Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedTom Verrilli: evaluation
2 Aug 2026 Lenny's Podcast This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)
“So everyone who gets hired at Whatnot in any role has to do an actual hands-on case study. But the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data, and ask them to come back with a POV on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics is really telling, I think.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Tom Verrilli
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 2 Aug 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…And this comes back to that 32,000 people applied for jobs. I imagine a lot of that is just people who think they're PMs, or have the title PM, but are exactly what you described. They just focus a lot on alignment, writing docs, meetings, things like that, and not actual building, understanding what it takes to build a successful product. Yeah. The number of people who do really well in a product interview, Lenny, and then you give them a case study. So everyone who gets hired at Whatnot in any role has to do an actual hands-on case study. But the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data, and ask them to come back with a POV on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics is really telling, I think. Okay. So going beyond the hiring step, say you hire somebody, what are some things you've learned about how to get the most out of the people you hire? You mentioned this kind of contrarian take that you don't agree with this hire great people, get out of their way. So I want to hear more about that. And just is there anything else you've learned about just elements to building your very successful world-class product team?…
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