This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)

频道: Lenny's Podcast
视频: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruvis-VWg2s
原文语言: en
统计: 共 198 轮 · Tom Verrilli 106 · Lenny Rachitsky 87

[0:00] Tom Verrilli

As tech companies scaled, somewhere along the line, this HR ratio of a pod popped into being. Every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer, you add a PM. Hiring so many PMs infantilizes the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them.

随着科技公司规模扩张，不知道从哪一步开始，HR 那套「一个 pod 的人员配比」就冒出来了：每招六个工程师，就配一个设计师、配一个 PM。招这么多 PM，其实是在把工程师和设计师当小孩养——他们本来完全有能力做出好决策，只是从来不需要做，因为身边永远有个 PM 替他们兜着。

[0:17] Lenny Rachitsky

Something you wrote online that [music] surprised a lot of people at Whatnot. Product team was built on the somewhat simple premise, we regret that product management exists.

你在网上写过一段话，让很多人挺意外的：Whatnot 的产品团队从一开始就建立在一个挺简单的前提上——我们后悔产品经理这个岗位存在。

[0:26] Tom Verrilli

Not a thing you probably hear from a lot of CPOs. We articulated that way to force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one, you hire one with this really specific need. It [music] is better to not assume we need a PM in every place. The only argument for why you would want product management to be a specialist function is really it's a trade, not a qualification. It's something you get good at by doing. It's a muscle, but the flip side of that is the more you abstract your engineers and your designers from doing the same thing, their muscle gets under developed.

这确实不太像是从一个 CPO 嘴里说出来的话。我们之所以这么表述，是为了逼自己记住：你不能为了招 PM 而招 PM，你招人一定是因为有一个非常具体的需求。默认「每个地方都得配个 PM」不是好事。据我所知，产品管理之所以该成为一个专门职能，唯一站得住的理由是——它是一门手艺，不是一纸资格证。它是靠做才能变好的东西，是一块肌肉。但反过来说，你越是把工程师和设计师从这件事里抽离出去，他们那块肌肉就越练不出来。

[0:55] Lenny Rachitsky

They also wrote this brutal quote, "In the last 2 years, 31,832 people applied to be a product manager at Whatnot. We hired one." What do you look for in the folks that you hire?

你还写过一句挺狠的话：「过去两年里，有 31,832 个人投递了 Whatnot 的产品经理岗位。我们只招了一个。」那你招人的时候到底在看什么？

[1:06] Tom Verrilli

I can tell you what's definitely trending down. Folks who spend a lot of the time in their interviews talking about driving alignment and stakeholder management because there's definitely a group of PMs whose specialty wasn't technical, it was politics.

我可以明确告诉你什么东西在明显贬值：面试里花大量时间讲「推动对齐」「管理利益相关方」的人。因为确实有那么一批 PM，他们的专长不是技术，是政治。

[1:17] Tom Verrilli

You're very excited about this move to IC work. PMs moving away from this big org management world. If you were really successful as a PM, you got promoted into being a director. We took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things. Why wouldn't [music] you want Messi playing for your team rather than trying to have the academy coming along all the time?

你对「回到 IC 亲手做事」这个转向非常兴奋——PM 不再往大团队管理那条路上走。过去你要是 PM 做得很成功，就会被提拔成总监。相当于我们把所有 A 级选手都提拔到了不再亲手做事的位置上。你想想，为什么不让 Messi 直接上场替你踢，非要一直指望青训营慢慢往上输送人呢？

[1:37] Lenny Rachitsky

Today, my guest is Tom Verilli. Tom is chief product officer at Whatnot, former long-time chief product officer at Twitch, and former director of product growth at Twitter. He's also someone I've been wanting to get on this podcast for so long. Tom has a lot of hot takes and really unique and important insights on the future of the product role,

今天的嘉宾是 Tom Verrilli。Tom 是 Whatnot 的首席产品官，此前长期担任 Twitch 的首席产品官，更早还做过 Twitter 的产品增长总监。他也是我盼了很久想请上节目的人。关于产品这个角色的未来，Tom 有很多犀利的观点，也有非常独到、非常重要的洞察，

[1:55]

[music]

[音乐]

[1:55] Lenny Rachitsky

what he's seeing the best PMs doing differently these days and what he's looking for when he's hiring product people for his team now. If you're not familiar with Whatnot, it's a live stream shopping platform. It's the fastest growing US marketplace business of all time. At one point Tom shares how he bought a fresh lobster from a fisherman on the platform. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's product [music] pass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI product in the world available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Tom Birilli. Tom, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

比如他观察到最优秀的那批 PM 如今在做哪些不一样的事，以及他现在给团队招产品人时到底在看什么。如果你还不了解 Whatnot：它是一个直播购物平台，也是美国历史上增长最快的市场平台业务。节目里 Tom 还讲到他怎么在平台上直接从渔民手里买了一只活龙虾。开始之前，别忘了去 lennysproductpass.com 看看 Lenny's Product Pass——免费用一年全世界最热门、做得最精致的 AI 产品，仅面向 Lenny's Newsletter 的订阅者开放。那么，有请 Tom Verrilli。Tom，太感谢你来了，欢迎来到播客。

[2:33] Tom Verrilli

Thank you so much, dude. It feels kind of surreal after years of watching.

太谢谢你了，兄弟。看了这么多年节目，现在自己坐在这儿，感觉有点不真实。

[2:36] Lenny Rachitsky

Mhm. I hear that. I hear that people come on the podcast. Here you are.

嗯嗯，我懂。上节目的人经常这么说。现在你人就在这儿了。

[2:40] Tom Verrilli

to be first time long time.

就是那句「第一次打电话进来，听了好多年」。

[2:42]

[laughter]

[笑声]

[2:42] Lenny Rachitsky

That's right. Um I want to start with something that you wrote online that surprised a lot of people and I think will surprise a lot of people uh coming from a long time chief product officer, long time product builder, someone that's built a lot of very successful products and teams. What you wrote is since it's earliest inception, the Whatnot product team has built was built on the somewhat simple premise, we regret that product management exists.

没错。我想先从你在网上写的一段话聊起——那段话让很多人很意外，我觉得也会让不少听众意外，尤其它出自一位干了这么多年的首席产品官、做了这么久产品、带出过很多成功产品和团队的人。你写的是：从最早期开始，Whatnot 的产品团队就建立在一个挺简单的前提上——我们后悔产品经理这个岗位存在。

[3:09] Tom Verrilli

Yes, sir. Not a thing you probably hear from a lot of CPOs.

是的，没错。这确实不太像是能从很多 CPO 嘴里听到的话。

[3:12] Lenny Rachitsky

No. Talk about why you feel this way. Talk about how you got to this place. Talk about what this means.

确实不像。说说你为什么这么看，你是怎么走到这一步的，还有这句话到底意味着什么。

[3:19] Tom Verrilli

Sure. I mean, I always try and start with like history in order to understand kind of things. And one of the things when you come to product management is if you go all the way back, like product management didn't exist, right? It was like the business and you know, very often founder CEO types talking directly to engineering and design about what we needed to build and then executing it together. And you know, internet businesses it turns out scaled a lot faster than any other businesses in history. And so at some point scale meant delegating the specifics of execution to somebody or trusting somebody else to work out what comes next because there's just too many things on for somebody to sit with. But, if you think about most startups or you think about how that evolution worked, that was really a specialist role where somebody was working it out. It was usually you said less things to the engineer where you had to describe in less detail what you were trying to get done to to a designer because they understood or they they'd been involved. And this idea that we need this kind of specialist decision-making class of humans in tech is really a more modern function than it is a like pure necessity.

好。我一般喜欢先从历史讲起，这样才好理解一件事的来龙去脉。说到产品管理，你一路往前追溯会发现：产品管理原本根本不存在。当时就是业务方——很多时候是创始人或 CEO 这类角色——直接跟工程和设计聊我们要做什么，然后大家一起把它做出来。结果互联网生意的扩张速度比历史上任何生意都快得多。所以到某个节点，规模化就意味着必须把执行的细节委托出去，或者信任别人去想清楚下一步做什么，因为事情实在多到一个人扛不下来。但你回头看大多数创业公司、看这个演化过程会发现，那其实是一个专才角色在替大家把事情想清楚。通常你对工程师要说的话更少，要跟设计师描述的细节也更少，因为他们本来就懂，或者他们一开始就参与其中。所以「科技行业需要这么一个专门做决策的人群」这个想法，更像是一个现代产物，而不是什么天然的必需品。

[4:25] Tom Verrilli

You know, the way I would think about it and the way that Whatnot has always treated it is like it would actually be way better if engineering and design had the context that they needed to just make great decisions there if they were so in touch with users and what they needed that they could kind of make the same decisions that a product manager is. The only argument as far as I'm aware for why you would want product management to be a specialist function is really it's a trade, not a qualification. And and what I mean by that is it's something you get good at by doing. It's a muscle, for want of a better term, and as every private trainer has ever told me, muscles are built by reps. And so, the more you do it, the better you get at it. But, the the flip side of that is the more you abstract your engineers and your designers from doing the same thing, their muscle gets underdeveloped. And so, I think product management plays a really important role, and I think, you know, you can deploy product management to have a really important leverage on particular things that need to go really well. Um and in a lot of ways doing that lets design and engineering be the best they can be at their craft in those situations. But, wherever possible, it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager uh and instead have design and engineering going through those those kind of steps and making sure that their muscles are well ripped.

我的看法，也是 Whatnot 一直以来的做法是：如果工程和设计本身就掌握了足够的上下文，能当场做出好决策；如果他们跟用户、跟用户的真实需求贴得足够近，近到能做出跟产品经理一样的判断——那其实是好得多的状态。据我所知，产品管理之所以该成为一个专门职能，唯一站得住的理由是：它是一门手艺，不是一纸资格证。我的意思是，它是靠做才能变好的东西；换个说法，它是一块肌肉。而每个私教都跟我说过，肌肉是一组一组练出来的。所以你做得越多，就越擅长。但反过来，你越是把工程师和设计师从同一件事里抽离出去，他们那块肌肉就越萎缩。所以我认为产品管理有非常重要的作用，你完全可以把产品管理投到那些必须做到极好的关键位置上，形成杠杆。而且很多时候这么做，恰恰能让设计和工程在那些场景里把自己的手艺发挥到极致。但只要有可能，最优解还是不设产品经理，让设计和工程自己走完这些步骤，确保他们的肌肉一直在被练。

[5:39] Lenny Rachitsky

Do you feel like product management was very helpful early on and was important, and then it kind of went through a period of, well, there's way too many PMs that are not that amazing. And now there's kind of this coming back to okay, what is actually an amazing PM and maybe we need fewer of them.

你会不会觉得，产品管理在早期是很有用、很重要的，然后经历了一段「PM 多到泛滥、而且大多数没那么厉害」的阶段，现在又绕回到了这个问题上：到底什么才算一个厉害的 PM，也许我们需要的人其实更少？

[5:54] Tom Verrilli

Yeah. Uh 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. Uh and I don't mean that as a disheartening pejorative for folks, but I think it's more, you know, you're being kind of a really really self-critical as a function. Does the average PM add a ton of value to folks around them in the way that having really high-quality product management can, you know, disseminate clarity and absorb ambiguity in the ways that they can or like help people make really timely decisions. And I think a lot of it is this function of like as tech companies scaled and winded up hiring so many engineers, somewhere along the line um and I don't want to pin it on like HR, but somewhere along the line this kind of HR ratio of like a pod popped into being. You know, every time you hire six engineers, you add a designer or you add a PM, you add an EM and and the you know, the nucleus exists. And then when you're now serving billion DAU products, you got a lot of engineers. And so now all of a sudden you got a lot of product managers. And in most cases, you probably don't need a PM for notifications infrastructure.

是的。有意思的是，你去问大多数工程师、甚至设计师，他们都记得自己合作过的那几个优秀 PM——主要是因为他们跟太多糟糕的 PM 共事过。我说这话不是想打击谁，而是我觉得，我们这个职能对自己是相当苛刻的。一个中等水平的 PM，真能像高水准的产品管理那样，给身边的人带来巨大价值吗？高水准的产品管理能把确定性扩散出去、把模糊性吸收掉，能帮大家在关键时刻及时做出决定。我觉得这里面很大一部分原因是：科技公司规模扩张、招了海量工程师之后，不知道从哪一步开始——我也不想把锅甩给 HR——但不知从哪一步开始，就冒出了一套 HR 的「pod 人员配比」。每招六个工程师，就加一个设计师、加一个 PM、加一个 EM，一个「细胞核」就这么成型了。等你要服务十亿 DAU 的产品时，你手上就有一大堆工程师。于是突然之间，你手上也有了一大堆产品经理。而大多数情况下，你其实并不需要给「通知系统基础设施」配一个 PM。

[7:02] Tom Verrilli

Right? Engineers are perfectly capable of understanding how that works. And in a lot of ways, you know, as we just described, hiring so many PMs infantilizes the engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to because there was always a PM to babysit them.

对吧？工程师完全有能力搞明白那套东西怎么运转。而且就像我们刚才说的，招这么多 PM，其实是在把工程师和设计师当小孩养——他们本来完全有能力做出好决策，只是从来不需要做，因为身边永远有个 PM 替他们兜着。

[7:21] Lenny Rachitsky

This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBA, [music] audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket and start working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today.

本期节目由我们本季的冠名赞助商 WorkOS 提供支持。OpenAI、Anthropic、Cursor、Vercel、Replit、Sierra、Clay，还有其他好几百家赢家公司，有什么共同点？它们背后都跑着 WorkOS。如果你在做面向企业客户的产品，你一定体会过接 single sign-on、SCIM、RBAC、审计日志这些大公司必备功能的痛苦。WorkOS 把这些「卡单」的东西变成了开箱即用的 API，配上一套专为 B2B SaaS 打造的现代开发者平台。我投的创业公司里，只要开始往上走、开始做大客户，几乎都会用上 WorkOS。原因很简单，它们就是最好的。不管你是刚要拿下第一个企业客户的种子轮公司，还是正在全球扩张的独角兽，WorkOS 都是让你最快具备企业级能力、把增长堵点打通的那条路。本质上，它就是企业级功能领域的 Stripe。去 workos.com 就能上手，或者直接进他们的 Slack——那边有真的工程师在等着回答你的问题。WorkOS 让你用好用的 API、完整的文档和顺滑的开发体验更快地把东西做出来。今天就去 workos.com，让你的产品具备企业级能力。

[8:31] Lenny Rachitsky

Uh something that I find people run into eventually when they think this way that I want to get your take on is engineers and designers don't necessarily want to be doing the work of a PM because a lot of the work of a PM is kind of annoying and not fun. And you know, there's a glamour part like making decisions.

有件事我想听听你的看法——很多人顺着这个思路走下去，最后都会撞上它：工程师和设计师未必想干 PM 的活，因为 PM 的工作里有很大一部分挺烦人、挺没意思的。当然也有光鲜的部分，比如做决策。

[8:45] Tom Verrilli

less glamorous than people think, yeah.

其实没大家想的那么光鲜，是的。

[8:46] Lenny Rachitsky

Yes, exactly. How do you think about that just like o- uh especially as the company scales, engineers having to be in alignment meetings, having to write docs, uh aligning everyone, uh taking note, you know, all these like kind of minutia part of PM. And also just the big like they also want to you know, engineers want to build, engineers want to code, designers want to design. How do you think about that element of s- they may not actually want to be doing that work.

对，没错。你怎么看这一点？尤其是公司规模变大之后，工程师得去开各种对齐会、得写文档、得跟所有人对齐、得做会议记录……所有这些 PM 工作里的琐碎部分。还有更根本的一层：工程师就是想造东西、想写代码，设计师就是想做设计。对于「他们其实未必想干这些活」这一点，你是怎么想的？

[9:09] Tom Verrilli

I think this is where like specialization works both ways, right? It is useful to have folks who are well honed in making decisions. It's totally reasonable as well for someone to say, "Listen, uh I'm an infrastructure lead and I want to think a lot about scale and I do not want to have to spend my time debating, you know, alignment or getting those minutia right. And certain skill sets don't necessarily translate super well, right? If you're really good at building big mental models in your head of how infrastructure should scale, you may not have the skill set of listening to a customer and actually understanding the core problem as opposed to the thing that they said, which again, just a thing that we've built over time. So, my supposition of we regret isn't to say that we don't want product managers, just we recognize in those situations that you do need to kind of help other functions specialize, but I think it's we we articulate it that way to kind of force ourselves to remember that you don't hire a PM just for the sake of hiring one, you hire one with a really specific need. And I think what goes with it, Lenny, is like you have to build the culture of the organization around that. So, for example, when we say, you know, we regret product management exists, every time we write documents about how we ship or what we're doing, we're very kind of clear that anyone can bring, you know, change forward that we can have DRIs of new product development that isn't an engineer or is a designer, but that everybody goes through that same level of function of like, you've got to go through product review. You've got to actually do the work because it is real work.

我觉得这正是「专业化」双向成立的地方。有一批被专门打磨过、擅长做决策的人，是有价值的。同样地，一个人说「听着，我是基础设施负责人，我想花时间琢磨规模化的问题，我不想把时间耗在争论对齐、抠那些琐碎细节上」，这也完全合理。而且某些技能之间并不能很好地迁移——如果你特别擅长在脑子里搭建「基础设施该怎么扩展」这种大型心智模型，你未必具备另一种能力：听客户讲话，真正听懂他背后的核心问题，而不是只听见他嘴上说的那句话。而这，同样是长年累月练出来的。所以我说「我们后悔」，并不是说我们不想要产品经理，只是在那些场景里我们承认，你确实需要帮别的职能完成专业化分工。我们之所以用这么极端的说法，是为了逼自己记住：你不能为了招 PM 而招 PM，你招人一定是因为有一个非常具体的需求。Lenny，跟这件事配套的是——你必须围绕它把组织文化建起来。举个例子，既然我们说「我们后悔产品管理这个岗位存在」，那我们每次写关于怎么发版、我们在做什么的文档时，都会写得非常清楚：任何人都可以推动改变，新产品开发的 DRI 可以是工程师，也可以是设计师；但所有人都要走同一套流程——你得过产品评审，你得真把这些活干了，因为那是实打实的工作。

[10:31] Tom Verrilli

And if people don't want to do that, if they will kind of want to do something else, we can always move product management around. And so, rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to kind of problems or kind of like core projects. And that means that there will be a year more where there isn't a PM attached to a particular engineering team even though there's lots of ongoing product work to do.

而且如果有人不想做这件事、想去干点别的，我们随时可以把产品经理挪开。所以我们不是把 PM 对应到某个团队——那种做法等于默认这个 PM 会一直干那摊事——我们更倾向于把他们对应到具体的问题、或者说核心项目上。这就意味着，可能有一年甚至更久，某个工程团队身边根本没有 PM，哪怕这个团队手上有一大堆产品活要干。

[10:54] Lenny Rachitsky

What I love about this is we often hear uh people at like eng-oriented products talk like this. Uh like developer tools where we don't need PMs. Why do we need PMs? Uh and it's often comes from companies like Linear and I don't know, like companies that are building developer tools where you could see why engineers are enough. And so, it's really interesting to hear from your perspective because you built very consumery products, very very consumery products that require what you think are very strong PM skills. So, it it means a lot even more so coming from you that you find that PMs aren't as necessary as people may think in building something great.

我特别喜欢这一点。我们经常听到偏工程向的产品团队这么讲话，比如开发者工具那一类——「我们不需要 PM，要 PM 干嘛？」这话通常出自 Linear 这类做开发者工具的公司，你能理解为什么在那种场景下光有工程师就够了。所以从你这儿听到同样的观点就特别有意思，因为你做的是非常非常 to C 的产品，是那种照理说需要极强 PM 能力的产品。所以这话从你嘴里说出来分量更重——你居然觉得，要做出很棒的东西，PM 并不像大家以为的那么不可或缺。

[11:30] Tom Verrilli

Yeah, I think there was like two parts that that drove it. And I've certainly like a lot of what I'm kind of talking about here are things that I definitely learned over time, you know, I I spent seven years at Twitch prior to time at whatnot, and that was very Amazon two-pizza team, you know, ratio-driven. I started in the valley at Twitter, and that was similarly very like you always had this kind of very tight alignment. And there was God, there was a lot of alignment meetings, so you can imagine why engineers didn't want to be in them. And it's kind of evolved over time to understand that like actually a lot of that is just a function of like management not being able to see what's going on. And so you you hire more folks, and you build more layers, and your systems beget systems. And and I think what's really changing is people are realizing that like it's not true anymore that the only way to get leverage is just to hire more more PMs underneath you and and be more senior. That you know, we've got a better understanding of what's happening in businesses now. It's easier to kind of like converse directly with the code base and talk to your engineers than it ever has been. And so you don't actually have to get into this like all-scale thing. And I don't really think consumer or enterprise is the cutting point anymore. I think it's more kind of the culture of the organization itself.

是啊，我觉得背后有两股力量。而我现在讲的这些，很多都是我这些年慢慢悟出来的。来 Whatnot 之前我在 Twitch 待了七年，那儿是很典型的 Amazon two-pizza team 那一套，讲人员配比。我职业生涯是在硅谷的 Twitter 起步的，那边也差不多，永远是那种紧耦合的对齐关系。天哪，对齐会开得也太多了——你就明白为什么工程师不愿意坐在那些会里。慢慢我才想明白：这一整套很大程度上只是因为管理层看不清底下到底在发生什么。所以你就招更多人、加更多层级，系统又长出新的系统。我觉得现在真正在变的是，大家开始意识到——以前那条路已经不成立了：想要更大的杠杆，就只能在自己下面多招几个 PM、把自己做得更资深。今天我们对业务里正在发生什么理解得更清楚了，直接跟代码库「对话」、直接跟工程师聊，比以往任何时候都容易。所以你其实不必走上堆组织规模那条路。而且我也不觉得 to C 还是 to B 是分界线了，我认为更多取决于这家公司自身的文化。

[12:38] Lenny Rachitsky

How much of this shift in your mind is AI-driven because AI now enables non-PMs to do PM-y work? And how much of it was like pre pre-AI? And then I want to talk about just what this actually looks like at your team, but let me ask that question first.

在你看来，这个转变有多少是 AI 驱动的——因为 AI 现在让非 PM 的人也能干 PM 的活了？又有多少是 AI 之前就已经在发生的？之后我想聊聊这在你团队里具体长什么样，不过先请你回答这个问题。

[12:50] Tom Verrilli

I don't think it's explicitly because of AI, but I do think AI makes it a lot easier. I think it's two things. I think AI certainly means that there's an enormous amount of leverage for an IC now. I don't know how much other people feel this, but I was talking to a couple of our senior leads the other day, and we feel that we're so capable of doing things now with AI that you almost feel a bunch of pressure of the stuff you're not doing because you know that if you carved out a couple more hours, you could you could move a lot of stuff. Um it certainly easier to move fast with AI tooling if you've got well-honed judgment. You know, you can call data now on a hex thread that is basically what it would take a week, two weeks with an Amazon L7, you know, uh data scientist in 2017. And so, if you're empowered and have good judgment, you can basically make really quick decisions and just kind of keep people moving, which is extraordinary. But more than just AI, I think it's also a lot of those kind of like ratio, you know, like kind of pushes also came with a bunch of other cultural pushes like, you know, hire great people and get out of their way and bottoms-up roadmaps and and all of those pieces where I think there's been a of a cultural shift in tech over the last little while, which is like, actually top-down's pretty good because folks at the top, generally speaking, can make quick decisions and remove all of this alignment debate. They have probably more macro context than most folks. And assuming that they are genuinely in touch with ground truth and are good enough, it's actually a really efficient model to be able to kind of have senior leadership involved in a lot of those decisions, which means you it's not just the tooling that makes them efficient, but you can have one very senior PM across more things and they can be more efficient than having, you know, three relatively entry-level PMs. But

我不认为这是明确由 AI 引起的，但 AI 确实让它容易了很多。我觉得有两层。第一，AI 确实让今天一个 IC 手里的杠杆大得惊人。不知道别人感受如何，前几天我跟我们几位资深负责人聊，我们都觉得：现在借着 AI 能干成的事太多了，多到你反而会为「还有一堆没干」而焦虑——因为你心里清楚，只要再挤出两三个小时，就能推动一大片事情。而且只要你的判断力磨得够准，用 AI 工具跑得快确实容易多了。现在你在一个 Hex thread 里拉一份数据，放在 2017 年得让 Amazon 一个 L7 数据科学家干上一到两周。所以只要你有授权、判断力又好，你几乎可以飞快地做决定，让整摊事一直往前跑，这太惊人了。但除了 AI，我觉得还有一层：当年那套「配比」的推动，往往还捆着一堆别的文化主张——招最好的人然后别挡道、路线图自下而上等等。而过去这段时间，科技行业发生了一次文化转向：其实自上而下挺好用的，因为高层通常能快速拍板，把那些对齐上的扯皮一次性砍掉；他们掌握的宏观信息大概率也比大多数人多。只要他们真的贴着一线的真相、水平也够，让资深管理层深度参与这些决策其实是个非常高效的模式。这也意味着，让效率变高的不只是工具——你可以让一个非常资深的 PM 同时管更多事，而他的效率会超过三个相对初级的 PM。

[14:31] Tom Verrilli

certainly AI makes all of that a lot easier again.

当然，AI 又让这一切变得更容易了。

[14:34] Lenny Rachitsky

So, just again of coming back to the broad premise, which I think is very important to clarify, uh this point about uh regretting product management exists isn't saying we don't want or think PMs are useful. It's that uh it is better to not assume we need a PM in every place and uh it is a great to enable other functions to do the PM work. Uh and also just PMs kind of take away the reps from people being able to do the things that PMs do. And if they can do that work, they can actually execute better, they'll build better products.

那我再回到那个大前提上——我觉得这点很有必要说清楚：所谓「后悔产品经理这个岗位存在」，并不是说你们不想要 PM，也不是觉得 PM 没用。而是说，最好别默认每个位置上都得配一个 PM；同时，让其他职能也能干 PM 的活是件好事。而且 PM 的存在其实抢走了别人练手的机会——如果他们自己能干这些活，他们的执行会更好，做出来的产品也更好。

[15:03] Tom Verrilli

I think it's also better for PMs to not be mapped specifically to a team than it is to say, we go with the workers. You will build more and better reps, you're going to work out more muscle groups by like moving around on the things you work on as opposed to saying, I'm attached to whatever this EM owns.

我还觉得，对 PM 自己来说，不被死死绑在某个团队上也更好，而不是那种「我们跟着团队走」。你在不同的问题之间流动，能练到更多次、练得更扎实，等于练到更多块肌肉；而不是说「我就挂在某个 EM 负责的那摊事上」。

[15:19] Lenny Rachitsky

So, let's let's follow about Uh what does your what does the team look like? What does the PM {slash} and design team look like at Whatnot? What What does this org look like in this world view?

那我们顺着往下聊。你的团队具体长什么样？Whatnot 的 PM 和设计团队是什么结构？在这套世界观下，这个组织是怎么搭起来的？

[15:28] Tom Verrilli

Yeah, we've we've just passed 20 PMs. We have kind of I think 21, 22 PMs in the building today, which for those following Whatnot's trajectory is is pretty small considering the volume of of GMV that our sellers move. We're very loosely organized into three groups, kind of buyer, seller, and what we would call kind of trust and risk. So, the folks looking after our standards, you know, payments, kind of safety, etc. And then within those kind of like broad groups, we basically reassign the PMs pretty regularly. So, people have like loose, you know, alignment. You might be like broadly a growth PM or broadly kind of like work on discovery, but even amongst those groups, kind of gets allocated and moved around pretty quickly. And that's because the way that we do planning is like every 6 months, you know, the CEO, myself, some other folks and senior leads will sit down and just define what what needs to be true over the next 6 months. What do we have to get done as a company? Both in terms of like outcomes and critical projects. And then we sit down and we go through that list and say, who's who's the DRI? Who's accountable for that? And that's mostly how we end up allocating PM work. And so, quite regularly you'll have something, you know, we've just finished a planning cycle literally this morning, and you'll quite regularly go through those and you'll get to the end and say, cool, there's this thing that's like second or third priority in a bunch of different teams' road maps. That feels really important.

我们刚刚过 20 个 PM，现在大概 21、22 个。对于关注 Whatnot 增长曲线的人来说，考虑到我们卖家跑出来的 GMV 体量，这个数字算相当小了。我们大致松散地分成三个组：买家、卖家，还有我们叫「信任与风险」的那一块——负责平台标准、支付、安全这些。而在这几个大组内部，我们会相当频繁地重新分配 PM。所以大家的归属是很松的：你可能大体上是个增长 PM，或者大体上做 discovery，但即便在组内，任务的分配和调动也很快。这是因为我们做规划的方式是：每 6 个月，CEO、我、还有另外几位同事和资深负责人坐下来，明确未来 6 个月「什么必须成立」、公司必须完成哪些事——既包括结果，也包括关键项目。然后我们把这张清单一条条过，问：这件事的 DRI 是谁？谁来担责？PM 的活基本就是这么分出去的。所以经常会出现这种情况——我们今天上午刚跑完一轮规划——你一条条过下来，过到最后会说：有件事在好几个团队的路线图上都只排在第二、第三优先级，可它看起来真的很重要。

[16:50] Tom Verrilli

Who owns that? We actually don't have an owner for that. And we'll go and grab a PM and be like, congratulations, this is the thing we need you to deliver over the next 6 months. It's rarely you need to build a feature that works exactly this way, that does this thing. It's a little more high-level than that. But like, how do you go and work out what needs to be true? And then you map the human beings that you think can kind of got that. Not every name is a PM name, but overwhelmingly when you go through that planning process, it tends to be PMs and it tends to be kind of PMs who have the right skillset vis-a-vis what it is, whether it's more financial, whether it's more kind of like, you know, algorithmic and recommendations-based, whether or not it's like core user feature.

那这件事归谁？我们其实没人在管。于是我们就抓一个 PM 过来：恭喜，接下来 6 个月这就是你要交付的东西。这里很少是「你要做一个功能，长成这样、干这件事」，而是比这更高一层：你去把「什么必须成立」想清楚。然后你把你觉得能扛下来的人对上去。名单上并不全是 PM 的名字，但整个规划过程走下来，绝大多数还是 PM，而且是技能组合跟这件事匹配的 PM——看这事是偏财务的，还是偏算法和推荐的，还是核心的用户功能。

[17:28] Lenny Rachitsky

Let me follow that actual specific thread at the end there around what you look for in product managers that you hire. So, you also wrote this uh brutal quote. In the last 2 years, 31,832 people applied to be a product manager at Whatnot. We hired one.

我想顺着你最后那条线继续问——你招产品经理时到底看什么。你还写过一句挺狠的话：过去两年里有 31,832 个人投递 Whatnot 的产品经理岗位，我们招了一个。

[17:44] Tom Verrilli

Yes, sir.

没错，就是这样。

[17:46] Lenny Rachitsky

Pretty great. Pretty great. Um so, there's a few things here I want to talk about. One is just what is it you look for in the folks that you hire, especially these days? What do you find what's kind of like trending up in what you find you need in really successful PMs at Whatnot and what's maybe trending down.

相当猛，相当猛。这里我想聊几件事。第一件就是：你招人的时候到底在看什么，尤其是现在这个阶段？在 Whatnot 真正做得成的 PM 身上，你觉得哪些特质的权重在往上走，哪些在往下掉？

[18:02] Tom Verrilli

I can tell you what's definitely trending down. It's uh folks who spend a lot of the time in their interviews talking about those like alignment meetings and driving alignment and stakeholder management and and those pieces because uh there's definitely a group of PMs and I certainly used to be one of them earlier in my career whose specialty wasn't technical or customer-oriented, it was politics. And so, folks who tend to kind of like naturally lean towards like driving alignment, building building relationships, I you know, tell me about a time when you failed and like, "Oh, I didn't keep the CEO up to date with something and that led to a pivot." is definitely kind of a thing that is a bit of an anti-pattern that trends down. What we tend to find kind of really jumps in a PM kind of interview is over the course of of your interviews or your case study, can we see both the macro thinking and the micro thinking? I think the system works something like this and I can describe an end state, but can I, you know, almost exude impatience on like, "And here's how I would validate that very quickly. Here's where I would push to get that done." And are you specific about the things that you've built? All right, there's an awful lot of folks who've worked at, you know, Fang, Uber, pick any scale company where they baby sat things that existed and they maybe, you know, polished the edges of it as opposed to the idea of saying, we were given this problem and I had to go and come up with something unique and novel or I had to kind of really iterate our way through a complicated change.

我可以明确告诉你什么在往下掉：面试里花大量时间讲「对齐会」「推动对齐」「利益相关方管理」那一套的人。因为确实有一类 PM——我职业早期也是其中之一——他们的看家本领既不是技术也不是用户，而是政治。所以那些天然就往「推动对齐、经营关系」上靠的人……你问他「讲一次你失败的经历」，他说「哦，我没及时把某件事同步给 CEO，结果导致了一次转向」——这就是个挺明显的反模式，权重在往下掉。而在 PM 面试里真正让人眼前一亮的是：在几轮面试或者 case study 里，我们能不能同时看到你的宏观思考和微观思考？「我认为这个系统大概是这么运作的，我能描述出一个终局状态」——但你能不能同时几乎按捺不住地流露出一种急迫感：「而我会这样快速验证它，我会从这儿使劲把它推成」。还有，你讲自己做过的东西时够不够具体？说实话，有非常多人在 FAANG、Uber、随便哪家规模化公司待过，他们做的是照看一个已经存在的东西，顶多把边角打磨打磨；而不是那种「我们接到这么一个问题，我得自己想出一个独特、新颖的解法」，或者「我得带着大家一点点迭代，趟过一次很复杂的变更」。

[19:27] Tom Verrilli

But I made decisions along the way and we moved because I think it's it's easy in a very large organization with inertia to kind of go along with what's happening and not necessarily be an agent of change or be a decision maker, which is ultimately what you need PM to do.

「但我一路上都在做决策，我们真的动起来了。」——因为在一个惯性很大的组织里，太容易随波逐流了，你不一定是那个推动变化的人，也不一定是那个做决策的人，而这恰恰是你最需要 PM 去干的事。

[19:41] Lenny Rachitsky

There's something you said there that I just had Elizabeth Stone on the podcast. She's CPO at Netflix and asked her what's the trait she most that is also most trending up and she said exactly what you said initially, which was the systems thinking, thinking big picture, thinking about the bigger business. And her And her advice there to work on this and I want to ask you if you have any other advice here. Say someone hears this, they're like, oh wow, I got to work on my systems thinking skills. Her advice is take one click back from your problem and think about, okay, for my manager, what do they think about this problem and how does that impact the rest of the business? Um thoughts on just how somebody might develop the skill and get better at systems thinking?

你刚说的这点让我想起，我最近正好请了 Elizabeth Stone 上节目，她是 Netflix 的 CPO。我问她哪个特质的权重上升得最快，她的回答跟你一开始说的一模一样——系统性思考，看大局，思考更大的业务盘子。她也给了练习的方法，我也想问问你有没有别的建议。假设有人听到这儿想：哇，我得练练自己的系统思考能力。她的建议是：从你手上的问题往后退一步，想一想——站在我老板的位置上，他会怎么看这个问题？这件事又会怎么影响业务的其他部分？你怎么看，一个人该怎么培养、怎么把系统性思考练得更好？

[20:17] Tom Verrilli

I mean, I think the skill is exactly the right way to say it. I think you can get good at it from just a mental exercise. So, like, you can do it in small ways. One of the things I ask a lot in product review when someone says, hey, we want to run an experiment, is, okay, what do we do if it's green? What do we do if it's red? And if folks are like, actually, I don't know how my strategy would change, like, cool, we haven't really thought about that. So, like, stop and go and do the mental exercise of how it would work. And then I think it's the same thing if you can build quick local solutions if you have done the mental exercise in your head of saying, well, what would happen if we had a thousand times more usage of this than we expected or what are the unexpected knock-on effects that this could have? And how do you just start doing all of that in your head before you get pen on paper, before you get code on the system? And I think it it helps actually unblock people to move faster, too, because I I the other thing that PMs are often slowed down by is like oh, risk, oh, legal might, finance might, another team might. And I think one of the monikers we use internally is know then go.

我觉得把它叫做一种「技能」特别准确。我认为你光靠脑子里的思维练习就能练出来，而且可以从很小的地方练起。我在产品评审上经常问的一个问题是：有人说「我们想跑个实验」，好，那如果结果是绿的你打算怎么办？如果是红的呢？如果对方说「其实我不知道我的策略会怎么变」——那好，说明我们压根没想过这件事。那就先停下来，把这个思维练习做完。同理，你要想快速做出一个局部方案，前提是你已经在脑子里过了一遍：如果这个东西的使用量比我们预期高一千倍会怎样？它可能带来哪些没预料到的连锁反应？在动笔之前、在往系统里写代码之前，先在脑子里把这些都跑一遍。我觉得这反而能帮人跑得更快。因为另一件经常拖慢 PM 的事就是：哦，有风险；哦，法务可能有意见，财务可能有意见，别的团队可能有意见。我们内部有个说法叫 know then go——先想明白，再往前冲。

[21:17] Tom Verrilli

As in just like think through all the things that could go wrong, understand where scale will break, understand the things that might happen and then make the like move on anyway because if you've thought through all the things that could happen at scale, you're probably going to preempt a bunch of them. So, uh I really like Elizabeth's quote there, but mine is like just do the mental exercise of just like playing out if it gets really widely adopted, if it happens, if there is something that goes wrong, what will it be? You don't have to solve all of them, you've just got to think through all of them and then you end up solving more than you think.

意思就是：把所有可能出问题的地方想一遍，搞清楚规模上来之后哪里会崩、可能发生什么，然后照样往前推。因为你既然已经把规模化之后可能发生的事都过了一遍，你大概率已经提前拆掉了一批雷。所以我很喜欢 Elizabeth 那句话，但我的版本是：就做那个思维练习——如果它被大规模采用会怎样、如果真发生了会怎样、如果出岔子会是哪儿出岔子。你不需要把所有问题都解决掉，你只需要把它们都想一遍，最后你解掉的会比你以为的多。

[21:47] Lenny Rachitsky

I love that. So, it's essentially don't just focus on uh will this be an impactful experiment and think about what comes next and what comes next if this is true.

我太喜欢这个说法了。所以本质上就是：别只盯着「这个实验有没有影响力」，还要想清楚下一步是什么，以及如果它成立了，再下一步又是什么。

[21:55] Tom Verrilli

Like, okay, it's I moved it. Um particularly in a higher growth environment, you're not really looking for a 5% statistic win. You're looking for something that kind of like totally moves the business um and that has kind of compounding vector over time. And so, you just got to think through what that what that is.

对，就是那种「好，我把这个指标推动了」——尤其在高速增长的环境里，你要的不是一个 5% 的统计显著胜利，你要的是那种能整体撬动业务、并且随时间复利的东西。所以你必须把那个东西到底是什么想清楚。

[22:10] Lenny Rachitsky

Something else you said that uh is changing in how PMs operate that you're very excited about is this move to IC work, PMs moving away from this kind of big org management world to actually doing the work. Talk about that and what that means for the role of product management.

你还提到 PM 工作方式上另一个你特别兴奋的变化：往 IC 工作回归——PM 从那种大组织管理的世界里抽身出来，真正自己下场干活。聊聊这个，以及它对产品经理这个岗位意味着什么。

[22:26] Tom Verrilli

I I I I mentioned a little bit earlier, but there was this thing in the you know, in the ratio land where like 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. Your goal goal is just to coach and guide. And so, we took all of our A players and then promoted them out of doing things. Uh and they spent all of their time in alignment and they spent all of their time kind of like coaching and tweaking what their team was doing and you get this really yo-yo development process where somebody does all this work, it goes through a review, it gets told no and you just kind of going back and forward in in reviews. You can see my scar tissue coming through. Um Uh on our team, uh everybody is like there are managers. There's like I think four or five people across the team who manage other PMs. 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. And I think there's kind of a couple real advantages of it. The first um is 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. And it's really great for the organization to have somebody who can do that as opposed to the idea of like working through three layers of, you know, we we divide the problem up against a most a couple PMs. Those folks need to get into alignment. There's different engineering teams debating stuff. You just tend to go.

我前面稍微提到过：在那个「讲配比」的年代，一个 PM 做得非常成功的结果就是被提拔成总监，然后突然之间规矩变成——你别再亲自动手了，你的任务是当教练、给指导。于是我们把最顶尖的一批人，提拔到了不做事的位置上。他们把时间全花在对齐上，全花在辅导和微调团队产出上，于是你得到一个来回拉扯的开发过程：有人干完一大堆活，进评审，被否掉，然后就在评审里来来回回。你能看出我身上的旧伤疤了。在我们团队里，确实有管理者，大概四五个人管着其他 PM，但他们所有人 90% 以上的时间都在做 IC 的活。我自己大概也有 50% 的时间在做 IC 的活。我觉得这里有几个实打实的好处。第一，如果你是一个产品 VP，有十年、甚至十五年做东西的经验，那到这个阶段，你对「什么能成、什么不能成」的直觉应该已经磨得相当准了，你能比别人更快地做决定，能非常非常快地产生真实的影响。对组织来说，有这么一个人是极大的好事——相反的做法是穿过三层结构：我们把问题切开分给两三个 PM，这些人得先互相对齐，几个工程团队又在那儿争论……而你这边直接就开干了。

[23:56] Tom Verrilli

So, that's wonderful. I think the second thing is there's two ways that that ends up driving leverage. One is a VP in theory can, you know, handle the workload of multiple, kind of like more junior PMs just because, as I said, they're more efficient. And that means that you see more of the board at any given point in time, and so you're far more likely to make the intuitively correct decision for how should we tune the discovery algorithm vis-a-vis people who ship slowly, which is a you know, an evergreen thing in in e-com. Well, if you're thinking about how we, you know, manage uh sellers who ship slowly, and you know about the power of kind of like discovery, you can in either case make the kind of correct decision. You know? One of the things that I remember playing Twitch for a long time, and I was probably one of the people more at fault of it than ever was discovery team and the ads team were always at war for impressions. Right? Like, where do ads go in the feed? What's the impact to discovery metrics? What's the impact to kind of ad dollars? One of the first things I did when I got to Twitch was just put ads in discovery, and make sure that there's the same PM who's accountable for both.

这点特别棒。第二点是，这种做法从两个方向带来杠杆。一是理论上一个 VP 能扛下好几个更初级 PM 的工作量，就像我说的，因为他效率更高。而这意味着你在任何时刻都能看到棋盘上更多的格子，因此你更可能凭直觉就做出正确的决定——比如面对「发货慢的卖家该怎么调 discovery 算法」这种电商里的常青问题。如果你既在想怎么处理发货慢的卖家，又懂 discovery 的威力，那两边你都能做出对的判断。我在 Twitch 待了很久，印象很深的一件事是——而且我大概是最该为此背锅的人之一——discovery 团队和广告团队永远在为曝光位打仗：广告放在 feed 的哪个位置？对 discovery 指标的影响是什么？对广告收入的影响又是什么？我到 Twitch 之后做的头几件事之一，就是把广告直接放进 discovery，并且确保这两件事由同一个 PM 负责。

[25:00] Tom Verrilli

Cuz they're going to make the natural trade-off that say the goal is GMV generated from the feed. One of them is through organic, one of them is through kind of like a paid substitution. Solved. And when you put the same person across multiple things, they tend to organically align those things and you just cut out 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. And so, having VPs mostly in IC land, having directors mostly doing IC work, even having me having to grapple with IC work keeps everybody connected to the ground floor of what's actually true as opposed to what seems true in a review. But also means that you're more likely to make the kind of intuitively correct decision early. Just because why wouldn't you want, you know, Messi playing for your your team when you rather than trying to kind of have the the academy coming along all the time.

因为那个人自然而然就会做出取舍——比如把目标定成「feed 产生的 GMV」，其中一部分来自自然流量，一部分来自付费替代。问题就解决了。当你让同一个人横跨多件事时，他们会自发地把这些事对齐，你等于砍掉了好几个月的来回扯皮，也砍掉了那种把「公司利益优先」变成「个人职业优先」的政治。所以让 VP 大部分时间待在 IC 的状态里，让总监大部分时间做 IC 的活，甚至让我自己也不得不亲手去啃 IC 的活，能让所有人跟「地面上真正发生的事实」保持连接，而不是跟「评审会上看起来像事实的东西」连接。同时这也意味着，你更可能在早期就做出那个凭直觉正确的决定。毕竟——你为什么不想让 Messi 上场替你踢，非要一直靠青训营慢慢往上顶呢？

[25:52] Lenny Rachitsky

I love this. So, when you talk about IC work for a PM, what does IC work for a PM in this context mean? Does it mean shipping code building or is it like running a team, running owning a road map, writing the strategy doc? Imagine it's the second bucket.

我太喜欢这个了。那当你说 PM 做 IC 的活，在这个语境下具体指什么？是指自己写代码、自己动手做产品，还是说带一个团队、扛一条路线图、写策略文档？我猜是第二类？

[26:05] Tom Verrilli

Uh whatever is required to kind of like most effectively ship is the short answer. Um have I personally shipped some production code and whatnot? Yes. Uh do I think that's really the best use of my time? Not really. You know, I'm I'm certain that quietly somebody reworking most of my code in order to ensure that the linting was correct and the localization worked and all of the new ones that decades of software engineering has taught you that, you know, me and Claude code did not get right. But I do think it starts with like are you literally in the support tickets? Do you know what customer problems we're having? Have you pulled all of the data yourself so that you actually understand it? Have you sat with engineering and design, you know, have you queried the code base directly in order to understand how things work and then have you written the spec? Are you then running a stand-up in a week or I think all all that is just like core individual IC work.

简单说就是——怎么能最高效地把东西发出去，就做什么。我本人有没有真往 Whatnot 的生产环境提交过代码？提交过。但我觉得这是我时间的最佳用法吗？倒也不是。我很确定，背后一定有人默默把我大部分代码重写了一遍，去保证 lint 规则没问题、本地化能跑通，还有所有那些几十年软件工程经验教给你的东西——那些我和 Claude Code 没搞对的地方。但我觉得这件事的起点其实是：你有没有真的去翻客服工单？你知不知道用户现在遇到的是什么问题？数据你有没有自己拉一遍、真正把它看懂？你有没有跟工程和设计坐在一起？你有没有直接去查代码库、搞明白东西是怎么运作的？然后 spec 是不是你自己写的？接下来一周的 stand-up 是不是你在跑？我觉得这些全都是最核心的 IC 工作。

[26:52] Lenny Rachitsky

There's a lot of people that have worked their way up the ladder of product, become a VP, and it doesn't feel exciting to go back to being an IC. Some people like clearly you love it, you enjoy it. A lot of people are like, "Ah, I thought I was done with this. I could just work through people. I could think big picture." How do you feel about that? And what do you What would you say to folks in that in that bucket?

有很多人是一路顺着产品这条梯子往上爬、做到 VP 的，让他们回去做 IC，听着一点都不兴奋。有些人像你这样，显然是真心喜欢、乐在其中；但也有很多人会想：「啊，我以为我早就熬过这一关了，我可以靠带人做事、可以只想大方向了。」你怎么看这件事？对处在这个状态的人，你会说什么？

[27:11] Tom Verrilli

Uh I think there are probably still a lot of organizations where that is really valuable and that they will go. My recruiting tends to be the folks who are, "Oh my god, I used to love product management and I'm so sick of sitting in alignment meetings and and I'm out there pitching CPOs and VPs of product to be like, "Don't you miss actually doing things? Do you want to come back?" And I think it's okay for us to acknowledge that there'll be a bifurcation across the industry. I do think that there are organizations that are sufficiently large that maybe everyone being hands-on isn't right. I also think, you know, I mentioned earlier that like you have to have a matching culture to kind of go with this kind of environment where that's the expectation, you know, where people are like, "I don't want to talk about it. I want to just, you know, let's go and do that thing." And in a lot of ways, you know, every every startup is a reflection of their founders. And so that naturally tends to be, you know, how do they think and how do they want to run the organization? But I've actually found that a lot for a a lot of the cases you go and talk to somebody who's spent the last five, six years as a as a senior director at, you know, Meta who spends their entire time in alignment meetings and they miss actually talking to customers and talking to engineers and shipping things.

我觉得现在应该还有不少组织，那套做法在里面依然很有价值，这些人也会去那些地方。我招人的对象往往是这种：「天哪，我以前是真的热爱做产品，现在我实在受够了整天坐在对齐会议里。」我就在外面到处游说那些 CPO 和产品 VP：「你难道不怀念亲手做事的感觉吗？要不要回来？」我觉得我们可以坦然承认，整个行业会出现分化。确实有些组织大到一定规模，让所有人都亲自下场可能并不合适。我前面也提过，你得有一套匹配的文化来撑住这种环境，让「亲自下场」成为默认预期——大家的状态是「别讨论了，直接干吧」。而且从很多角度看，每家创业公司都是创始人的投影，所以这自然取决于创始人怎么想、想把组织带成什么样。但我实际发现，很多时候你去跟一个在 Meta 当了五六年高级总监、整天泡在对齐会议里的人聊，他们是真的怀念跟用户聊、跟工程师聊、把东西发出去的那种感觉。

[28:18] Lenny Rachitsky

What makes makes me think about it, I imagine you've seen this list of all of these chief technology officers that have gone to become just engineers at Anthropic. I pulled up this list as you were talking. The CTO of Workday is just a member of technical staff at Anthropic. Uh CEO CTO of Instagram, Box's CTO, uh super.com's CTO, they're just like engineers now at Anthropic. Yep.

这让我想到——我猜你也看过那份名单吧，一大批 CTO 跑去 Anthropic 当普通工程师。你刚才说的时候我正好把名单调出来了：Workday 的 CTO，现在在 Anthropic 就是个 member of technical staff；Instagram 的 CTO、Box 的 CTO、super.com 的 CTO，现在都只是 Anthropic 的工程师。就是这样。

[28:39] Tom Verrilli

Uh if this is my greatest desire that the Whatnot product bench basically looks like that.

说实话，我最大的心愿就是 Whatnot 的产品团队阵容能长成那个样子。

[28:44] Lenny Rachitsky

Mm.

嗯。

[28:44] Tom Verrilli

Um all of these people with like great skills and great understanding and actually end up coming and building as ICs.

一群技能顶尖、理解力极强的人，最后是以 IC 的身份来做东西。

[28:52] Lenny Rachitsky

What about the like the the comp of this path, you know? That's people's dream, move up to VP, make millions of dollars. Is there a world where you can still do that and be an IC?

那这条路的薪酬怎么办？大家的梦想不就是升到 VP、赚几百万美元吗。有没有可能既做 IC，又拿到那个数？

[29:02] Tom Verrilli

I actually think it's easier. Spicy take, but like go and take the comp required to have five L5s reporting to one L7 and then four L7s reporting to one VP and now total the comp of that product org and turn around and say, what if I had three people? Why can't I pay them all you know, D2 VP money, particularly if they're having the level of impact that those folks are having there? Like why not?

我其实觉得更容易。这话可能有点辣，但你去算一笔账：五个 L5 汇报给一个 L7，四个 L7 汇报给一个 VP，把这个产品组织的薪酬全加起来。然后你回过头问一句：如果我只用三个人呢？为什么不能给他们每个人都开 D2、VP 那个量级的钱？尤其是当他们真的能做出那个量级的影响时。凭什么不行？

[29:29] Lenny Rachitsky

And just to fully understand why this is happening, why this should happen, what I'm hearing there's kind of many combinations. One is AI is enabling this, which is great, perfect timing.

为了彻底搞清楚这件事为什么正在发生、为什么应该发生——我听下来好像是几个因素叠加。一个是 AI 让这件事成为可能，这很棒，时机刚刚好。

[29:38] Tom Verrilli

Yes.

对。

[29:38] Lenny Rachitsky

Uh What are the other motivations to do this? Is it just the product ends up being better? Is it fewer people?

那其他的动机是什么？就是产品最后会更好？还是人更少？

[29:45] Tom Verrilli

Uh I certainly think the product ends up being better. Like one of the things that folks have been telling us for a long time is yeah, that won't scale. Like oh, leadership isn't going to be able to stay hands-on with what's going on. You're going to need to go and hire tons more layers and what we found is that's actually not true.

产品最后确实会更好，这点我很确定。有件事外界跟我们讲了很久：「这肯定 scale 不了。」——「管理层不可能一直亲自跟进所有事，你早晚得去招一堆中间层。」但我们发现，其实并不是这样。

[30:01] Lenny Rachitsky

Right.

对。

[30:02] Tom Verrilli

It requires a different muscle. You have to make an effort to make sure you genuinely understand, you know, like ground truth. Uh an example we use all the time is we'll be talking in a growth meeting and someone will say, oh yeah, but that was fraud. You know, turn around and say, how do you know that was fraud? Oh, it's labeled in the data set as fraud. Okay, do you know how it gets labeled? I assume someone in ops does it. Okay, do you know the SOP or how they label that? No. Okay, so you don't know it's fraud. Uh and if you push, you know, a really experienced product director, like that they're going to go, good point, I don't. I'm going to go find out. And then you and invariably end up strengthening the the system that agents are using to kind of, you know, data label because suddenly there's a very smart person who's very invested in like understanding how we do that and helping guide it. And so, just that attitude that says like, we're going to do fewer things, we're going to make sure we execute the hell out of them, and we're going to kind of push our best people to be in the weeds everywhere means that you fix lots of things as you go, and you don't end up kind of just making loads of trade-offs.

这需要练一块不一样的肌肉。你得刻意去确保自己真的掌握了所谓的 ground truth（一手事实）。我们经常举的一个例子：增长会上有人说「哦那个是欺诈」。你就反问：你怎么知道那是欺诈？「数据集里就标着欺诈。」好，那你知道这个标签是怎么打上去的吗？「我猜是运营那边的人打的吧。」好，那你知道他们打标签的 SOP 是什么吗？「不知道。」那你其实并不知道那到底是不是欺诈。如果你这样去追问一个真正有经验的产品总监，他会说：说得对，我确实不知道，我去查清楚。然后几乎无一例外地，你最后会把 agent 用来打数据标签的那套系统也一并加固了——因为突然有个非常聪明的人极度在意这件事怎么运作，还愿意去把它带上正轨。所以就是这种态度：我们只做更少的事，但保证把它们执行到极致，同时逼着最优秀的人扎进每一处细节里。这意味着你一路走一路把很多东西顺手修好了，而不是到最后只剩一堆妥协。

[31:03] Tom Verrilli

And I think there's a general belief that like it's too easy otherwise for growth to hide all sins. Like you get bigger and you just end up scaling and everybody's kind of like working off of averages. So, culturally I think you got to be really committed to like let's, you know, whole ass few things, as I tend to say sometimes. Shout out Ron Swanson. Uh, and then push your best people to be really in the weeds of stuff. And actually what you find over time is you end up being more efficient by doing that because you actually understand how things work the first time and you make the best decisions. And then listen, AI, huge leverage for all of this. I I can't think of how much time I spent as a junior PM asking my engineers how hard something would be and, you know, distracting actual velocity in order to help scope future stuff. And now I can sit and, you know, talk to Claude and understand roughly LOEs. Um, I can sit there and go through and be like, it feels like there's some car crash of models that must be hitting new users as they open up the app, and you can literally just go through and be like, let's let's load up the feed and talk to me about the logic of who sees what in what order and when does this thing fire, and you can get answers really quickly.

而且我觉得有个普遍共识是：否则的话，增长太容易掩盖一切问题了。你规模越滚越大，一路 scale 上去，所有人都在看平均数过日子。所以从文化上，我觉得你必须非常坚定地说：少做几件事，但每件都做透——我有时候会说 whole-ass 几件事，这里致敬一下 Ron Swanson。然后逼着最好的人真正扎进细节里。而你长期会发现，这样反而更高效，因为你第一次就把事情的运作机制搞明白了，也就能做出最好的决策。还有就是，AI 在这件事上是个巨大的杠杆。我都想不起来自己当初做初级 PM 时，花了多少时间去问工程师「这个做起来有多难」——为了给未来的东西估个范围，把人家真正的开发速度都打断了。现在我可以直接跟 Claude 聊，大概搞清楚 LOE（工作量）。我可以坐在那儿一路排查，比如：感觉新用户打开 App 的时候，有一堆模型在那儿撞车。你就真的可以直接说：把 feed 加载出来，跟我讲讲谁会按什么顺序看到什么、这个东西什么时候触发——答案很快就出来了。

[32:06] Tom Verrilli

And having, as I said before, folks with enough tenure and enough reps that they can see that and say, you know what, that's bad, let's just make a good decision and change the ordering of those. I've saved now a kickoff meeting, an alignment meeting, a week writing PRDs, experiment time, all of that by just having somebody who's kind of empowered to go and make a decision.

再加上我前面说的，团队里有那种资历够、经验足的人，他们一看就能说：这个不行，我们直接做个正确的决定，把顺序改了。就这么一下，我省掉了一个 kickoff 会、一个对齐会、一周写 PRD 的时间，还有实验周期——只因为有个人被授权可以直接拍板。

[32:28] Lenny Rachitsky

So, coming back to people that are trying to get a job as a PM, whether you're new, let's actually hold off on new people, but people that are say managers, senior folks that are just like, wow, the market has really shifted. The a big thing we're hearing right now is you need to be comfortable with moving back into IC, giving up your fancy title. Is there anything more along those lines of just people looking for a job, struggling to find a job? Any other advice for them?

那回到那些想找 PM 工作的人身上。完全的新人我们先放一放，就说那些经理级、资深级的人，他们的感受是「哇，市场真的变了」。我们现在听到最多的一条是：你得能接受回去做 IC，得放下那个光鲜的 title。除此之外，对那些正在找工作、找得很吃力的人，你还有什么别的建议吗？

[32:53] Tom Verrilli

Start doing IC work in the role you're in would be my push like get back to the basics of like make sure that you're taking on kind of practical work. Cuz I just think it's like good to make sure that you're keeping those muscles, you know, well honed. I think it also starts with like pushing internally for those things. Like I would I would bet that if you started bringing that level of productivity back into the role that you're in, probably helps you where you are in addition to kind of help you where you might move to. But I think there's a lot of chatter online obviously about like PMs are engineers now. And I think that's all well and good. Like it's a great muscle to go and go and hone. As I said, I've I've pushed some production code because I wanted to go through the exercise of understanding it. But I think there's also before you get to like building things, it's like how quickly can you get back into the muscle of scoping the correct thing, understanding the problem, being able to define what good looks like. And like take advantage of the scale and the scope that you've got that you can see more and bring more to things. Like I think most folks who have sat in a you know, a director plus role will know the pain of sitting there and watching a junior PM yo-yo back and forth on the same PRD back to review where you kind of know what the answer is.

我的建议是：在你现在这个岗位上就开始做 IC 的活。回到基本功，确保你手上是有实操性工作的。因为我就是觉得，让那几块肌肉一直保持锋利本身就是好事。我觉得这也得从在内部主动争取开始。我敢打赌，如果你把这种生产力带回到你现在的角色里，除了帮你去到下一站，多半也会让你在当下的位置上更受益。当然，网上现在有大量讨论说「PM 现在就是工程师了」。我觉得这挺好的，这是块值得去练的肌肉——我前面也说了，我自己也提交过一些生产代码，因为我想亲身走一遍那个过程。但我觉得在「能动手做东西」之前还有一层：你能多快找回那种手感——把正确的事情圈出来、把问题理解透、能定义清楚什么才叫好。而且要用好你已经积累的视野和格局，你能看到更多，也能带进来更多。我想大多数坐过总监及以上位置的人都懂那种痛苦：眼睁睁看着一个初级 PM 抱着同一份 PRD 来来回回地改、反复送审，而你其实早就知道答案是什么。

[34:03] Tom Verrilli

Somewhere along the way we decided that you know, lead a horse to water as opposed to kind of help them understand the answer and then keep moving. And I think there's like something in our coaching styles that we can get back to of like help somebody understand what good looks like relatively quickly as opposed to just endless review yo-yo.

不知从什么时候起，我们集体决定要「把马牵到水边」，而不是直接帮他理解答案、然后继续往前走。我觉得我们的辅导方式里，有些东西是可以找回来的：相对快地帮别人搞明白什么叫好，而不是无休止地来回送审。

[34:19] Lenny Rachitsky

Uh this point you make about PMs not uh shipping to production, I so agree with. This my mind changed on this recently with a previous podcast guest um with this point that PMs are really like the leverage PMs have so much more leverage if they're not sitting there trying to ship to production. They can enabling the team to ship better and faster and making sure the things that are shipping are better is a much better use of PM's time than sitting there shipping stuff.

你刚才说 PM 不该自己往生产环境提交代码这一点，我太同意了。我最近因为之前一位播客嘉宾彻底改变了看法——他的观点是，PM 的杠杆恰恰在于别坐在那儿自己写代码上线。让团队发得更好更快、并且确保发出去的东西质量更高，才是 PM 时间更好的用法。

[34:41] Tom Verrilli

I mean this sounds really silly, mate, but like it takes me substantially longer to go through the minutia of like getting get commit and all of the kind of like pieces that are second nature to engineer a line than it does to actually work out what problem is and be able to describe it. So yes, like good practice to try and you know make sure you're doing something for example I don't want to judge if our dev tools have gotten easier or not based on what someone tells me. I'm going to go and try it and be like, yep, that was easier than last time I did it. But I do think you can get an awful long way understanding the code base and then talking to somebody who can actually execute well, you know, otherwise you're just going to get you're going to you're going to fall a foul of like a thousand classic traps that every other engineer learned how not to do when they were in L4.

说出来可能有点傻，但对我来说，去搞定 git commit 那一堆琐碎细节、那些对工程师早就是本能的东西，花的时间比我想清楚问题是什么、并把它描述出来要长得多。所以是的，练一练是好习惯——比如我不想仅凭别人一句话就判断我们的开发工具有没有变好用，我会自己去跑一遍，然后说：嗯，确实比我上次做的时候顺手了。但我确实觉得，光是把代码库搞明白、再去找一个真正能高效执行的人配合，就已经能走出非常远。否则你就会一头栽进那上千个经典陷阱里——那些每个工程师在 L4 阶段就学会怎么避开的坑。

[35:22] Lenny Rachitsky

So following that thread a little bit, what are some of the ways that AI has enabled you and or your team to move faster and be more productive other than prototyping, which is the very clear benefit of AI for PMs and product teams. What else would have been the top three of like, wow, this is really unlocked our productivity and and the quality of what we do?

顺着这条线再往下问：除了做原型——这是 AI 对 PM 和产品团队最显而易见的好处——AI 还在哪些地方让你和你的团队跑得更快、更高效？如果排个前三，哪些让你觉得「哇，这真的把我们的生产力和产出质量解锁了」？

[35:43] Tom Verrilli

I mean the first one I think by a country mile is data science. You know, we use Hex Threads internally at Whatnot. I'm sure there are other kind of like comparable products, but I think it's almost hard to remember time as a PM before you had tooling like that where you could genuinely start pulling very nuanced cohorts of data where you could kind of grab an individual user where you've heard a report actually understand, you know, like let's pull logs. Help me understand exactly what this user did and saw. How many other users look like this? You know, what would impact be? And then all of a sudden you can build pretty meaningful sensitivity models or like forecasts of what might happen, regression models, etc. Really, really, really quickly, which is like incredibly powerful. Um the other thing that we found is it helps us move much more quickly with shipping things because you can spot regressions and weird knock-on effects of two products intermixing more quickly than you used to be able to. And I think in, you know, really large complicated systems, that's always one of the things that ends up slowing you down of like release trains and all of that versus like if you build the right AI tool, you can spot regressions really quickly, which basically lets people just kind of like go. 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 have ever have in my career. So, that one I think is really powerful.

第一名我觉得遥遥领先，是数据科学。我们在 Whatnot 内部用 Hex Threads，市面上肯定也有别的类似产品，但我现在几乎已经想不起来，做 PM 而没有这类工具的日子是什么样了。你可以真正开始拉出非常细颗粒度的用户分群；听到一条反馈，你可以直接抓出那个具体用户去弄明白——把日志拉出来，帮我搞清楚这个用户到底做了什么、看到了什么，还有多少用户长这样，影响面会有多大。然后突然之间，你可以很快建出相当有意义的敏感性模型、预测、回归模型等等，而且是非常非常快，这个能力强得离谱。另一件我们发现的事是：它让我们发东西的速度快了很多，因为你能比以前更快地发现 regression，以及两个产品交叉之后产生的奇怪连带效应。我觉得在特别庞大复杂的系统里，这一直是拖慢你的东西之一——所谓的 release train 之类的；但如果你搭对了 AI 工具，你能非常快地发现 regression，这基本上就等于让大家可以直接往前冲。所以我不知道数据科学的未来会长成什么样，但作为一个产品经理，过去这一年我跟数据科学家说话的时间，是我整个职业生涯里最少的；与此同时，我泡在数据里、真正去理解产品怎么运转的时间，大概是我职业生涯里最多的，可能是以前的十倍。所以这一条我觉得威力真的很大。

[37:08] Tom Verrilli

Second one I've already mentioned, which is like stop bothering engineers with how does the code base work and actually just go and talk to Claude and understand it, which is really helpful, you know, I used to say earlier on in my career that the goal was always to be understand your systems at the boxes and lines level of, you know, which system drives which thing and now there's no excuse not to understand that or a nuance layer. But the other one, and this might be very specific to Whatnot, so I don't know that this will help everyone, but one of the things that I've been lucky to do in my career is basically worked on live products for a decade now. And so, it's always been really cool to be able to ship a product and then watch a customer use it and watch them kind of figure it out. So, like, uh, I think people have just gotten this experience with like Listen Labs and and, you know, others in that cohort of watching people use your product, but I've always been able to sit and watch people use a thing for the first time and go through that new user comprehension gap. What's really cool with a bunch of the AI tooling right now is as they're describing, oh, I'm having a problem, you can literally be watching the code base live and work out is that actually a bug that's happening right now, right now, or is that a comprehension gap where it doesn't work as expected and suddenly you've got this video artifact of someone using your product. You can be analyzing the code base in real time.

第二条我前面已经提过了：别再拿「这个代码库是怎么跑的」去烦工程师，直接去问 Claude 自己搞明白，这非常有用。我职业生涯早期常说，目标永远是把你的系统理解到「框图和连线」的层面——哪个系统驱动哪件事；而现在，你没有任何理由不去理解到那一层，甚至更细的一层。还有第三条，这条可能非常 Whatnot 特有，所以不见得对所有人适用：我职业生涯里比较幸运的一点，是我做直播类产品已经做了十年。所以我一直觉得特别酷的一件事，就是能把一个产品发出去，然后看着用户去用、看着他们一点点摸索明白。我觉得现在大家通过 Listen Labs 那一类工具也开始有这种体验了——看真人使用你的产品；而我一直有机会坐在那儿看别人第一次用某个东西，看他们跨过新用户的理解鸿沟。现在有了这一堆 AI 工具，特别酷的一点是：当用户在描述「我遇到了个问题」的时候，你可以同时实时地看着代码库，判断这到底是一个此时此刻正在发生的 bug，还是一个理解鸿沟——东西没按用户预期工作。突然之间，你手上有一段真人使用你产品的录像，同时你还能实时分析代码库。

[38:23] Tom Verrilli

And you can be just talking kind of through AI to the code base to understand what's actually happening and it's this it's like you know, a feedback loop on steroids because all of a sudden you know exactly what's going on customer side, code side, and observe side as as like a viewer in real time, which is really cool.

你还可以隔着 AI 直接跟代码库对话，搞清楚到底发生了什么。这就像是打了兴奋剂的反馈闭环——因为突然之间，你作为一个实时的旁观者，同时掌握了用户侧、代码侧和观察侧到底在发生什么，真的很酷。

[38:40] Lenny Rachitsky

That sounds uh both awesome and very stressful to be building products that are that live in real time. I think about um Netflix where they invest in live now and that's just like all you've done for 10 years and how big of a deal that was for them. I know the scale is different, but

听起来既酷，又特别有压力——你做的是实时发生的产品。我想到 Netflix，他们现在也在往直播上投，而这恰恰是你干了十年的事，对他们来说这是多大的一件事。我知道量级不一样，不过……

[38:55] Tom Verrilli

Honestly, my second week at Whatnot, um I remember sitting in a room watching so uh uh one of those not familiar uh kind of commerce auction live auction platform but live commerce platform um and there's varieties of different ways to run an auction, but one of them is what's called sudden death, which is like when the timer ends, it ends. Right? Otherwise, the classic auction environment, somebody bids in the last 5 seconds, it adds 10 seconds back on the clock. Uh and a seller can decide what auction model they want. And I was sitting there watching a seller who was like, "These are taking too long. I wish this 7-second timer was actually 3 seconds cuz I want to move more product." And they I I watched two engineers in the office look at each other and be like, "That's a config. We could totally do that." And so they went and updated it in real time and then jumped in the chat of a show and just said, "Refresh your app." And then all of a sudden, bang, it was operating that way and I was like, "Cool. I'm I'm with my people. I'm in like the right place." Because that's the level of like responsiveness that you can get uh in a live environment and obviously AI means that that's really easy for lots of people to take on. Not that I would touch production code uh in that kind of way cuz that's a disastrous idea. Uh but for qualified humans, it's a wonderful one.

说实话，我到 Whatnot 的第二周，就记得坐在一间屋子里看直播。给不熟悉的人解释一下，Whatnot 是那种拍卖式的直播电商平台，拍卖有好几种玩法，其中一种叫 sudden death（骤死式）——倒计时归零就是结束，没得商量。另一种是经典拍卖模式：有人在最后 5 秒出价，倒计时就再加 10 秒。卖家可以自己选用哪种拍卖模式。当时我看着一个卖家在那儿说：「这也太慢了，我真希望这个 7 秒倒计时是 3 秒，我想更快出货。」然后我就看见办公室里两个工程师对视了一眼，说：「这不就是个配置项嘛，完全能改。」于是他们当场就改了，然后跳进那场直播的聊天区，说了一句「刷新一下你的 App」。一瞬间，砰，就按新规则跑起来了。我当时心想：太爽了，我找到组织了，我来对地方了。因为直播环境能给你这种级别的响应速度。当然，AI 也意味着这种事现在对很多人来说非常容易上手了——倒不是说我会那样去动生产代码，那是灾难性的主意——但对有资格的人来说，这是件美妙的事。

[40:00] Lenny Rachitsky

That is very cool. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs. And now with Command.

这太酷了。本期节目由 Mercury 赞助——一家截然不同的银行服务，超过 30 万创业者爱用它，现在还带上了 Command。

[40:10]

[music]

[音乐]

[40:10] Lenny Rachitsky

I've been a customer of Mercury's for over 6 years. I have never once thought about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy, dare I say fun, to send invoices, [music] move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team. Does your bank have an API, a terminal native CLI, or an AI-ready MCP server? I don't think so. And [music] just recently they launched Command, a conversational interface built directly into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator. I've been using Command to transfer [music] money around, to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyze my cash flows, and just today I used it to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year. I just asked, "How much have I made from X over the past year?" 10 seconds later I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC.

我用 Mercury 已经 6 年多了，一次都没想过要换。Mercury 基本上就是「银行由产品人来做、而不是由银行家来做」会是什么样。他们把开发票、转账、给团队成员开虚拟卡这些事做得特别简单，甚至可以说好玩。你的银行有 API 吗？有终端里原生的 CLI 吗？有能直接给 AI 用的 MCP server 吗？我看是没有。最近他们还上线了 Command——一个直接内置在 Mercury 里的对话式界面，相当于你的财务操盘手。我一直在用 Command 转账、看自己钱主要花在哪些类目上、分析现金流。就在今天，我还用它查了过去一年某个赞助商一共给我打了多少钱。我就问一句「过去一年 X 给我付了多少？」，10 秒后答案就出来了。真的太带劲了。想了解更多请访问 mercury.com，几分钟就能在线申请。Mercury 是一家金融科技公司，不是 FDIC 承保的银行；银行服务由 Choice Financial Group 和 Column N.A. 提供，两家均为 FDIC 成员。

[41:15] Lenny Rachitsky

Coming back to this data science point, uh I I I had a I have a friend who's a data scientist, and he said it's a rough time for data scientists because of this exact thing. And to add a little more color, uh basically their time used to be asked to do some data analysis, do some work with the data, come back, here's the results, here's I'm confident in this conclusion. Now their time is basically uh seeing like half-assed data science work from non-data scientists, and and just like show me, is this right? And then and and half the time it's wrong. And they're like, what the hell is my job now? It sucks.

回到数据科学这个点。我有个朋友是数据科学家，他说现在数据科学家日子挺难过的，就是因为这件事。再补充点细节：他们以前的工作是，你让他做点数据分析、跑跑数据，他回来给你结果，说「这个结论我有信心」。现在他的时间基本都花在看非数据科学的人做出来的半吊子分析上，人家拿过来问「你看看，这对不对？」，一半时候是错的。他们就想：那我这活儿现在到底算什么？太糟心了。

[41:49] Tom Verrilli

Yeah, so uh I have a lot of empathy for that because I've certainly seen it. Another plug for why having fewer more senior PMs is helpful because there is a folks who've seen more of those reps and understand. But I also think a lot of the time that uh lack of clarity comes from the other thing, which is organizations have historically underinvested in data engineering and data structures and and good data labeling, and whether or not you've got your kind of um not just your tax on a maze right but whether or not you really understand whether or not your data systems and structures are set up well and so what we found is a lot of our best data scientists are pushing in that direction of like are we actually you know correctly updating all the ways in which our tracking and attribution works so that it's less easy for people to kind of like misunderstand those and then yeah using an AI tool to find a piece of data much like using an AI tool to write code doesn't absolve you of responsibility to make sure that that was good analysis good code it's just tends to be leveraged for those people who are naturally inclined that way.

对，我特别能共情，因为我确实见过。这也是「PM 少一点、但更资深」为什么有用的又一个论据——资深的人趟过更多这类事，他懂。但我也觉得，很多时候这种「说不清楚」其实来自另一件事：组织长期以来在数据工程、数据结构、好的数据打标上投入不足。你的分类体系（taxonomy）对不对只是其中一层，更关键的是你到底清不清楚自己的数据系统和结构搭得好不好。所以我们发现，我们最好的那批数据科学家正在往这个方向使劲：我们的埋点和归因到底有没有被正确地更新，好让别人不那么容易理解错。然后，用 AI 工具去捞一份数据，跟用 AI 工具写代码是一回事——它并不免除你的责任，你还是得确保那是一份好的分析、一份好的代码。它只是把那些本来就有这种自觉的人给放大了。

[42:48] Lenny Rachitsky

So if you think about these different functions data science user research design engineering PM what I'm hearing so far is we'll need probably fewer PMs we'll need fewer data scientists are there any other roles that you think they'll they're kind of trending down in terms of we'll need and are there any roles trending up like wow we're going to need a lot more of this kind of person?

那你看这几个职能——数据科学、用户研究、设计、工程、PM——我到目前听下来是：PM 大概会需要更少，数据科学家也会需要更少。还有别的角色你觉得需求在往下走吗？有没有哪些角色是往上走的，就那种「天哪我们得多招好多这种人」？

[43:07] Tom Verrilli

Well funnily enough like as I say I haven't spoken to a data scientist in a while we've we've certainly still hired plenty because I do think that kind of all that tracking and attribution and measurement really really powerful I also think one of the flip sides of we say we need fewer it's like fewer of for the same output doesn't necessarily mean fewer of in macro because if you are using these systems right you can just grow more quickly you can build more things you can take on more stuff so you know I would be surprised actually if we ended up with like net fewer I think it's more like net fewer vis-a-vis customer impact for both um certainly I think kind of like trending up over time within these roles are these kind of like and I don't remember the exact label that people used to use but this idea of like tech leads that are kind of like a hybrid EM where you're running a very small team kind of running at things because same way that we say you know, the cost of trying something has come down. The idea that says you can have kind of core focus, which is a thing we're very big on. We've also found incubating a lot of smaller teams to kind of go over and sit in the corner and just try and build this thing going you know, it's not quite prototyping, but it's like go and take a swing at a thing that we've historically thought was too hard is getting cheaper and increasingly has very high leverage. So, the idea of like engineering manager light for one of a better term, uh is a thing that I definitely think that we'll see more and more of. It's like not quite the technical member of staff, although that must be lovely, um but certainly not the kind of like full-on EM role. I think it's one that that definitely will come about more often.

有意思的是，我刚说我好久没跟数据科学家聊过了，但我们其实还招了不少，因为我确实觉得埋点、归因、度量这些非常非常有价值。另外，「需要更少」还有一个反面：同样的产出需要的人更少，不等于总量上人更少。因为如果你把这些系统用对了，你可以长得更快、做更多东西、扛更多事。所以如果最后净人数真的变少了，我反而会挺意外。我觉得更准确的说法是：相对于你创造的客户价值，人是变少了。而在这些角色内部，明显在往上走的是——我不记得大家以前用的确切叫法了——那种 tech lead、有点像半个 EM 的混合角色：带一个很小的团队，直接往事情上冲。因为就像我们说的，试一件事的成本降下来了。我们非常看重「核心聚焦」，但我们也发现，孵化一堆小团队、让他们跑到角落里去把某个东西做出来——这不完全算做原型，更像是「去啃一个我们历史上一直觉得太难的东西」——这件事正在变便宜，而且杠杆越来越高。所以「轻量版工程经理」（姑且这么叫）这种角色，我觉得肯定会越来越常见。它不完全是那种「member of technical staff（技术成员）」的路子——虽然那听着确实挺美——但也绝不是完整的 EM 岗。我觉得这种角色一定会越来越多地出现。

[44:49] Lenny Rachitsky

So, maybe just to close the loop on this part of the conversation, there's this, you know, trend towards everyone's kind of a builder, PMs are shipping a little bit, being a little more engineer, engineers are taking on more of the PM work. How do you think this just kind of maybe plays out over the next couple years in terms of what product teams look like broadly? Is it still PM, engineers, a designer data scientist somewhere? Is there How do you kind of envision the the canonical product team over the coming years?

那也许把这一段收个尾：现在有个趋势是人人都是 builder——PM 也开始自己动手发点东西、更像工程师一点，工程师也开始接更多 PM 的活。你觉得接下来几年这件事会怎么演变？产品团队大致会长什么样？还是 PM、工程师、设计师，再加某个地方挂一个数据科学家吗？你怎么想象未来几年那个标准配置的产品团队？

[45:16] Tom Verrilli

Great question, uh and I don't know that I know what it looks like everywhere. I think what it'll look like at whatnot is it probably still looks mostly like it has historically, which is, you know, there are reasons that you'd have a specialist designer, specialist engineers, specialist product management. I think those kind of very concrete teams will largely be reserved for like very specific projects or like things that we have high confidence or conviction that we need to solve or we're pretty high confidence conviction that we have a path forward on a thing and we want to make good progress. And I think at the edges around that is going to be a lot more free space for people to play on, like, "Hey, I'm reasonably sure I can go and make a meaningful improvement to this thing and it doesn't matter if you are a designer, an engineer, a product manager, a data scientist, you can and you should. Right? If you're sitting there on a Friday afternoon and you can't focus on the PRD you're writing, but you're pretty sure you can go and fix something, go for it. Um and so I think it probably doesn't morph in the more formal sense, but I do think there's just a lot more free space for people who are well-versed in the customer problems, well-versed in the code base, and understand some of that macro context will just be empowered to do more and more things.

好问题。我不敢说我知道所有地方会长成什么样。我觉得在 Whatnot，它大概还是跟历史上差不多——你确实有理由需要专职设计师、专职工程师、专职产品经理。我觉得这种编制很实的团队，会主要留给那些非常具体的项目：我们高度确信必须解决的问题，或者我们高度确信已经找到了路径、想把它推进好的事情。而在这些团队的边缘，会多出大得多的自由空间让人去发挥——「嘿，我基本确定我能去把这个东西做出一点实质改进」，那你是设计师、工程师、产品经理还是数据科学家都不重要，你可以做，而且你应该去做，对吧？周五下午你坐在那儿，手里的 PRD 怎么都写不进去，但你很确定你能去把某个东西修好，那就去修。所以我觉得形式上它可能不会有太大变形，但确实会多出很多自由空间：那些对用户问题很熟、对代码库很熟、又理解一部分宏观背景的人，会被赋权去做越来越多的事。

[46:28] Lenny Rachitsky

Two or two and a half years ago I had this post I put out where I said, "Why PMs are the best positioned role in tech to thrive in an AI world?" And I feel like even though the beginning of our conversation was like, uh we should live in a world where we regret PM exists, I feel like we agree on this idea that the skills that seem to matter most and are going to be most valuable, whether it's a PM doing them or an engineer or designer, is very PM-y skills. I'll share a few examples in this from this post. Like what what do we Who is really good at this stuff? These these things. Identifying what to build, distilling and communicating requirements, prioritizing everyone's ideas for the highest ROI opportunities, uh giving feedback on designs to improve impact, developing go-to-market strategy, understanding business strategy. Like to me this is what PMs do, and it feels like that's becoming more and more important. So I guess the question to you is if you agree with this idea that the PM-y skills seem to be the most valuable now as AI takes on the building.

两年、两年半前我发过一篇文章，标题是《为什么 PM 是科技行业里最有条件在 AI 时代活得好的角色》。虽然我们这场对话开头是「我们应该活在一个后悔 PM 这个岗位存在的世界里」，但我觉得我们其实在这点上是一致的：真正最要紧、最值钱的那些技能——不管做的人是 PM、工程师还是设计师——都非常「PM 味儿」。我念几个那篇文章里的例子：判断该做什么、把需求提炼出来并讲清楚、把所有人的想法按 ROI 高低排优先级、对设计给出能提升效果的反馈、制定 go-to-market 策略、理解业务战略。在我看来这就是 PM 干的事，而且它好像越来越重要。所以问题是：当 AI 接手了「动手做」这部分之后，PM 味儿的技能反而最值钱——你同意这个说法吗？

[47:21] Tom Verrilli

Definitely agree. Also props for bringing in the receipts even with a timestamp, my friend. Well done.

完全同意。另外我的朋友，你连时间戳都带上了，这证据摆得漂亮。

[47:26] Lenny Rachitsky

Mhm.

嗯。

[47:27] Tom Verrilli

Um I think what I my only build on that would be to say I think those core PM skills aren't necessarily the things that we have rewarded PMs for over the last 5 years versus storytelling, alignment, strategy. And so I do think you're 100% correct that like can I genuinely understand the customer, can I genuinely understand the business, can I genuinely understand the tech, and can I translate the three together for, you know, optimal efficiency? Is the point of leverage when doing things gets cheaper, trying things is cheaper, etc. Um so absolutely agree that product skills are probably the most durable. My build would just be there's a lot of people who have the title PM who haven't spent a lot of time building those skills in the last 5 years, but have gotten really good at communicating frameworks to leadership. Uh and so I just kind of push us back as a function into like that core work.

我唯一想补充的是：这些核心的 PM 能力，未必是过去 5 年我们真正在奖励 PM 的东西——我们奖励的是讲故事、拉齐、讲战略。所以我觉得你说得百分之百对：我能不能真正理解用户、真正理解业务、真正理解技术，然后把这三者翻译打通、跑出最优效率？当「做事」变便宜、「试错」变便宜之后，这就是杠杆点。所以我完全同意，产品能力大概是最经得起时间考验的。我要补的只是：有很多人挂着 PM 的头衔，但过去 5 年并没有花多少时间练这些能力，反而把「向管理层输出框架」练得炉火纯青。所以我只是想把我们这个职能往回推，推回到那些核心的活儿上。

[48:23] Lenny Rachitsky

Yeah, Marty Cagan calls this product theater. A lot of people just do the things that PMs should be doing.

对，Marty Cagan 管这个叫「产品剧场」（product theater）——很多人做的只是 PM 表面上该做的那些动作。

[48:28] Tom Verrilli

Or and listen, I'm guilty of this. We have we rewarded it for so long,

而且说实话，这事我自己也有份。我们奖励这种东西奖励了太久，

[48:32] Lenny Rachitsky

Yeah.

是。

[48:32] Tom Verrilli

uh that like it doesn't surprise me that that product theater is a is a core skill set for a lot of folks. I just think that there's not a lot of place to hide in that anymore.

所以「产品剧场」成了很多人的核心技能，我一点都不意外。我只是觉得，现在这里面已经没什么地方可藏了。

[48:41] Lenny Rachitsky

And this comes back to that 32,000 people applied for jobs. I imagine a lot of that is just people who think they're PMs or have the title PM, but don't have but are exactly what you described. They just focus a lot on alignment, writing docs, meetings, things like that, and not actual building, understanding what it takes to build a successful product.

这就又回到那个「32,000 人投简历」的事。我猜里面很大一部分，就是那些自认为是 PM、或者头衔是 PM，但恰恰是你刚才描述的那种人：把大量精力放在拉齐、写文档、开会这些事上，而不是真的去做东西、去搞懂做成一个产品到底需要什么。

[48:57] Tom Verrilli

Yeah, the number of people who do really well in a product interview Lenny, and then you give them a case study. 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 PRD 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, uh is kind of really telling, I think.

是。Lenny，产品面试里表现特别好的人真的很多，然后你给他一个 case study——在 Whatnot，任何岗位的人被录用前都得做一个真刀真枪的实操 case——那些台上表现极其漂亮的人，你给他一个题目、一份数据，让他拿一份 PRD 回来，然后我们让他当面口头答辩，那些擅长表演但不抠细节的人，思考质量崩塌得有多快，我觉得是相当说明问题的。

[49:23] Lenny Rachitsky

Okay. So kind of going uh beyond the hiring step, say you hire somebody, what are some things you've learned about how to get the most out of the people you hire? You mentioned this kind of uh contrarian take that you don't agree with this hire great people get out of their way. So I want to hear more about that. And just is there anything else you've learned about just uh elements to building a very successful world-class product team?

好。那我们往招聘之后再走一步：假设你把人招进来了，关于「怎么把招来的人的价值发挥到最大」，你学到了哪些东西？你之前提到一个反共识的看法，说你并不认同「招最好的人，然后别挡他们的道」。这个我想多听听。另外，关于打造一支非常成功的世界级产品团队，还有别的心得吗？

[49:45] Tom Verrilli

I mean, nuance required in my life hire people and get out of the way is wrong. I will say um but couple couple pieces to build off of it. I think in general the higher great people and get out of their way became this kind of like macro saying for let them work out what the road map is. Let them work out what the problems are. Just like completely devolve, you know, like what's going on. And I think the real answer is obviously the better people you hire the more you can kind of like totally trust that they know what they're doing. But we tend to live in a verify then trust land as opposed to a like totally trust or even trust but verify, which is like I'm probably in a better position than any of my kind of directs to understand how all of the different pieces of our system buyer seller kind of trust fit together. They're almost certainly in a better position than me to understand the nuance of like how any of those individual features work. You know, if somebody quizzed me today on exactly all the waitings in the Whatnot Discovery model, I would definitely be wrong vis-a-vis any of the engineers on that team, vis-a-vis any of the team, you know, uh, the PMs on that team. Good. But like it's actually kind of incumbent on me to learn that and understand that over time because I'm asking them to make decisions and I am proving things that they're doing. And so time spent actually working alongside those teams like in the trenches trying to solve something really really powerful.

这话得说得有分寸，但我的看法是：「招好人然后别挡道」这句话是错的。不过有几点可以在它基础上展开。我觉得「招最好的人然后别挡道」后来变成了一句很宏观的口号，被理解成：让他们自己去定路线图、自己去找问题，完全放权，随便你们怎么搞。而我认为真实的答案显然是：你招的人越好，你就越能完全信任他们知道自己在做什么。但我们更倾向于活在「先验证、再信任」的模式里，而不是「完全信任」、甚至「信任但要验证」。因为要说买家、卖家、信任这些不同模块怎么拼在一起，我大概比我任何一个直接下属都更有位置去理解；而具体到任何一个功能内部的细微之处，他们几乎肯定比我更清楚。你今天要是考我 Whatnot 的 Discovery 模型里所有权重具体是多少，跟那个团队的工程师比、跟那个团队的 PM 比，我肯定答错——这是好事。但我其实有责任随着时间把这些学会、搞懂，因为我在要求他们做决策，而且我在审批他们做的东西。所以真正跟这些团队并肩、泡在战壕里一起解一个问题，花的这个时间非常非常有价值。

[51:11] Tom Verrilli

One of the things that I saw earliest when I joined Whatnot that I've seen kind of Grant, who's our founder CEO, do is he'll sit in a review and be like, I don't think this is right. And then he'll pause and say, I'm going to clear the rest of my day. Let's sit and figure it out. And he'll actually end up sitting with the team and going through, you know, again, easier with AI data tools. Let's literally pull up the tickets. Let's literally pull up the code. Let's like go through the data line by line and understand what's actually happening so that we can make a decision there. And it means he's very up to date with what's going on. Kind of very culturally sets the tone for the team that like we're just seeking truth. And it makes it very much a like us versus you. Like reviews got very into like listen for yes for a little while there where all you're trying to do as a PM is just get a a green light so that you can go back to your your engineers and say I have some credibility. I can get, you know, the CPO to approve what we're building as opposed to this idea that says we're just trying to find out the right answer and in theory everyone wants us to come up with the right answer. So you know, we use planning to to align the company on like what are the really important things we have to solve.

我刚进 Whatnot 时最早看到的事情之一，是我们的创始人兼 CEO Grant 的做法：他会在一个评审里说「我觉得这不对」，然后停一下，说「我把今天剩下的时间全清了，我们坐下来把它搞清楚」。他真的会跟团队一起坐下来，一条条过——当然，有了 AI 数据工具这事更容易了——我们把工单直接调出来，把代码直接调出来，把数据一行一行过一遍，搞清楚到底发生了什么，然后当场做决定。这意味着他对正在发生的事非常了解，也在文化上给团队定了调：我们就是在求真。这也让整件事不再是「我们 vs 你」的对立。有一阵子，评审变得非常「只为听到一个 yes」——你作为 PM 做的所有事，就是拿到一个绿灯，好回去跟工程师说「我有背书了，我能让 CPO 批准我们要做的东西」；而不是那种「我们只是在一起找出正确答案、而且理论上所有人都希望我们找到正确答案」的状态。所以我们用规划这件事来把公司拉齐：到底哪些是我们必须解决的真正重要的事。

[52:21] Tom Verrilli

That's mostly a resourcing discussion, right? Like if we pick the right things stack rank them all, ultimately I'm most accountable for making sure that we have the right resources in the right places to hit things. But like I don't know if those are the right places if all I do is delegate to the team to go figure it out and I'm not actually periodically very deep with them on like exactly how does that work, you know? How do our like you know, referrals work? Literally what is the logic that fraud might use in order to invalidate one? Oh, based on address signals. How do we calculate address signals? Is that like a Google normalized thing or is that like, you know, free text that's put in? And if you don't actually push yourself down to sit alongside your IC engineers and your IC designers and your IC PMs, you don't actually know that stuff. So you can't make good macro decisions without the micro. So increasingly I think I you know, I I push myself to I try and be T-shaped. I can go very very deep when required but I'm mostly broad across pieces and I think the idea of just like hiring people and then like 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.

而那基本上是一场资源分配的讨论，对吧？如果我们挑对了事情、把它们全部排好序，那最终最该为「资源有没有放对地方、能不能把事情打下来」负责的人是我。但如果我做的只是把事情丢给团队自己去想，我自己从不定期地跟他们一起深入到「这东西具体怎么运作」，我根本不知道资源放得对不对。比如我们的 referral（推荐）机制到底怎么跑的？风控判定某个推荐无效，用的具体逻辑是什么？哦，是基于地址信号。那地址信号怎么算的？是 Google 那种标准化处理，还是用户随手填的自由文本？如果你不逼自己下沉到一线，跟一线工程师、一线设计师、一线 PM 坐在一起，你根本不会知道这些东西。而没有微观，你就做不出好的宏观决策。所以我越来越会逼自己做一个 T 型的人：需要时能扎得非常非常深，但大部分时候是横向铺得广。我觉得「把人招进来、然后不再多问一句、把所有细节都授权出去」，其实并不是让一个组织发挥最大价值的最优模式。

[53:32] Lenny Rachitsky

With a very product-minded founder, CPO classically is a very challenging role for people because you're basically with person between a very opinionated founder and the team building it. Uh what have you

在一位非常有产品判断的创始人手下，CPO 历来对很多人来说都是个非常难做的角色，因为你基本上夹在一位主见极强的创始人和真正在做事的团队中间。那你……

[53:44] Lenny Rachitsky

Yeah. found works in creating a, you know, environment where you are happy in that role?

嗯。那你觉得，要营造出一个能让自己在这个角色里干得开心的环境，什么最管用？

[53:51] Tom Verrilli

Yeah, and kind of funnily that's been most of my career. Actually, I worked for three founder founders in a row who are all kind of very product-minded. Um and at Whatnot I've got two, which is a blessing, actually. In general, uh I try not to kind of double up if, you know, Grant or Logan, our our founders, are on a thing, probably doesn't need me. Like, what's the advantage of an extra layer? Um you know, I think jokingly one of the PMs on the team has referred to it as the two dads problem, where you've just got like two people dishing kind of like 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. So, my first thing is like, if Grant or Logan are on it, I check that they're watching it, they're accountable for it, and I step out. So, there'll be long periods of time where like fully half my team could be working on something, and I couldn't tell you day-to-day where it is, because, you know, it's with Grant, it's with Logan, and that's totally fine. I don't have to be across all of the things they're doing. We just need to make sure that there is somebody doing that bar raising.

说来挺有意思，我大半个职业生涯都是这么过来的。我连着给三位创始人干过，都是特别有产品感觉的人。到了 Whatnot 更是有两位，这其实是件幸事。总体上我尽量不去做重复的那一层——如果我们的两位创始人 Grant 或 Logan 已经盯着某件事了，那大概就不需要我了。多加一层管理有什么好处呢？团队里有个 PM 开玩笑，把这叫「两个爹的问题」：两个人给你下互相矛盾的指令，或者有人要 review，你辛辛苦苦做完一版来汇报给我，转头再去汇报，又得到另一套说法。所以我的第一原则是：如果 Grant 或 Logan 在这件事上，我确认他们确实在盯、也对结果负责，然后我就抽身出去。所以会有很长一段时间，我团队里可能有整整一半人都在做某件事，而我说不出它每天进展到哪一步了——因为那事在 Grant 手上、在 Logan 手上，这完全没问题。我不需要把他们做的所有事都摸一遍，我们只要确保有人在把标准往上拉就行。

[54:50] Tom Verrilli

So, we spend a lot of time doing that alignment. I think the second one is like, ultimately, if you are a product leader in a founder-led company, you have to understand it's not your company, it's theirs, and you just find the right balance of like, you know, "Hey, are you open to feedback on this? Have you made up your mind? You know, are you open to a push on this?" And you just find that rhythm kind of working with folks. Generally speaking, you know, the there's a reason that founder-led companies do so well in our industry, you know, the insight required and the kind of customer intuition to make the thing in the first place and work tends to be really important. Um and then I just view my job as, you know, making sure that we've got coverage on the places where our founders are.

所以我们花很多时间在这种对齐上。第二点是：如果你是一家创始人主导的公司里的产品负责人，你最终得明白，这不是你的公司，是他们的。你要找到那个分寸感，比如「嘿，这件事你愿意听点反馈吗？你是不是已经拿定主意了？这个点我能不能推你一下？」——就是在合作中慢慢磨出这种节奏。总的来说，创始人主导的公司在我们这行表现好是有原因的：最初把这个东西做出来所需要的洞察力，以及那种对用户的直觉，往往真的非常关键。至于我的工作，我就把它看成：确保创始人顾不上的那些地方，都有人兜住。

[55:27] Lenny Rachitsky

Awesome. So, a couple things you've learned here for building and this I think in consumer this is especially important is uh counterintuitively to how maybe people think things should work, you're finding that the best teams, companies, products end up coming from top-down, founder-led almost you know, micromanagement is a is a dirty word to a lot of people, but it's basically being in the weeds is uh in spite of how people may feel, this actually ends up being leading to better stuff.

太好了。所以这里有几点经验——我觉得在消费级产品里尤其重要——而且和很多人以为的运作方式恰恰相反：你发现最好的团队、公司、产品，最后往往来自自上而下、创始人主导的方式，甚至可以说是……「微观管理」对很多人来说是个脏字，但本质上就是钻进细节里。不管大家感觉上多别扭，这种方式实际上确实能做出更好的东西。

[55:55] Tom Verrilli

Top-down works well if leadership is good enough to be in the weeds and be specifically correct. I think where it falls apart is where you don't actually know ground truth and then you attempt to manage people from above and that's where I think the term micromanagement comes from. Otherwise, if you're working from the same data and you have it, I don't know a junior engineer or a an entry-level designer who isn't stoked to sit there and work alongside the CPO or the CEO and ship something cuz you're just unblocked. There's no alignment, meetings there's nothing to do. They also find that like you can give way better feedback if you're literally in the detail. I think the nuance is just like how do you make sure you can do that in enough places? There's never been a better time to be in to to attempt to be in the detail on things because you can literally query it in real time.

自上而下能奏效的前提是：领导层足够强，能钻进细节，而且在具体问题上判断是对的。它崩掉的地方在于——你其实并不掌握实情，却还想从上面去管人，我觉得「微观管理」这个词就是这么来的。反过来，如果大家看的是同一份数据、你也确实掌握了它，那我还没见过哪个初级工程师或者刚入行的设计师，会不乐意跟 CPO 或 CEO 坐在一起把东西做出来的——因为你直接被解锁了，没有对齐会，什么杂事都不用干。而且他们会发现，你真的钻到细节里之后，给出的反馈质量高得多。真正微妙的地方只是：你怎么保证自己能在足够多的地方做到这件事？而现在是有史以来最适合钻细节的时候，因为你可以实时把数据查出来。

[56:40] Lenny Rachitsky

I think that's such an important nuance here. The story told is so um powerful, this idea of Grant just okay, I'm going to clear my day, I'm going to spend time going deep on this stuff. That feels like a very necessary ingredient for someone at the top to be making right or wrong decisions because your point if they don't have all the details, they don't they're not making decision out of real data.

我觉得这个区别特别重要。你讲的那个故事很有说服力——Grant 直接说「行，我今天把日程清空，就花时间把这块钻透」。对一个身处顶层的人来说，这好像是能做出对的决策、而不是错的决策的必要条件。因为按你的说法，如果他们手上没有全部细节，那他们的决策就不是基于真实数据做出来的。

[56:58] Tom Verrilli

And we can do that because, you know, as I said, we we plan what we're doing and then we allocate and then we're dividing and conquering. So, like he's probably trying to nail three or four most important things at a time and you know, he's the CEO, he's going to call the ball and say these are the four things I own right now and I'm going to be like, "Great. I'll be over here then." And then within those, like what am I doing with the rest of my day that is more important than nailing the five things I've said we'll get done this half. Like if it's anything other than maybe hiring standing meetings, any of that stuff, you can just clear it and set the tone for the team that like until we understand it we can't do anything else.

我们之所以能这么干，是因为像我刚才说的：我们先规划做什么，然后分配，然后分头攻。所以他大概同一时间就死磕三四件最重要的事，他是 CEO，他会拍板说「这四件事现在归我」，我就说「太好了，那我去管别的」。而在这些事情之外，我一天剩下的时间还能有什么，比把我说过这半年要搞定的那五件事做成更重要？除了招人之外，什么例会之类的，全都可以清掉——同时也给团队立个调子：在我们把这件事搞明白之前，别的什么都干不了。

[57:34] Lenny Rachitsky

Say somebody is looking for a CPO role or a first PM role, kind of similar, basically working for a founder. Uh what would be your advice for them to land in a place where they're happy and not just super frustrated by by this kind of middle layer where they just don't actually have any agency.

假设有人在找 CPO 的岗位，或者去当一家公司的第一个 PM——性质差不多，本质上都是给创始人干活。你会给他们什么建议，让他们能落到一个自己待得舒服的地方，而不是被夹在中间那一层、其实一点自主权都没有，天天窝火？

[57:52] Tom Verrilli

Yeah, I mean I think the first thing you've got to work out is like why do you want it? Right? There's this idea that like the CPO's job you get to decide all of the road maps and all these things and I've got bad news for you that's like not strictly true. But I think it also comes down to like spending some time with that person to work out like how do we jam on a topic? How do they like to get pushed? How do they not? And then you spend a lot of your time calibrating. So like before I joined Whatnot, I think Grant and I had like five or six different coffees where we talked about like how do you get, you know, this type of team to move? How do you work on those things? And then I obviously went through a series of interviews and actually came down to kind of LA where Grant and Logan were based at the time and spent a whole day with him. Just like in a room going through a couple different problems, talking through different things in the road map, just like really getting into it. And I tried through that to kind of be my most ordinary self as opposed to like interview self, if that makes sense. Cuz you kind of got to ask yourself, do I really want to spend my whole time like having this discussion and this debate? But like I like being a CPO or any kind of product lead because in a lot of ways what I'm doing is I'm like helping translate that vision and that intuition into reality. And then, you know, there is an art to learning how to push somebody without kind of competing with them. And I think a lot of the times I've seen the CPO CEO relationship go badly and ends up with like the CPO is competing with the CEO for vision and they end up at like loggerheads. And I think, you know, that's not your job.

我觉得第一件要想清楚的是：你为什么想要这个位置？有种想象是当了 CPO 就能决定所有路线图之类的事，我得说个坏消息——严格来讲并非如此。另外就是，要花时间跟那个人相处，摸清楚：我们俩讨论一个话题时是怎么碰的？他喜欢别人怎么推他？哪种方式他不吃？然后你会花大量时间做这种校准。所以在我加入 Whatnot 之前，我和 Grant 大概喝了五六次咖啡，聊的都是「这类团队要怎么才能动起来？这些事该怎么做？」后来当然也走了一系列面试，还专门飞到 LA——当时 Grant 和 Logan 都在那边——跟他们待了一整天。就在一个房间里过几个具体问题，聊路线图上的各种事，真的往深里钻。我在那个过程里刻意让自己表现得最日常，而不是那个「面试状态的我」，你懂我意思吧。因为你得问问自己：我真的愿意天天泡在这种讨论和争论里吗？但我确实喜欢做 CPO 或者任何产品负责人的角色，因为很大程度上我做的事，就是帮着把那份愿景和直觉翻译成现实。另外，怎么推动一个人、同时又不跟他较劲，这里面是有门道的。我见过好多 CPO 和 CEO 关系搞砸的情况，最后都是 CPO 在跟 CEO 争「愿景归谁」，两个人顶上了。而我觉得，那本来就不是你的活儿。

[59:17] Lenny Rachitsky

I want to ask more about that, this art of pushing back and and, you know, nudging things in a direction. Is there kind of one trick or one tip you might share with folks to get to be good at cuz a lot of people deal with execs and they're always trying to you know get them to agree to what they want.

我想再多问问这个——反推回去、把事情往某个方向轻轻带的这门手艺。有没有什么诀窍或者一条小建议可以分享，让大家能把这件事做好？因为很多人都要跟高管打交道，总想让对方同意自己想要的方案。

[59:32] Tom Verrilli

I think the first thing is like don't treat it as a trick. I mean you're not trying to get an answer and a yes. You're trying to kind of seek truth is like my first statement. And so I wouldn't say it's especially common that we start out of alignment, but I do think you know, part of your role if you're one of the more senior product folks in the room and the the CEO or you know, if you're a director and and it's the CTO in the room is like pushing the team in a way that you don't really expect or you don't really understand is like start from a place of curiosity. Does that person have more context than you or is there a thing that you're not aware of that is guiding it? So I often try and start with like can you can am I hearing you right that this is your prior? Is there a you know, piece of context or something that I don't have that helps inform that prior? Cool. Make sure everybody's on that same baseline and you know, I coach my PMs to do this with me all the time too. Like if I'm coming at you from an angle you don't expect pause and make sure that you understand why. And then after that you know, I try and do a couple different things. You're obviously just people are people, right? They have good days. They have bad days.

我觉得第一点是：别把它当成一个「技巧」。你要的不是一个答案、一句「同意」，我的第一条原则是——你是在寻求真相。所以，我们一开始就不对齐的情况其实不算特别常见；但如果你是房间里比较资深的产品人，而 CEO——或者你是总监、房间里坐的是 CTO——正在用一种你没料到、也不太理解的方式推着团队走，那你角色的一部分就是：从好奇心出发。是不是这个人掌握的上下文比你多？是不是有什么你不知道的东西在牵引他？所以我常常这样开场：「我理解得对吗，你现在的先验判断是这个？有没有什么背景信息是我不掌握、但支撑了这个判断的？」好，先把所有人拉到同一个基线上。我也一直教我的 PM 反过来对我用这一招：如果我从一个你没预料到的角度切进来，先停一下，搞清楚为什么。在这之后，我会再做几件别的事。当然，人终归是人嘛——有状态好的时候，也有状态差的时候。

[1:00:34] Tom Verrilli

Sometimes it can be as simple as like is your mind made up on this or are you open to input? If the answer is like no, I'm pretty set that this is the answer shut up. Like don't pick a fight for the purposes of picking a fight. If the answer is like actually yes, you're welcome to push me but I'd need to see data. If I don't have any data in the room, if it's just my opinion then I've the terms of the debate are pretty clear. If I have fresh data, bring it. Uh if I really believe a thing and I don't have data, question why. Um or go get it and then go back to them with the data. But if the answer is like if it nobody's got data, it's just two opinions, the CEO's opinion is going to win. And like that's okay. Check your ego at the door, get to the answer, but if you've got data, bring it. And then sometimes it's like just make sure that you're debating for the right reasons. I think it's, you know, easy in your PM theater that you're describing of like wanting to make sure that you set the framing and the tone. And there are genuinely times in our industry where like nomenclature matters and exactly what word is used can be really important. But a lot of the time it doesn't.

有时候可以简单到就问一句：这事你是已经定了，还是还听得进意见？如果对方说「不，我基本认定就是这个答案」，那就闭嘴——别为了争而争。如果对方说「其实可以啊，欢迎你推我，但我得看到数据」，而我手上一份数据都没有、只有我的看法，那这场辩论的规则就很清楚了。我要是有新数据，就把它端上来；我要是真的很坚信某件事却拿不出数据，那就问问自己为什么，或者先去把数据搞到手，再带着数据回去找他。但如果谁都没数据、纯粹是两种观点碰撞，那 CEO 的观点就会赢——这也没什么不好。把自尊心放在门外，把答案拿到手；但你要是有数据，就一定要拿出来。还有一点是：确认你争论的理由是对的。你刚才描述的那种「PM 表演」很容易发生——总想着要由自己来定框架、定基调。我们这行确实有些时候，用词是要紧的，具体用哪个词可能非常关键。但更多时候，它根本不重要。

[1:01:39] Lenny Rachitsky

There's a concept that I heard uh come up a bunch when I talk to people who work with you. Uh the phrase was uh play the accordion.

我跟那些跟你共事过的人聊的时候，有个说法反复被提到——叫「拉手风琴」。

[1:01:46]

[laughter]

[笑]

[1:01:47] Lenny Rachitsky

Explain.

展开讲讲。

[1:01:48] Tom Verrilli

So, I mentioned earlier I'm not huge on frameworks, but I do think uh there's a mental model which is quite useful that goes to the thing that you and I discussed earlier on like uh think through a problem mental do the mental work even if you're not shipping at all, which is like obviously the magic of code is that you can kind of ship things and iterate really quickly and get data as you go. And I think one of the the trappings that comes with that is uh you're just iterating forward and throwing spaghetti at the wall and you don't really know what direction you're going in. I think there's a second failure mode, which is people sit down and write out these long road maps and strategic vision docs of what we'll do over the next two, three years that kind of loses the comparative advantage we have over every other industry, which is learning. Like AB tests mean that you can update your understanding of a problem and therefore change your direction as you go. So, uh the point of the analogy of play the accordion is if you think about like a piano accordion before you can play a note you got to stretch it all the way out, bring the air in. So, like what is it we're trying to get done here?

我前面说过我不太迷信框架，但确实有一个心智模型挺有用，跟我们刚才聊的那件事是通的——就是把一个问题彻底想透，哪怕你根本还没开始上线任何东西。写代码的神奇之处显然在于，你可以很快地发布、快速迭代，边做边拿数据。而随之而来的一个陷阱就是：你一路往前迭代，把面条一把把往墙上扔，其实并不知道自己在往哪个方向走。我觉得还有第二种失败模式：有人坐下来写出一份份很长的路线图和战略愿景文档，规划未来两三年要做什么——这就丢掉了我们相对其他所有行业的比较优势，也就是「学习」。A/B 测试意味着你可以不断更新自己对一个问题的理解，从而边走边调方向。所以「拉手风琴」这个比喻的意思是：想想钢琴式手风琴，你要弹响一个音之前，得先把它整个拉开、把空气吸进来。也就是先问：我们到底想在这儿做成什么？

[1:02:47] Tom Verrilli

But, you don't make music until you press the key and push it all the way back into V1. And then when you go to play the the next kind of like progression you pull it all the way out again. Okay, given what we just learned what do we do? And then you go and build the next thing again. And like you've got to get used to this motion that says like this isn't creating value. Like pulling it out doesn't actually do anything. Uh all the value is created here, but until you are going through this motion constantly of saying we'll re-evaluate what we understand, how does this change what we're doing? You're probably not playing the right thing. And I know I'm probably bastardizing somewhere in the in the comments there's going to be a musician who points out to me that this is actually also one of the ways you make music, but I found it just a generally very valuable like memory device for PMs to be like you've got to constantly be zooming out and pushing back in, zooming out and and pushing back in.

但只有当你按下键、把它一路推回去、压成一个 V1 的时候，才真的发出声音。然后要弹下一段和弦走向时，你又得重新把它整个拉开：好，基于刚学到的东西，我们接下来做什么？然后再去把下一个东西做出来。你得习惯这个动作——拉开的那一下其实并不创造价值，价值全是在推回去的那一下产生的。但如果你不持续做这个动作、不断问「我们要重新评估自己的认知，这会怎么改变我们正在做的事」，那你多半弹的就不是对的曲子。我知道这个比喻可能不太准确，评论区肯定会有音乐家跳出来说，拉开的过程其实也是在出声——但我发现，作为一个给 PM 用的记忆装置，它总体上非常有价值：你必须不断地拉远视角、再推回细节，拉远、再推回。

[1:03:38] Lenny Rachitsky

Yeah, that is

对，这真是

[1:03:39]

[laughter]

[笑]

[1:03:39] Lenny Rachitsky

such a fun analogy cuz you know, it's like the even though you make music expanding it, it's like inward or it's like learning from the

……一个特别有意思的比喻。因为你看，虽然拉开的时候也在出声，但真正的重点是往里推的那一下，或者说是从中学到的……

[1:03:48] Tom Verrilli

Yeah, the compression

对，是压缩的那一下。

[1:03:49] Tom Verrilli

What are we learning? How do you communicate differently? Back to shipping.

我们学到了什么？沟通方式要因此有什么不同？然后再回到发布。

[1:03:52] Lenny Rachitsky

a different kind of music, internal music, external experiment.

……是另一种音乐，向内的音乐，向外的实验。

[1:03:55] Tom Verrilli

Yeah, cuz genuinely there are people who are really big on road maps and there are people who are really big on iteration. I I think the honest answer is you've got to do both. You can't over-index on either.

对，因为现实里确实有一拨人特别信路线图，另一拨人特别信快速迭代。老实说，答案是两边都得做，哪一边都不能压得太重。

[1:04:05] Lenny Rachitsky

So the lesson here is run experiments and but then make sure you think about the implication of the of the result at the bigger picture and then

所以这里的启发是：去跑实验，但一定要在更大的图景上想清楚结果意味着什么，然后……

[1:04:14] Tom Verrilli

What what are we learning?

……我们到底学到了什么。

[1:04:15] Tom Verrilli

Have a plan. Like

得先有个思路。比如说——

[1:04:16] Tom Verrilli

system works this way. I I have this belief that if we change the way that discovery algorithms work for XYZ reasons it will have this impact. What's the smallest thing I can do to to prove that? Okay, it worked. Great, no change to plan. V2. Oh that didn't work. V3 is going to have to be different and you just kind of want to always be going through that motion.

系统现在是这么运作的。我有个判断：如果基于某某理由去改推荐分发算法的运作方式，会带来这样的影响。那我能做的最小的一件事是什么，才能验证这个判断？好，验证成功了，太好了，计划不变，直接上 V2。哦，没成，那 V3 就得换个路子。你要做的就是不停地在这个动作里循环。

[1:04:36] Lenny Rachitsky

People not watching on YouTube, Tom is moving his hands.

没在 YouTube 上看视频的朋友说明一下，Tom 现在正手舞足蹈呢。

[1:04:39] Tom Verrilli

Just gesticulating wildly.

疯狂比划中。

[1:04:41] Lenny Rachitsky

What's like what's like a context where you had said that to someone, hey, go play the accordion or we're playing the accordion. Like Like what are they usually doing wrong?

一般是在什么情况下，你会跟某个人说「去拉一下手风琴」，或者说「我们来拉拉手风琴」？他们通常是哪里做错了？

[1:04:50] Tom Verrilli

It tends to be that you're shipping something with a in a very local sense without necessarily understanding impact. So an example right now is, you know, the core of most marketplaces is listings, right? Like if you try and think about amazon.com without listings, there's basically nothing there. It's a bunch of you know, it's a left rail or right rail and some videos. Um in video commerce and live commerce whatnot, you don't really historically need listings. If I want to sell you a pair of AirPods, I could literally hold them up to screen and show you them and describe them and say they're AirPods. I'm going to start them at a dollar and as a buyer, you now have all the information you need in order to kind of like make a purchase decision, which is great. And so, you may not have to invest in making listings the way that someone else does and that's probably net good for a seller because it takes like 3 and 1/2 minutes to make a listing. Uh and it takes 0 minutes to describe a thing and hold it up. Uh but you then zoom out and say, "Oh, New buyers are going to come to live commerce and expect search to function. 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 they didn't we didn't know you have them and I therefore can't direct people to it. And so, you go through this exercise of like we don't need to fix it, it works. And then you're like, "Okay, great. What does that have implications for other things?

通常是这样：你交付了某个东西，但只站在很局部的视角上，并不真正理解它的影响。举个眼下的例子——大多数交易市场的核心是商品列表（listing），对吧？你想想 amazon.com 如果没有 listing，基本上就什么都不剩了，就剩一条左侧栏或右侧栏加几段视频。但在视频电商、直播电商里，比如 Whatnot，从历史上看你其实不太需要 listing。我要是想卖你一副 AirPods，我完全可以直接把它举到镜头前，给你看、给你描述，告诉你这是 AirPods、一美元起拍——作为买家，你已经拿到了做购买决策所需的全部信息，这挺好。所以你可能根本不用像别人那样在 listing 上砸资源，而这对卖家大概率是净收益，因为做一条 listing 要花三分半钟，而举起来说两句是零分钟。可你一旦把镜头拉远就会发现：新买家来到直播电商，是默认搜索得能用的。如果非要等你卖完了我才知道你卖的是什么，那我根本没办法把想买 AirPods 的人送进对的直播间——因为我们压根不知道你手上有这个货，也就没法把人导过去。所以你会先经历这么一轮：不用修，它现在能跑。然后你说，好，那这件事对别的东西又意味着什么？

[1:06:12] Tom Verrilli

Okay. Then what would we do? Oh, we're going to make everyone make listings. And you're like, zoom back out again. If every seller is now spending 3 minutes for every listing that they're making, the number of things they can sell per hour is now dramatically, dramatically lower, which means it's bad for sellers. Okay, We can't do that again. And so, you just you have to keep stretching through the like what are the longer-term implications or what are the knock-on effects of things we're building.

好，那我们该怎么办？哦，那就让所有人都老老实实做 listing。然后你再把镜头拉远看一眼：如果现在每个卖家每上一件商品都要花三分钟，那他们每小时能卖掉的东西数量就断崖式下滑了，这对卖家是坏事。行，这条路也不能走。所以你必须一直这么来回抻——我们正在做的东西，长期意味着什么，会有哪些连锁反应。

[1:06:35] Lenny Rachitsky

Uh that is extremely helpful. What's interesting about Whatnot is it's there's like this spectrum of like Whatnot and then there's this whole trend of agentic commerce where agents are going to be buying the things for you and just working with each other, create a whole new agentic economy. And this is like the opposite, humans live talking to each other, buying from each other. Uh thoughts on that on that trend and and how may how that might impact you guys?

这段太有帮助了。Whatnot 有意思的地方在于，现在存在一条完整的光谱：一头是 Whatnot，另一头是眼下 agentic commerce 的大趋势——agent 替你买东西、agent 之间互相打交道，长出一整个全新的 agent 经济。而你们几乎站在它的反面：真人在直播里彼此聊天、彼此买卖。你怎么看这个趋势？它可能会怎么影响你们？

[1:07:00] Tom Verrilli

Uh listen, I for one welcome our agentic overlords for things like I don't want to have to think about light bulbs, air filters, any of the programmatic stuff that I need to run my life, right? Um I'm also pretty great with it for like really high intent things. I need a particular cable for my computer. I'm looking for, you know, outdoor lights for my house. Things where there are really taxing searches. I'm thinking about this these you know, got to go to a wedding which means I need black shoes but delivered by Thursday cuz if they don't get here before Thursday, they're no good for me kind of things like absolutely. But most of commerce in America isn't actually high intent. Like how many years are we into e-commerce now? Like 30 years into e-commerce and e-commerce has never exceeded 20% of retail spend in America. Right? The vast vast vast majority of retail shopping in the United States is still people going in person and buying things. Uh in the UK, it's somewhere it's like 75 25. And it turns out actually that a lot of shopping is low intent. I'm going to the mall. I might be because I've got a wedding coming up and I don't have anything to wear and I'm going to wander around and see what people have available because I don't actually know specifically what I want.

听我说，对于 agent 成为我们的新主宰这件事，我举双手欢迎——灯泡、空气滤芯这类维持我日常运转的程式化采购，我根本不想动脑子。对那些意图特别明确的场景我也完全 OK：我需要给电脑配一根特定的线，我在找家里用的户外灯——这些搜起来很折磨人的事。还有那种「要去参加婚礼，所以需要一双黑皮鞋，而且周四前必须送到，晚一天就没用了」的需求，那太合适了。但美国的商业里，绝大部分其实不是高意图购物。电商发展到今天多少年了？三十年了吧，而电商在美国零售支出里从来没超过 20%。绝大多数零售购物依然是人跑到线下去买东西。英国大概是 75 比 25。事实证明，很多购物是低意图的：我去逛商场，可能是因为快要参加婚礼、没衣服穿，我就到处溜达看看有什么，因为我其实并不确切知道自己想要什么。

[1:08:14] Tom Verrilli

And actually the value of stores is that that person who runs that shoe store has agency and taste and she curates a selection of shoes. She has, you know, a level of customer service. She has a window display which can show me the types of things she has and I can wander around the mall and actually work out what it is I want to buy or be educated by it. And as it turns out, it's quite pleasant. Like there's a reason that the mall is a social thing. And so I think you know, that agentic is going to be huge. Retail is a seven and a half trillion dollar industry in the US though, so I don't think it's a like winner takes all thing. What I think live commerce does is it's the first time that we've ever managed to kind of like bring together scale and convenience of the internet and also that same kind of like social cultural experience all of physical shopping because you know at at Twitch we used to basically assume that if it's less than a thousand people on the stream it's non-economic cuz you're you're operating on CPMs. So but you can go to a stream on whatnot and see 30 50 people are in that stream and you imagine for a moment that you're running a shoe store at a mall and you had 50 people in your store you'd never close. Like you would literally never shut down the store because that's so much more foot traffic than you can ever imagine being in a store because commerce has totally different economics to entertainment and CPMs aren't the thing that you have to worry about. So I think it's not really in kind of like competition with a gentle I think it's a completely different kind of like customer need.

而实体店的价值恰恰在于：开那家鞋店的人是有主见、有品味的，她精选了一批鞋；她提供一定水准的客户服务；她有橱窗陈列，让我一眼看到她这儿都有些什么。我可以在商场里晃，晃着晃着就想明白自己到底想买什么，或者被她种草、被她教育。而且事实证明，这个过程还挺愉快的——逛商场之所以是件社交的事，是有原因的。所以我觉得 agentic 一定会很大，但美国零售是个 7.5 万亿美元的行业，我不认为这是赢家通吃的局。我觉得直播电商真正的意义在于：这是我们第一次把互联网的规模和便利，跟线下购物那种社交与文化体验，真正揉到了一起。因为在 Twitch 的时候，我们基本上默认，一场直播人数如果不到一千，经济上就是不成立的——你吃的是 CPM。但在 Whatnot，你点进一个直播间，看到里面有三五十人；你想象一下你在商场开一家鞋店，店里同时站着 50 个人，你根本不会关门——你会永远开着，因为这个客流量远远超出你对一家实体店的想象。原因是电商和娱乐的经济模型完全不同，CPM 根本不是你要操心的东西。所以我不觉得它跟 agentic 是竞争关系，我觉得它满足的是完全不同的一类用户需求。

[1:09:45] Lenny Rachitsky

Amazing. There's room for everyone. I want to end maybe with a a question about Twitter. So you were at Twitter PM at Twitter working on growth. I feel like everybody that worked at Twitter as a PM was just scarred from the experience of Twitter. Everyone's do not do things this way. What's what's something that stuck with you from that experience? What did you learn? What did you unlearn?

太精彩了，市场大到容得下所有人。我想用一个关于 Twitter 的问题来收尾。你当年在 Twitter 做 PM，负责增长。我总觉得凡是在 Twitter 做过 PM 的人，都被那段经历留下了创伤，人人都在说「千万别照我们那样干」。那段经历里，有什么是一直留在你身上的？你学到了什么？又「反学」掉了什么？

[1:10:05] Tom Verrilli

It is funny. I uh I have said to a friend before that asking someone who was at Twitter in like the 2015-16 era is a little bit like a therapist asking somebody to tell them about their childhood. It's like you know the trauma that you're you're bringing up. Yeah. For those who not familiar with that lore I think we had nine heads of product in the two years that I was there. It was that level of kind of chaos. I think my favorite quote was from someone on the partnership team who said it felt like chaos which had lived in the events. That was like how often drama was going on about the place. Um I think learning I probably took two overwhelming things away from from my time at Twitter and other than like some incredible friends and I will say that that the product diaspora from that era of Twitter is pretty incredible and and everywhere. The first one is like if you truly find product market fit like if you manage to bottle lightning doesn't matter how badly you screw up the organization uh of it like it's huge. And like Twitter genuinely had that level of product market fit that you could emotionally feel how much people loved your product. And it's a really powerful litmus test to learn relatively early in your career that that's what PMF is, not like "Hey, the graphs look okay." Right?

挺好笑的。我以前跟一个朋友说过，问一个 2015、2016 年前后待过 Twitter 的人这种问题，有点像心理治疗师让人聊聊自己的童年——你知道自己是在往外掏创伤。给不熟悉那段掌故的朋友说一下：我在那儿的两年里，产品负责人换了九任。就是这种程度的混乱。我最喜欢的一句形容来自商务合作团队的一个同事，他说那感觉就像混乱直接住进了通风管道，无孔不入——公司里天天都在上演各种狗血。要说收获，除了交到几个特别好的朋友之外——我得说，那个年代从 Twitter 走出来的产品人后来散落各处，阵容相当惊人——我从 Twitter 主要带走了两件压倒性的东西。第一件是：如果你真的找到了 product-market fit，如果你真的把闪电装进了瓶子里，那你把组织搞得再烂都无所谓，它照样是个庞然大物。Twitter 当年真的有那种级别的 PMF——你能在情绪层面直接感受到用户有多爱这个产品。在职业生涯相当早的阶段就明白「这才叫 PMF」，而不是「嘿，曲线看着还行」，这是个特别有力的试金石。

[1:11:12] Tom Verrilli

There's like a level of fervor that goes in. Um I think maybe on the flip side of like less positive is like what I definitely learned is like most of the time you hear it's really complex. It isn't. Leadership's just weak. So, you know, the two years that I was there, everyone knew we were going to have to lift the 140 character limit, right? There was working group after working group, like the project beyond 140 was like everywhere, because we knew for example that like uh people in Japan tweeted six times more often than people uh in Western markets, and it was largely when we spoke to them because kanji let you say heaps more uh in the same number of characters than uh you know, a Romance language did. We knew that was the inevitable end state, but there's obviously a bunch of like work that was needed and trade-offs, and just no one wanted to make the call, and so there was just like yet another design sprint, yet another cycle. And it was another year and a half after I left. I think it was maybe maybe even almost two years after I left before someone actually did it. And it turns out, you know, nobody died. The the soul of the place didn't fall apart. I imagine the same discussion went on for editing tweets, which took another two and a half years. Like, sometimes things aren't actually that complicated. It's just weak leadership.

那是一种带着狂热的东西。反过来说，没那么正面的一条我也确实学到了：大多数时候你听到的「这事特别复杂」，其实并不复杂，只是领导层软弱而已。我在那儿的两年里，所有人都知道 140 字限制迟早得放开，对吧？一个工作组接一个工作组，「beyond 140」这个项目到处都是。因为我们知道，比如日本人发推的频率是西方市场用户的六倍，而我们跟他们聊下来发现，很大程度上是因为汉字在同样字符数里能表达的信息量，远多于罗曼语系的语言。我们知道放开是必然的终局，但显然还有一堆活要干、一堆取舍要定，就是没人愿意拍这个板。于是就又是一轮设计冲刺，又是一个周期。一直到我离开之后又过了一年半——可能差不多两年——才终于有人真的把它做了。结果呢，也没死人啊，这地方的灵魂也没崩塌。我猜「编辑推文」这件事也是同样的讨论翻来覆去，又拖了两年半。所以说，有时候事情真没那么复杂，就是领导层软弱。

[1:12:26] Lenny Rachitsky

Yeah, it's funny how far it's come. Now you can write an entire blog post on Twitter, like articles. It's a big bet. On the product market fit piece, I think even more important there is the network effects of a Twitter, which you spent a lot of time thinking about building marketplaces. Like to me, watching Elon basically change everything. I forget who tweeted this, but just like everything changed. The brand, the name, the website,

是啊，看看现在都走到哪一步了，挺有意思——你现在能在 Twitter 上写一整篇博客，就是那个长文功能。这是个大赌注。关于 product-market fit 这一点，我觉得更关键的其实是 Twitter 的网络效应，你也花了很多时间琢磨怎么做交易市场。对我来说，看 Elon 基本上把所有东西都改了一遍——我忘了是谁发的那条推——就是说，什么都变了：品牌、名字、网站，

[1:12:46] Tom Verrilli

uh number of people working there, everything.

还有在那儿上班的人数，什么都变了。

[1:12:48] Lenny Rachitsky

people, the team, like what what was the thing that that stayed the same? and it was basically the network effects of Twitter.

人、团队，全变了。那什么东西是没变的？基本上就是 Twitter 的网络效应。

[1:12:54] Tom Verrilli

Yep.

对。

[1:12:55] Lenny Rachitsky

It's the place to be so everyone's there and that's hard to break.

那儿就是「大家都在的地方」，所以所有人都在那儿，这一点很难打破。

[1:12:58] Tom Verrilli

And even in spite of how much you tried to mess it all up it's still kicking. That's it.

而且不管你怎么折腾、怎么想把它搞砸，它还是活得好好的。就是这么回事。

[1:13:04] Tom Verrilli

If you bought a lightning genuinely you can tell.

你要是真把闪电装进了瓶子里，是真的看得出来的。

[1:13:06] Lenny Rachitsky

Yeah. Okay, I'm going to take us to a recurring corner of the podcast, fail corner. Why I like doing this is because people see you see see people like you coming on the podcast have the have this illustrious career everything's going great constantly you're just killing it and they don't see the things that don't work out and the times that you failed and in their life things often go wrong. So So the question for you is just what's an example of a time in your career where things failed something you built some career movie made that didn't work out and then what what did you learn from that experience?

对。好，接下来进入我们播客的固定环节——失败角。我喜欢做这个环节，是因为大家看到像你这样的人上播客，都是履历闪闪发光、一路顺风、一直在赢，看不到那些没成的事和失手的时刻；而在他们自己的生活里，事情却经常出岔子。所以我的问题是：你职业生涯里有没有哪一次是彻底失败的？做砸的东西，或者做错的职业选择？你又从那段经历里学到了什么？

[1:13:40] Tom Verrilli

Honestly mate and it's very nice of you to say nice things but I feel like I fail more often than I succeed across the course of my career. Genuinely to the to the blog you referenced right at the start I published in the in the back of that the actual document we use internally to talk about how we build and it starts with like batting 500 is like the goal. So like you're hoping to be right as often as you're wrong. So there's probably just too many specific examples of of times I've screwed up in my career but there probably is a really common thread to it and I think it's probably an easy trap for for any PM to fall into which is like averages mean nothing to the individual is probably the thing that I've like really scarred by. In any sizable population it's really attractive to go and look at like average utility or average adoption of something and then you find that like you know only 3% of people use something. And you're like cool we can probably get rid of that feature it's not used widely. But if you don't go a layer deeper and be like actually four like you know it's only 3% of something but there's a group of people for whom it's 100% of what they do. This is their core use case and for expediency sake because somebody doesn't want to maintain a feature anymore you're just going to deprecate it.

说实话，兄弟，你把我夸得太好听了，但我觉得整个职业生涯里，我失败的次数比成功的次数多。真的，回到你开头提到的那篇博客，我在文末附了我们内部真正在用的那份文档，讲我们怎么做产品，开篇第一句就是：目标是打出五成的击球率。也就是说，你期望自己对的次数和错的次数差不多一样多。我搞砸过的具体例子实在太多了，但里面确实有一条非常一致的主线，而且这可能是任何 PM 都容易掉进去的坑：平均值对个体毫无意义。这大概是最让我留下疤痕的一条。在任何有一定体量的用户群里，去看某个功能的平均使用率、平均渗透率，是很有诱惑力的，然后你发现只有 3% 的人在用。你会说，行吧，这功能大概可以砍了，用的人不多。但如果你不再往下钻一层，你就不会发现：虽然只占 3%，但有那么一群人，这个功能占了他们全部行为的 100%——这就是他们的核心用例。而你为了省事，因为有人不想再维护这个功能了，就直接把它下掉了。

[1:14:48] Tom Verrilli

And then it turns out you like blow up the use case of that group of humans and then to your last point about network effects, the ongoing spiral effect of that can be enormous. You know, I I think about it a lot in e-commerce of like this is somebody's business. Right? If we're just not reliable or like deprecating a feature, it's kind of like a Westfield Mall just turning off the power in the lead-up to Christmas without thinking about it. And so like there are real downstream impacts to people's businesses that often come from just like a lack of nuance in understanding metrics, particularly averages. Like they they just lie to you all the time and I think you know, I've probably screwed up in all of the ways in my career, but most of the time I've made genuinely like 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 that are hidden underneath.

结果就是，你把那群人的用例整个炸掉了。再接着你刚才说的网络效应——这件事持续发酵的螺旋效应可能极其巨大。在电商里我经常想这件事：这可是别人的生意啊。如果我们不可靠，或者随手下掉一个功能，那有点像 Westfield 商场在圣诞季前夕想都不想就把电闸拉了。所以这些对别人生意的真实下游冲击，往往就源于对指标——尤其是平均值——理解得不够细腻。平均值真的天天都在骗你。我这辈子大概各种错都犯过，但绝大多数让我事后「对自己失望」级别的决策，都是因为我依赖了平均值，而没去想藏在它底下的那些个体用例。

[1:15:36] Lenny Rachitsky

Makes me think about Jeff Bezos has a quote, "When you have data and an anecdote, trust the anecdote."

这让我想起 Jeff Bezos 那句话：当你手上既有数据又有个案时，相信个案。

[1:15:41] Tom Verrilli

Yep. That's exactly right.

对，完全正确。

[1:15:45] Lenny Rachitsky

Well, Tom, we've gone through everything I wanted to talk about. Is there anything else that you wanted to share, anything you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

好，Tom，我想聊的都聊完了。在进入我们特别精彩的闪电问答之前，你还有什么想分享的，或者想留给听众的话吗？

[1:15:55] Tom Verrilli

I think all I'd add, Mike, I've really enjoyed the discussion, so thank you, is like I don't think there is one way to to do product management and I don't think there is one way that AI will shape the industry. So like we're pretty confident that for Whatnot, the product we're building and the culture of the company that we have, that you know, this model of like fewer PMs who are more senior a lot more autonomy is right for us. Uh I don't pretend to, you know, 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 like the actual product work and getting out of that theater and I think that probably is true everywhere. Um even if you are still, you know, there are people who are wonderful people managers and really derive their satisfaction from doing that and growing and coaching and I'm sure there'll be loads of places where that's still valuable. So uh assume that at least half of what I've said is wrong in the same basis that half of the things I've probably ever shipped are not correct.

我想补充的就一点——Lenny，这次聊得特别过瘾，谢谢你——那就是：产品管理没有唯一正确的做法，AI 会怎么重塑这个行业也没有唯一的答案。就 Whatnot 来说，结合我们在做的产品和公司的文化，我们挺笃定：PM 更少、更资深、给足自主权，这个模式对我们是对的。但我不会假定整个行业都该这样。不过我确实认为，眼下是回归产品工作本源、跳出那些「表演」的最好时机，这一点大概放到哪儿都成立。当然，也确实有人是很出色的带人型管理者，成就感就来自带团队、帮人成长、做教练，我相信在很多地方这依然很有价值。所以我说的这些，你至少当一半是错的——毕竟我这辈子发布过的东西，大概也有一半是错的。

[1:16:47] Lenny Rachitsky

That's why I love these conversations and why I think this work that we do together is important is we are living through the wildest time in our careers. So much is changing. So much is being rethought as you've described and it feels like the only way we can make our way through this successfully is to learn from how other people are approaching it, see what they've learned, see what they've has not worked.

这正是我喜欢做这种对话、也觉得我们一起做的这件事有价值的原因：我们正经历职业生涯里最疯狂的一段时期。太多东西在变，太多东西像你说的那样被重新想了一遍。感觉唯一能顺利穿过去的办法，就是看别人是怎么做的、他们学到了什么、什么被证明行不通。

[1:17:07] Tom Verrilli

Take bits that resonate, ignore the bits that seem bombastic or not applicable.

有共鸣的部分拿走，听着夸张或者不适用的部分就忽略掉。

[1:17:12] Lenny Rachitsky

Exactly, cuz like no one knows exactly where Elizabeth Stone had this great way of putting it. We're in this kind of there's there's a storming phase and a norming phase and we're in the storming phase of holy Like I remember in my PM career as I started writing and stuff everyone was always asking me, "How has product management changed in the last decade?" I'm like, "It hasn't changed. It's the same basically." But it feels like now it actually has significantly changed.

完全同意，因为真的没人知道确切答案。Elizabeth Stone 有个说法我特别喜欢：一个阶段是 storming（激荡期），一个阶段是 norming（规范期），我们现在就处在那种「我靠」的 storming 阶段。我记得刚开始写东西那几年，所有人都问我：过去十年产品管理变了什么？我都说，没变啊，基本还是那一套。但现在感觉是真的变了，而且变化不小。

[1:17:34] Tom Verrilli

Although to your point earlier, actually the core thing will be the same.

不过按你前面说的，其实最核心的那部分还是不会变。

[1:17:39] Lenny Rachitsky

Yeah.

对。

[1:17:39] Tom Verrilli

Yeah.

嗯。

[1:17:40] Lenny Rachitsky

Yeah. So So that's why these are so useful just for people to see. Here's how a team is operating and what they've learned and here's things to try and it may not work for you. But this is how we learn from each other. With that, we have reached a very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. All right, here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

对。所以这类对话才这么有用——大家能看到一个团队是怎么运转的、他们学到了什么、有哪些做法可以拿去试。也许对你不管用，但我们就是这么互相学习的。说到这儿，我们进入激动人心的闪电问答环节。我有五个问题。来吧。有没有两三本书，是你最常推荐给别人的？

[1:18:01] Tom Verrilli

Okay, uh, not to be clichéd, but The Hard Thing About Hard Things I still think is the best book written about product management. Um, just from a like breadth of things that you have to go through and try and do and screw up a lot. Slightly left field, um, but the best book anyone's ever recommended to me to read which I now recommend to others, um, is The Purpose Driven Church by a pastor called Rick Warren. Uh, Emmett Shear, the CEO at 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. Uh, Uh it's literally a like how to go and build a church uh, guidebook written in the '90s. Definitely worth a read if you're in a community product of any form. Uh and the last one is if you're looking for kind of like fiction or fantasy, which is where I tend to go in the evening, Babel by R.F. Kuang.

好。第一本可能有点老生常谈，但《The Hard Thing About Hard Things》（创业维艰）我到现在还是觉得是写产品管理写得最好的一本书——它把你要经历、要尝试、还会搞砸一大堆的那些事都覆盖到了。第二本有点冷门，但它是别人推荐给我、我读完又转推给别人的最好的一本：牧师 Rick Warren 写的《The Purpose Driven Church》（直译：目标驱动的教会）。Twitch 的 CEO Emmett Shear 当年基本上是盯着所有人读这本书。它以一种很疯狂的方式在剖析：人为什么会在情感上投入某件事，以及怎么在一群人身上把这种情感投入「设计」出来。它字面上就是一本九十年代写的「如何建一间教会」的操作手册。如果你做的是任何形式的社区型产品，绝对值得一读。最后一本，如果你想看小说或者奇幻——我晚上一般就看这类——推荐 R.F. Kuang 的《Babel》（巴别塔）。

[1:18:51] Lenny Rachitsky

11 books have never been mentioned before get added to the canon of recommended books.

又有从没被人提过的书，被加进推荐书单的「正典」里了。

[1:18:55] Lenny Rachitsky

It's very fun.

特别有意思。

[1:18:57] Lenny Rachitsky

Favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed?

最近有没有特别喜欢的电影或者剧？

[1:19:01] Tom Verrilli

Uh Star City on Apple TV. Uh if you liked For All Mankind, it's kind of like the flip of that, but it's the Soviet side. It's like watching the Americans and For All Mankind mixed together.

Apple TV 上的《Star City》。如果你喜欢《For All Mankind》（为全人类），这部算是它的翻面，讲的是苏联那一侧。感觉像是《The Americans》（美国谍梦）和《For All Mankind》混在一起看。

[1:19:13] Lenny Rachitsky

Favorite product that you have recently discovered that you really like?

最近发现的、你特别喜欢的产品呢？

[1:19:17] Tom Verrilli

Uh this is a very deep cut. So I will apologize to most listeners. Um uh hopefully you've detected the accent. 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. You ever had that kind of concept where you're like, I wish the government has all my data, but I wish there was just like one place where I could with one click get my driver's license renewed, I could like transfer titles, and do all of the admin that slows you down in life? Services New South Wales actually nailed bizarre to me that I would ever come on a podcast and say, actually a government-run app in Australia, of all places, is it. But I was home recently and had to do all of my life admin, and it's incredible.

这个特别小众，先跟大多数听众说声抱歉。你们大概听出我的口音了——虽然总有人说我的澳洲口音快没了。我特别喜欢的一点是：每次回国我都会发现，澳大利亚一堆政府服务类 App 已经做得相当出色。你有没有过那种念头：反正政府握着我所有数据，那能不能就给我一个地方，一键就能续驾照、能过户、能把生活里那些拖后腿的行政杂事一次办完？Service NSW（新南威尔士州政府服务）真的做到了。我自己都觉得离谱——我居然会在播客上说，最好用的产品之一竟然是澳大利亚的一个政府 App。但我最近回去办了一堆生活杂事，体验好得惊人。

[1:19:58] Lenny Rachitsky

Wow. Something I heard recently about Australia, while we're on that topic real quick tangent from lightning round, is with a solar panel buildout that has happened there, there's more electricity available in Australia than they can use.

哇。说到澳大利亚，趁闪电问答稍微跑个题：我最近听说，因为那边光伏铺得太猛，澳大利亚的电已经多到用不完了。

[1:20:11] Tom Verrilli

Yep. Solar Solar is real huge in Australia.

没错。太阳能在澳大利亚是真的火。

[1:20:14] Lenny Rachitsky

So it's like they're giving people free electricity in the middle of the day cuz there's so much available, and they're like, use all your stuff in the middle of the day cuz this is otherwise it's going to go to waste.

所以中午那段时间，电多到直接免费送给居民用，还鼓励大家「白天赶紧把家里的电器都开起来」，不然这些电就白白浪费掉了。

[1:20:22] Tom Verrilli

There is a pitch somewhere that says if AI actually needs a loads of electricity in order to feed data centers, Australia's entire 21st century economy should be power.

所以有一种说法是：如果 AI 真的需要海量电力来喂数据中心，那澳大利亚整个 21 世纪的经济支柱就该是「电」。

[1:20:30] Lenny Rachitsky

Incredible. That's just like such good news that we are finding ways to generate so much energy from solar panels.

太厉害了。我们能靠光伏发出这么多电，这件事本身就是特别好的消息。

[1:20:37] Tom Verrilli

A small piece of regulation in what 20 years ago that said if you're building a new property you got to put solar panels on the roof and it turns out it works great.

起因就是二十来年前一条不起眼的规定：新建房产屋顶必须装太阳能板。结果证明效果好得不行。

[1:20:43] Lenny Rachitsky

Oh my god. I love this. I love this optimism of the future because you know climate energy

天哪，我太喜欢这个了。我喜欢这种对未来的乐观，毕竟气候、能源这些事……

[1:20:47] Tom Verrilli

Technology is the way through. Not not the problem.

技术是出路，而不是问题本身。

[1:20:50] Lenny Rachitsky

Mhm. Here, here. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?

嗯，说得好。好，还剩两个问题。你有没有一句常挂在心里的人生信条，工作或生活中经常回到它？

[1:20:58] Tom Verrilli

In my uni days or back in college for American translation I used to have a party trick where I'd memorized if by Rudyard Kipling cuz I thought it was like deep and really meaningful. Um, but I think if if I'm being really honest I'll figure it out is probably the closest. You know, like it turns out most things are not as hard as people think like we'll work it out. I'll figure it out. If you're willing to devote the required time, money, effort, energy, you can solve almost anything. And if you're not then it's probably not that big of a problem.

上大学那会儿——按美国的说法就是 college——我有个派对绝活：能整段背出 Rudyard Kipling 的《If》（如果），因为我那时候觉得它特别深刻、特别有意义。但说实话，现在离我最近的大概是这么一句：「我能搞定。」你会发现，大多数事情并没有大家想的那么难，办法总能想出来，我能搞定。只要你愿意投入必要的时间、金钱、精力和心力，几乎任何问题都能解决；而如果你不愿意投入，那它大概也算不上什么大问题。

[1:21:28] Lenny Rachitsky

Final question. I imagine people ask you this a lot but I'm also just curious. What's something you bought on Whatnot in the past month or so that was just awesome, delightful, surprising?

最后一个问题。我猜很多人都问过你，但我自己也真的好奇：过去这一个月左右，你在 Whatnot 上买到过什么特别棒、特别惊喜、特别让人开心的东西？

[1:21:38] Tom Verrilli

The most fun thing I bought recently I'm not joking is a live lobster. So

我最近买过最有意思的东西——我真没开玩笑——是一只活龙虾。

[1:21:44] Lenny Rachitsky

Was that a hook?

这是故意给我下的钩子吧？

[1:21:44] Tom Verrilli

We've recently one of the things that's really taken off on Whatnot is our like fresh and specialty foods kind of category and so there's this wonderful seller who goes by e-fish-co who has a seafood store down on the dock in San Diego and every morning as the boats come in he literally goes out and live streams all of the crates of seafood coming in off the boats and then he auctions them off live on Whatnot and and ships next day to your door. So I got a California spiny tail lobster shipped direct to my door courtesy of a live stream.

我们 Whatnot 上最近有个品类特别火，就是生鲜和特色食品这一块。有个特别棒的卖家，账号叫 e-fish-co，他在圣地亚哥的码头上开了家海鲜店。每天早上渔船一靠岸，他就真的跑到码头去开直播，把一箱箱刚卸下来的海鲜全拍给你看，然后当场在 Whatnot 上拍卖，第二天就发货送到你家门口。所以我就是靠看了一场直播，买到一只加州刺龙虾，直接寄到我家。

[1:22:13] Lenny Rachitsky

And how's this work? They put in ice ship it next day same day?

这具体怎么操作的？冰镇打包，然后次日达还是当天送到？

[1:22:16] Tom Verrilli

and ice kind of like container and it's UPS overnight on my door the next day. And that is why I think e-commerce is going to be great but not all encompassing because I had no intention of buying a spiny California lobster that morning.

就是冰袋加一个保温箱，走 UPS 隔夜件，第二天就到我家门口了。这也正是为什么我觉得电商会非常牛，但不可能包打天下——因为那天早上我压根就没打算买什么加州刺龙虾。

[1:22:29] Lenny Rachitsky

And my free agent decides he needs a lobster today and we

而且我的 AI agent 也不会自己决定今天该来只龙虾——

[1:22:31] Tom Verrilli

I got to be honest with you, it was delicious.

跟你说实话，那玩意儿是真好吃。

[1:22:34] Lenny Rachitsky

Amazing. I didn't know that you could buy stuff like that. Tom, where can folks find you online if they want to follow your writing / hiring? Talk about what you're hiring for and finally, how can listeners be useful to you?

太赞了。我都不知道还能这么买东西。Tom，如果大家想关注你写的东西、或者想投你们的岗位，上网去哪儿能找到你？也讲讲你们在招什么人。最后一个问题：听众能为你做点什么？

[1:22:45] Tom Verrilli

If you're looking for me online, I'm TD Robo, t d r o b b o on Twitter, which is or X, I guess, which is where I do most of my musing and some mix of product management and yelling about Warriors games, so apologies in advance. And then on LinkedIn is the other place I've got most of my kind of like work writing. I will say it's I try for quality over volume, so don't expect daily daily drops from me on either.

想在网上找我的话，我在 Twitter——现在叫 X 了——上是 TD Robo，t-d-r-o-b-b-o。我大部分碎碎念都发在那儿，一半是产品管理，一半是看勇士队比赛时的骂骂咧咧，先向大家道个歉。另一个地方是 LinkedIn，我偏工作向的写作基本都在那边。不过得说一句，我追求的是质量不是数量，所以两个平台都别指望我天天更新。

[1:23:09] Lenny Rachitsky

Just bang those. Just bang those once a year.

全是爆款嘛。一年放一发爆款就够了。

[1:23:11] Tom Verrilli

That was the nicest thing anyone said about me in ages. Just just dropping casual bang those. And how can folks be be helpful? Honestly, would always welcome feedback around what not and how people are finding it and what more we can do better. So like hit me up on either of those platforms with, you know, hot takes, feedback or thoughts.

这是我好久以来听到的最好听的一句话了——你就这么随口甩出一句「全是爆款」。至于大家能怎么帮到我？说实话，我一直特别欢迎关于 Whatnot 的反馈：大家用下来感觉怎么样、我们还能在哪些地方做得更好。所以不管是犀利的吐槽、意见还是想法，在这两个平台上随时找我聊。

[1:23:28] Lenny Rachitsky

And then you're hiring PMs even spite of the many strong opinions about product management. Maybe just talk about that and where folks can apply.

另外你们还在招 PM——尽管你对产品经理这个职业有那么多犀利的看法。要不聊聊这块，还有大家该去哪儿投简历。

[1:23:34] Tom Verrilli

Sure. Listen, we are constantly looking for PMs. The the intent of kind of like explaining how many people applied versus hired was not to discourage people. It was more along the lines of like the proliferation of product management doesn't itself naturally lend to the people with the skill set that you and I spent the better part of 90 minutes talking about right now. But, you know, we hired two people yesterday. I'm very excited for them to come start and we've always got a variety of of PM roles open. The Whatnot, if you just kind of Google Whatnot jobs, the the right kind of application process will will pop up there. Or I've found that, you know, the valley is small enough and product management is not that kind of obscure that you can probably find one of the 20 or so humans who work at Whatnot and and reach out to them. But we're looking at a variety of things right now. Payments very high on on our list of what we're doing as well as logistics. So if anyone is really excited to come work on the future of shipping, lobsters overnight, it turns out there's quite a lot of nuance product we have to happen there.

没问题。听我说，我们一直在招 PM。我前面讲多少人投递、最后只录了几个，不是为了劝退大家，我更想表达的是：产品经理这个岗位泛滥了，但泛滥本身并不会自然长出你我刚刚花了一个半小时聊的那套能力。不过我们昨天刚录了两个人，特别期待他们来入职，而且我们手上一直有各种 PM 岗位在开。想投 Whatnot 的话，你直接 Google 一下「Whatnot jobs」，正规的申请入口就出来了。或者我发现硅谷其实挺小的，产品经理这圈子也没那么隐秘，你八成能找到在 Whatnot 工作的那二十来号人里的某一个，直接联系他。我们现在在看好几个方向，支付在我们的优先级清单上非常靠前，还有物流。所以如果有人特别想来做「隔夜把龙虾寄到家」这件事的未来形态——事实证明，这里头要解决的产品细节相当多。

[1:24:28] Lenny Rachitsky

Amazing. Tom, thank you so much for being here.

太棒了。Tom，非常感谢你来上节目。

[1:24:31] Tom Verrilli

It was a pleasure, mate. Thanks for having me.

很荣幸，兄弟。谢谢你邀请我。

[1:24:33] Lenny Rachitsky

Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. [music] See you in the next episode.

各位，拜拜。非常感谢大家收听。如果你觉得这期有价值，可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或者你常用的播客 App 上订阅本节目。也欢迎给我们打个分或者留条评价，这真的能帮更多听众发现这档播客。所有往期节目和节目的更多信息，都可以在 lennyspodcast.com 上找到。[音乐] 我们下期见。