Tom Verrilli. Chief Product Officer at Whatnot, the live shopping marketplace. Verrilli built product teams at Twitch and Twitter before joining Whatnot, where he leads a product organization operating with significantly fewer PMs than industry norms. He is known for questioning whether product management as a dedicated function improves product outcomes, and for replacing permanent PM assignments with rotating problem-centric DRI roles that any discipline can hold.
Operating themes
- DRI over PM layer Assigning directly responsible individuals by problem rather than by team redistributes product judgment to engineers and designers who previously deferred to PMs.
- Headcount as a signal PM-to-engineer ratios reveal how much decision authority has been removed from the people doing the work, not how sophisticated the product process is.
- Judgment atrophy Organizations that always provide a PM layer produce engineers and designers who cannot make product decisions without one, compounding the dependency over time.