Tom Verrilli: belief

Transcript context

…I love this. So when you talk about IC work for PM, what does IC work for PM in this context mean? Does it mean shipping code building or is it like running a team, owning a roadmap, writing the strategy doc? Imagine it's the second bucket. Whatever is required to most effectively ship is the short answer. Have I personally shipped some production code at Whatnot? Yes. Do I think that's really the best use of my time? Not really. I'm certain that quietly somebody reworked most of my code in order to ensure that the linting was correct and the localization worked and all of the nuance that decades of software engineering has taught you that me and Claude Code did not get right. But I do think it starts with, are you literally in the support tickets? Do you know what customer problems we're having? Have you pulled all of the data yourself so that you actually understand it? Have you sat with engineering and design? Have you queried the code base directly in order to understand how things work? And then have you written the spec? Are you then running, you stand up, and we go? I think all of that is just core individual IC work. There's a lot of people that have worked their way up the ladder of product, become a VP, and it doesn't feel exciting to go back to being an IC. Some people, clearly you love it, you enjoy it. A lot of people are like, oh, I thought I was done with this. I could just work through people. I could think big picture. How do you feel about that? What would you say to folks in that bucket?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.