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.”
Public evidence record
Tom Verrilli
Published podcast speaker
- Claims
- 25
- Episodes
- 1
- Shows
- 1
- Named items
- 3
Books, apps, and tools
The evidenced stack.
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.”
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.”
Claim ledger
What Tom said.
7 transcript-backed records
01 / 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
02 / 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
03 / 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
04 / 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
05 / 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
06 / 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
07 / 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