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Tom Verrilli: observation

2 Aug 2026 Lenny's Podcast This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)

“I mean, this sounds really silly, mate, but it takes me substantially longer to go through the minutia of getting, get, commit, and all of the pieces that are second eng to engineer aligned than it does to actually work out what the problem is and be able to describe it.”

— Tom Verrilli

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Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
observation
Recorded
2 Aug 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…This point you make about PMs not shipping to production, I so agree with. Because my mind changed on this recently with a previous podcast guest with this point that PMs have so much more leverage if they're not sitting there trying to ship to production. Enabling the team to ship better and faster and making sure the things that are shipping are better is a much better use of PM's time than sitting there shipping stuff. I mean, this sounds really silly, mate, but it takes me substantially longer to go through the minutia of getting, get, commit, and all of the pieces that are second eng to engineer aligned than it does to actually work out what the problem is and be able to describe it. So yes, good practice to try and make sure you're doing something. For example, I don't want to judge if our dev tools have gotten easier or not based on what someone tells me. I'm going to go and try it and be like, yep, that was easier than last time I did it. But I do think you can get an awful long way understanding the code base and then talking to somebody who can actually execute well. Otherwise you're just going to get fall afoul of a thousand classic traps that every other engineer learned how not to do when they were an L4. So following that thread a little bit, what are some of the ways that AI has enabled you and/or your team to move faster and be more productive other than prototyping, which is the very clear benefit of AI for PMs and product teams? What else? What are maybe in the top three of, wow, this has really unlocked our productivity and the quality of what we do?…

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