Tom Verrilli, Whatnot's CPO, has a provocative take on product leadership: ditch the traditional promotion ladder that pulls your best people away from hands-on work. Instead, let them play. Verrilli argues that keeping senior product managers deeply engaged in individual contributor (IC) tasks isn't just a quirky choice; it's a strategic advantage that drives faster decisions and better product outcomes.

Key Takeaways

  • Whatnot's CPO Tom Verrilli challenges the norm, stating that promoting A-player product managers into purely managerial roles removes their most valuable skills from direct impact.
  • At Whatnot, product managers who are also managers typically spend 90% or more of their time on IC work, such as directly shaping features or defining product strategy.
  • Verrilli himself, as CPO, still dedicates around 50% of his week to individual contributor tasks, demonstrating a top-down commitment to this model.
  • The core belief is that seasoned leaders possess honed instincts and broad context, allowing them to make faster, more impactful decisions when directly building.

The Promotion Trap: Why We Promote Our Best Out of Doing

Verrilli pulls no punches when discussing the conventional career path for product managers. He sees it as a trap, effectively removing your most potent talent from the playing field. “What you did if you were really successful as a PM is you got promoted into being a director and then all of a sudden it was like don't be hands-on anymore,” Verrilli explains. “Your goal is just to coach and guide. And so, we took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things.”

This isn't just about losing a good individual contributor; it's about diminishing the collective impact of your most experienced people. When your veterans are only coaching, decisions slow down. Context gets lost in translation. Junior team members, however talented, lack the years of pattern recognition to foresee issues or connect disparate threads across the product. The organization then relies on a complex web of meetings and cross-functional alignment just to replicate the holistic view a single experienced IC might naturally hold.

Whatnot's IC-First Leadership Model

Whatnot flips this script. Instead of promoting high-performing PMs away from the product, they keep them deeply embedded. Verrilli champions a model where leadership means getting your hands dirty. “On our team, everybody is like there are managers… All of them would spend 90 plus percent of their time doing IC work. I'm still probably 50% of my time doing IC work personally,” he reveals.

This isn't a demotion; it's a recalibration of leverage. An experienced leader with a decade or more of building instinct can often make or unmake a feature with a single, quick decision. “If you are a kind of ZP product where you've got a decade plus, maybe 15 years of experience building things, hopefully your instincts as to what's going to work or not fairly well honed at this point, you can just make decisions more quickly than people. You can have real impact very, very quickly,” Verrilli says. This direct involvement also cuts down on organizational friction. When one person oversees multiple related initiatives, they naturally align them, avoiding “months and months and months of back and forth and the politics that tends to kind of take it from being company first to career first.”

Verrilli frames it simply: “Why wouldn't you want, you know, Messi playing for your team when you rather than trying to kind of have the academy coming along all the time?” Your best players, he implies, should be on the field, scoring goals, not just coaching from the sidelines.

What to Do With This

This week, audit your senior product and engineering leaders' calendars. How much time are they truly spending building, designing, or directly influencing the product versus attending meetings or purely managing people? Challenge the assumption that leadership requires abandoning IC work; consider carving out a 20-30% IC chunk for your most experienced leaders to drive specific initiatives directly.