This CPO regrets that product management exists

Tom Verrilli, Chief Product Officer of Whatnot and former CPO of Twitch and director of product growth at Twitter, discusses why he believes product management should be a targeted rather than default role. The conversation covers how Whatnot organizes PMs around problems, what hiring looks like, the shift toward senior hands-on product leaders, and how AI is changing product work.

01Key learnings

• Don't hire a PM by default for every team; hire one only where there is a specific need, since engineers and designers can often make those decisions themselves.
• Product management is a trade built through repetition, so spreading PM reps to engineers and designers strengthens their judgment rather than leaving their muscles underdeveloped.
• Map PMs to problems and six-month company priorities rather than fixed teams, so ownership follows the work and people build varied experience.
• Hiring signals to watch: avoid overvaluing alignment and stakeholder politics; look for candidates who show both macro systems thinking and concrete, specific building experience.
• Practice systems thinking by asking what happens if an experiment is green or red, and what second-order effects follow at 1,000x scale, before building.
• Senior leaders staying hands-on (roughly half their time on IC work) lets them make faster, better-informed decisions and avoids layers of alignment meetings.
• Use AI tools to query data, understand code, and watch user sessions directly, reducing dependence on specialist intermediaries while still owning the quality of the analysis.
• Play the accordion: alternate between zooming out to set direction and pushing in to run small experiments, updating the plan with what you learn each cycle.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.