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

Tom Verrilli uses a deliberately provocative phrase to describe Whatnot’s product organization: “We regret that product management exists.” His explanation is narrower than the slogan. The company does not reject product managers; it tries to avoid hiring one by default. A product manager should be added when a specific need warrants the role, not simply because a team has reached a standard engineer-to-PM ratio.

Verrilli traces the role to a time when founders and business leaders could work directly with engineers and designers to decide what to build. As internet companies grew quickly, leaders could no longer participate in every execution detail, so specialist product roles helped translate direction into work. He argues that this response to scale became an assumed organizational template, even where engineers and designers had the context to make sound product decisions themselves.

The tradeoff is capability. Product management is a craft built through practice, Verrilli says; the same is true of product judgment in engineering and design. If PMs absorb every decision, other functions get fewer opportunities to build those muscles. In his view, product managers remain valuable where they provide leverage on a particular problem, while teams should let engineers and designers own more of the product work when they can.

Verrilli links the proliferation of product managers to a common pod ratio: every six engineers bring a designer, PM, and engineering manager. That structure may have seemed manageable, but a billion-user product can employ many engineers and, by extension, many PMs. He questions whether each area truly needs a dedicated PM, pointing to notifications infrastructure as work engineers can often understand directly. In his account, overstaffing the function can make designers and engineers dependent on a role that was meant to help them.

The process also has a human cost. Engineers and designers may be asked to attend alignment meetings, write documents, and coordinate decisions—work that can feel less appealing than building or designing. Verrilli accepts that specialization can be useful: an infrastructure lead may reasonably prefer to focus on scale rather than customer research or stakeholder coordination. His argument is not that every person should perform every task, but that the organization should assign specialist help where it addresses a real capability gap.

Verrilli says Whatnot’s product managers are not permanently mapped to engineering teams. They are reassigned among broad buyer, seller, and trust-and-risk areas as company priorities change. Every six months, the CEO, product leadership, and senior staff define important outcomes and projects, then name a directly responsible individual for each. A PM may be assigned to a cross-team problem that is important but lacks an owner, rather than to a feature specified in advance.

The approach depends on judgment and role fit. A project may need financial expertise, recommendation and algorithm knowledge, or experience with a core user feature. The person accountable is not always a PM, although Verrilli says PMs often fit the needs identified during planning. He describes a relatively small PM team—about 21 or 22 people—given Whatnot’s marketplace volume, but presents that size as a choice shaped by the company’s operating model rather than a universal benchmark.