For people who build product
Sven Balnojan recommends these
thdpth.comFour conversations about how the work actually gets done — teams, judgment, and the uncomfortable question of whether the job should exist at all.
4 episodes · 5h 16m total
Updated 4 hours ago
- 1Listen
This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth1 hr 25 min
Whatnot's chief product officer arguing that product management should not exist as a separate function.
It would be easy to dismiss as provocation, except he ran product at Twitch before this — so he is describing something he has actually operated rather than something he read. The argument is roughly that the coordination a PM provides is a symptom: if you need someone whose full-time job is keeping engineering and design pointed the same way, something upstream is already broken.
I do not fully buy it. But it is the most concrete version of that argument I have heard, and it is worth listening to with your own org in mind rather than in the abstract.
- 2Listen
Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth1 hr 19 min
The idea that companies are becoming a series of loops rather than a set of departments. Worth it for the framing even if you do not buy all of it.
- 3Listen
Tobi Lütke: AI Agents, Better Decisions, and the Future of Work
The Knowledge Project1 hr 6 min
Shopify's founder on running an AI council over his hardest decisions, and why taste and judgment get more valuable as the mechanical parts get automated.
- 4Listen
YETI: Roy and Ryan Seiders. How Two Brothers Turned a $400 Cooler Into a $2 Billion Brand
How I Built This with Guy Raz1 hr 25 min
Two brothers build a cooler retailers were certain nobody would pay for. A clean case of ignoring the addressable-market argument and turning out to be right.
That's what Sven Balnojan keeps coming back to. What do you keep telling people to listen to?
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