Tom Verrilli: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? Yeah. The funny thing is I think if you talk to most engineers, or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones. And I don't mean that as a disheartening pejorative for folks, but I think it's more if you're being really literally self-critical as a function, does the average PM add a ton of value to folks around them in the way that having really high quality product management can disseminate clarity and absorb ambiguity in the ways that they can or help people make really timely decisions? And I think a lot of it is this function of, as tech companies scaled and we ended up hiring so many engineers, somewhere along the line, and I don't want to pin it on HR, but somewhere along the line, this kind of HR ratio of a pod popped into being. Every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer, you add a PM, you add an EM, and the nucleus exists. And then when you're now serving billion DAU products, you got a lot of engineers. And so now all of a sudden you've got a lot of product managers. And in most cases, you probably don't need a PM for notifications infrastructure. Engineers are perfectly capable of understanding how that works. And in a lot of ways, 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. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. That's something that I find people run into eventually when they think this way that I want to get your take on is engineers and designers don't necessarily want to be doing the work of a PM because a lot of the work of a PM is kind of annoying and not fun. And there's the glamour part, like making decisions.…

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