Whatnot received 31,832 PM applications in two years and hired one. Lenny Rachitsky discusses which PM traits are becoming more valuable at the company and which are fading as the hiring bar shifts.
wrote this brutal quote, in the last 2 years, 31,832 people applied to be a product manager at Whatnot. We hired one.
Yes, sir.
What's kind of like trending up in really successful PMs at Whatnot and what's maybe trending down?
There's definitely a group of PMs 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 relationships. Tell me about a time when you failed. You're 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, can we see both the macro thinking and the micro thinking? And are you specific about the things that you've built? There's an awful lot of folks who've worked at FAANG, Uber, pick any scale company where they basically babysat things that existed and they've maybe 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, but I made decisions along the way and we moved. Because I think 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.
