# Whatnot's Product Culture and the Changing Role of Product Managers

DevFeed: [Whatnot's Product Culture and the Changing Role of Product Managers](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/building-and-whatnot-23708.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering/building-and-whatnot-772c33c57f63?source=rss----162aeca881b0---4>)

Author: Whatnot Engineering

Published: 2026-05-14T16:01:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Whatnot Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/whatnot-engineering.md>)

Topics: [Job](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/job.md>), [Software](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ecommerce](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ecommerce.md>), [industry](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/industry.md>), [job](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/job.md>), [leadership](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/leadership.md>), [people](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/people.md>), [product-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/product-management.md>), [software](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software.md>), [software-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software-engineering.md>)

## AI overview

Tom Verilli discusses Whatnot's deliberate product culture and argues that the product manager role has become diluted by organizational scale, hiring growth, and management incentives. He suggests that succeeding in an AI-driven industry depends on doing the right product work rather than relying on tools alone.

## Source excerpt

Tom Verilli | Chief Product Officer In the last two years, 31,832 people applied to be a Product Manager at Whatnot. We hired one. You're twice as likely to hit a hole in one as you are to get a job by simply applying. That's not a process failure. I've been building products -- and product teams -- for over a decade, and one of the biggest factors in deciding to come to Whatnot ~3 years ago was the very deliberate product culture. No one knows what it means to be a PM in the world of AI, but everything I see says the industry is moving towards us and how we build here -- because no tool will make you useful if you aren't doing the right job. First: we have to acknowledge that the average PM is deeply average. The product function emerged in response to scale -- engineering teams got too big for CEOs or GMs to manage directly, so a business <> tech conduit was needed. Over time, we lazily generalized the role to "every time you hire an Engineering Manager, you hire a PM". But where an Eng Director managed 30-40 people through their EMs, a PM Director just managed five. Incentives govern the world, so those directors' jobs became "justify growing my eng partners headcount" so they could, in turn, grow theirs to become a VP. Slowly, the role of junior PMs shifted from "CEOs of the product" to "babysitters of buttons" and product-minded engineers to infantilized order takers. Then COVID hit, and the industry hired a mind-boggling 500,000 new software engineers in just four years, and ~80,000 new PMs were minted to match. That's 80,000 PMs buried within gargantuan teams at FAANG, far from any customer, 50 layers from the zoom where it happens, taught paint-by-number PM'ing at a product school, in an era of unearned engagement growth where seemingly anything worked. The likelihood of someone emerging from that with great product instincts, experience, and grit actually feels less likely than hitting a hole in one. Second: we made our best, worse. When your job is supervising