Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Whatnot's CPO: "Hire great people and get out of their way" is overrated. | Tom Verrilli

7 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this interview excerpt, Tom Verrilli, Chief Product Officer at Whatnot, challenges the popular management mantra “hire great people and get out of their way.” He argues that simply delegating without ongoing involvement fails to maximize an organization’s potential. Verrilli emphasizes the importance of leaders working directly alongside their teams—“in the trenches”—to collaboratively solve problems. He illustrates this with a story about Whatnot’s founder and CEO, Grant, who, when he doubts a decision in a review, clears his schedule to sit with the team and figure out a solution. The conversation suggests that active, hands‑on leadership and continuous engagement are more effective than a hands‑off delegation model.

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What are some things you've learned about how to get the most out of the people you hire? You mentioned this kind of contrarian take that you don't agree with this, hire great people, get out of their way. Hire great people and get out of their way became this kind of like macro saying for let them work out what the roadmap 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 actually working alongside those teams, like in the trenches, trying to solve something. Really, really powerful. 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 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.