Tom Verrilli: evaluation

Transcript context

…What I love about this is we often hear people at eng-oriented products talk like this, like developer tools where we don't need PMs. Why do we need PMs? And it often comes from companies like Linear, companies that are building developer tools where you could see why engineers are enough. And so it's really interesting to hear from your perspective because you've built very consumery products, very, very consumery products that require what you think are very strong PM skills. So it means a lot, but even more so coming from you that you find that PMs aren't as necessary as people may think in building something great. Yeah, I think there was two parts that drove it. And I've certainly, a lot of what I'm talking about here are things that I've definitely learned over time. I spent seven years at Twitch prior to time at Whatnot, and that was very Amazon two pizza team ratio driven. I started in the Valley at Twitter and that was similarly very like you always had this kind of very tight alignment, and God, there was a lot of alignment meetings, so you can imagine why engineers didn't want to be in them. And it's kind of evolved over time to understand that actually a lot of that is just a function of management not being able to see what's going on. And so you hire more folks and you build more layers and your systems beget systems. And I think what's really changing is people are realizing that it's not true anymore that the only way to get leverage is just to hire more PMs underneath you and be more senior, that we've got a better understanding of what's happening in businesses now. It's easier to converse directly with the code base and talk to engineers than it ever has been. And so you don't actually have to get into this all scale thing. And I don't really think consumer or enterprise is the cutting point anymore. I think it's more the culture of the organization itself. How much of this shift in your mind is AI driven because AI now enables non-PMs to do PME work? And how much of it was pre-AI? And then I want to talk about just what this actually looks like in your team, but let me ask that question first.…

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