumerry products very very consumerry products that require what you think are very strong PM skills so it means a lot even more so coming from you that you find that PMs aren't as necessary as
11:28people may think in building something great >> yeah I think there was like two parts that that drove it um and I've certainly Like a lot of what I'm kind of talking about here are things that I've definitely learned over time. You know, I I spent seven years at Twitch prior to time at whatnot. And that was very Amazon to pizza team, you know, ratio driven. I I started in the valley at