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Tom Verrilli

Published podcast speaker

Claims
25
Episodes
1
Shows
1
Named items
3

Books, apps, and tools

The evidenced stack.

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book / recommends

The Purpose Driven Church

“the best book anyone's ever recommended to me to read, which I now recommend to others, is The Purpose Driven Church by a pastor called Rick Warren.”

Lenny's Podcast · 2 Aug 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

book / recommends

Babel

“Okay. Not to be cliched, but The Hard Thing about Hard Things I still think is the best book written about product management, just from a breadth of things that you have to go through and try and do and screw up a lot. Slightly left field, but the best book anyone's ever recommended to me to read, which I now recommend to others, is The Purpose Driven Church by a pastor called Rick Warren. Emmett Shear, the CEO at Twitch, used to basically make sure that people read it. It's this wild examination of why people emotionally invest in something and how to engineer emotional investment into it from a group of people. It's literally a how to go and build a church guidebook written in the '90s. Definitely worth a read if you're in a community product of any form. And the last one is if you're looking for fiction or fantasy, which is where I tend to go in the evening, Babel by R.F. Kuang.”

Lenny's Podcast · 2 Aug 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

book / recommends

The Hard Thing about Hard Things

“Okay. Not to be cliched, but The Hard Thing about Hard Things I still think is the best book written about product management, just from a breadth of things that you have to go through and try and do and screw up a lot. Slightly left field, but the best book anyone's ever recommended to me to read, which I now recommend to others, is The Purpose Driven Church by a pastor called Rick Warren. Emmett Shear, the CEO at Twitch, used to basically make sure that people read it. It's this wild examination of why people emotionally invest in something and how to engineer emotional investment into it from a group of people. It's literally a how to go and build a church guidebook written in the '90s. Definitely worth a read if you're in a community product of any form. And the last one is if you're looking for fiction or fantasy, which is where I tend to go in the evening, Babel by R.F. Kuang.”

Lenny's Podcast · 2 Aug 2026

Evidence receipt · Source ↗

Claim ledger

What Tom said.

25 transcript-backed records

01 / recommendation

Recommends The Hard Thing about Hard Things. Recommends The Purpose Driven Church. Recommends Babel.

“Okay. Not to be cliched, but The Hard Thing about Hard Things I still think is the best book written about product management, just from a breadth of things that you have to go through and try and do and screw up a lot. Slightly left field, but the best book anyone's ever recommended to me to read, which I now recommend to others, is The Purpose Driven Church by a pastor called Rick Warren. Emmett Shear, the CEO at Twitch, used to basically make sure that people read it. It's this wild examination of why people emotionally invest in something and how to engineer emotional investment into it from a group of people. It's literally a how to go and build a church guidebook written in the '90s. Definitely worth a read if you're in a community product of any form. And the last one is if you're looking for fiction or fantasy, which is where I tend to go in the evening, Babel by R.F. Kuang.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

02 / recommendation

Slightly left field, but the best book anyone's ever recommended to me to read, which I now recommend to others, is The Purpose Driven Church by a pastor called Rick Warren.

“Slightly left field, but the best book anyone's ever recommended to me to read, which I now recommend to others, is The Purpose Driven Church by a pastor called Rick Warren.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

03 / evaluation

I'm told constantly that my Australian accent is going, but one of the things that I love is every time I go home, I realize actually a bunch of the government services apps in Australia have become phenomenal.

“I'm told constantly that my Australian accent is going, but one of the things that I love is every time I go home, I realize actually a bunch of the government services apps in Australia have become phenomenal.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

04 / preference

The most fun thing I bought recently, I'm not joking, is a live lobster. Recently, one of the things that's really taken off on Whatnot is now fresh and specialty foods kind of category.

“The most fun thing I bought recently, I'm not joking, is a live lobster. Recently, one of the things that's really taken off on Whatnot is now fresh and specialty foods kind of category.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

05 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

06 / belief

I think there's a second failure mode, which is people sit down and write out these long roadmaps and strategic vision docs of what we'll do over the next two or three years that kind of loses the comparative advantage we have over every other industry, which is learning.

“I think there's a second failure mode, which is people sit down and write out these long roadmaps and strategic vision docs of what we'll do over the next two or three years that kind of loses the comparative advantage we have over every other industry, which is learning.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

07 / observation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

08 / uncertainty

If I don't know what you're selling until after you've sold it, there's no possible way that I can put somebody in the right stream for AirPods because we didn't know you have them and I therefore can't direct people to it.

“If I don't know what you're selling until after you've sold it, there's no possible way that I can put somebody in the right stream for AirPods because we didn't know you have them and I therefore can't direct people to it.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

09 / belief

I can go very, very deep when required, but I'm mostly broad across pieces. And I think the idea of just hiring people, and then not asking any more questions and delegating all of the detail just isn't really the most successful model for getting the most out of an organization.

“I can go very, very deep when required, but I'm mostly broad across pieces. And I think the idea of just hiring people, and then not asking any more questions and delegating all of the detail just isn't really the most successful model for getting the most out of an organization.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

10 / belief

Have a plan. I think the system works this way. I have this belief that if we change the way that discovery algorithms work for XYZ reasons, it will have this impact.

“Have a plan. I think the system works this way. I have this belief that if we change the way that discovery algorithms work for XYZ reasons, it will have this impact.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

11 / belief

I don't pretend to presume that that will be true for the entire industry, but I do think there has never been a better time to go back to the roots of the actual product work and getting out of that theater. And I think that probably is true everywhere, even if you are still, there are people who are wonderful people managers and really derive their satisfaction from doing that and growing and coaching.

“I don't pretend to presume that that will be true for the entire industry, but I do think there has never been a better time to go back to the roots of the actual product work and getting out of that theater. And I think that probably is true everywhere, even if you are still, there are people who are wonderful people managers and really derive their satisfaction from doing that and growing and coaching.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

13 / belief

I think jokingly one of the PMs on the team has referred to it as the two dads problem where you've just got two people issuing conflicting instructions, or somebody wants to review and then you do all this work to present it to me, and then you go back and it gets a different thing.

“I think jokingly one of the PMs on the team has referred to it as the two dads problem where you've just got two people issuing conflicting instructions, or somebody wants to review and then you do all this work to present it to me, and then you go back and it gets a different thing.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

15 / belief

Certainly I think trending up over time within these roles are these kind of, and I don't remember the exact label that people used to use, but this idea of tech leads that are kind of like a hybrid EM where you're running a very small team, running at things.

“Certainly I think trending up over time within these roles are these kind of, and I don't remember the exact label that people used to use, but this idea of tech leads that are kind of like a hybrid EM where you're running a very small team, running at things.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

16 / evaluation

They just lie to you all the time. And I think I've probably screwed up in all of the ways in my career, but most of the time I've made genuinely I'm disappointed in myself levels of decisions, it's typically that I've relied on averages without thinking about the individual use cases that are hidden underneath.

“They just lie to you all the time. And I think I've probably screwed up in all of the ways in my career, but most of the time I've made genuinely I'm disappointed in myself levels of decisions, it's typically that I've relied on averages without thinking about the individual use cases that are hidden underneath.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

17 / commitment

One of the first things I did when I go up to Twitch was just put ads in discovery and make sure that there's the same PM who's accountable for both because they're going to make the natural trade-off that say the goal is GMV generated from the feed.

“One of the first things I did when I go up to Twitch was just put ads in discovery and make sure that there's the same PM who's accountable for both because they're going to make the natural trade-off that say the goal is GMV generated from the feed.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

18 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

19 / evaluation

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.

“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.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

20 / preference

I'm going to go find out." And then you invariably end up strengthening the system that agents are using to data label because suddenly there's a very smart person who's very invested in understanding how we do that and helping guide it.

“I'm going to go find out." And then you invariably end up strengthening the system that agents are using to data label because suddenly there's a very smart person who's very invested in understanding how we do that and helping guide it.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

21 / evaluation

So I don't know what the future of data science looks like. But I think as a product manager, I've spent less time in the last year talking to a data scientist than I ever have in my career, even though I've probably spent 10 times more time in data and understanding actually how the product's working than I ever have in my career.

“So I don't know what the future of data science looks like. But I think as a product manager, I've spent less time in the last year talking to a data scientist than I ever have in my career, even though I've probably spent 10 times more time in data and understanding actually how the product's working than I ever have in my career.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

22 / preference

I think in general, the hire great people and get out of their way became this kind of macro saying for let them work out what the roadmap is, let them work out what the problems are, just completely devolve what's going on.

“I think in general, the hire great people and get out of their way became this kind of macro saying for let them work out what the roadmap is, let them work out what the problems are, just completely devolve what's going on.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

23 / preference

Because you got to ask yourself, do I really want to spend my whole time having this discussion and this debate? But I like being a CPO or a product lead because in a lot of ways what I'm doing is I'm helping translate that vision and that intuition into reality.

“Because you got to ask yourself, do I really want to spend my whole time having this discussion and this debate? But I like being a CPO or a product lead because in a lot of ways what I'm doing is I'm helping translate that vision and that intuition into reality.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

24 / evaluation

Otherwise, if you're working from the same data and you have it, I don't know a junior engineer or an entry-level designer who isn't stoked to sit there and work alongside the CPO or the CEO and ship something because you're just unblocked.

“Otherwise, if you're working from the same data and you have it, I don't know a junior engineer or an entry-level designer who isn't stoked to sit there and work alongside the CPO or the CEO and ship something because you're just unblocked.”
Speaker
Tom Verrilli
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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