Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta): "Whatnot’s CPO: “We regret that product management exists.” 31,832 PMs applied to Whatnot in 2 years. They hired one. Tom Verrilli (CPO at Twitch before this) just published a manifesto on why his own function is mostly broken. You’re twice as likely to hit a hole in one as lan…"

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Whatnot’s CPO: “We regret that product management exists.”

31,832 PMs applied to Whatnot in 2 years. They hired one.

Tom Verrilli (CPO at Twitch before this) just published a manifesto on why his own function is mostly broken. You’re twice as likely to hit a hole in one as land a PM job there by applying.

The cap is the strategy.

Whatnot runs their entire product surface with 20 PMs across 1,200+ employees. Tom estimates Twitch and eBay combined have over 400.

Here’s how they actually work:

PMs map to problems, not engineering managers. The senior PM building a new sales format for fashion sellers works across listings, logistics, AND payments. No single EM owns her.

Everybody ships. CEO Grant LaFontaine personally got on the phone with a Zendesk support engineer when tickets started dropping. Cofounder Logan hand-onboarded the first seller in Australia. Tom himself vibecodes features as an IC.

They hire almost exclusively senior PMs over endless alignment meetings and itching to build again. Or they convert proven sales/ops folks who already understand the customer.

There’s no distinction in titles or comp between managers and ICs at Whatnot. The PMs who do manage spend 90%+ of their time as ICs anyway.

In 2025, Whatnot ran 750 experiments. Roughly 3 ship/don’t-ship decisions per day. Tom calculated that making each of those decisions 3 days faster compounds to $1.1B in incremental earnings for Whatnot sellers over 2 years.

Speed is the entire premise. Once it’s lost, it never comes back.

Here's the playbook for the PMs Whatnot would actually hire: