Flat product orgs may outperform layered hierarchies on cost and output alike
The standard scaling playbook says growth requires management layers. Tom Verrilli of Whatnot says that assumption is wrong, and he has a pointed cost argument to back it up. The case for fewer, better-paid senior individual contributors is worth taking seriously.
Tom Verrilli, a product leader at Whatnot, challenges one of the most durable assumptions in organizational design: that leadership staying close to the work is a liability at scale. The conventional advice, as Verrilli describes it, holds that growing companies must add management layers or risk losing coherence. His experience at Whatnot points the other way.
“What we found is that’s actually not true,” Verrilli says, describing years of external pressure to hire more layers and the choice to resist it. The claim is specific to product organizations and comes with a direct cost argument, not just an appeal to culture or speed. That grounding is what makes it worth examining.
The arithmetic Verrilli lays out is straightforward. A standard product hierarchy, five individual contributors at a senior level reporting to a manager, and four of those managers reporting to a vice president, carries a combined compensation load that, when totaled, can look very different from what it buys. His argument is that a smaller number of high-caliber senior individual contributors, paid at vice-president-level rates, can deliver equivalent or greater impact at lower total cost. The trade is headcount for seniority and autonomy.
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? Tom Verrilli
This framing runs against a deeply embedded piece of scaling orthodoxy. The Journal of Organization Design has published multiple reviews of flatter structures in recent years, with researchers noting that the appeal of fewer layers, faster decisions, and stronger talent retention is well understood, but that the risks of dysfunction are just as real. The question most of that literature wrestles with is not whether flat can work, but under what conditions and at what size. Verrilli’s contribution is less theoretical: it is a practitioner’s account of a specific structure holding up under growth pressure.
The public record offers at least one comparable case. GitLab operates without a vice president of product or product directors, placing the full weight of product leadership on individual managers working without formal hierarchical authority. That model has been stress-tested long enough to become part of GitLab’s documented operating approach. It does not prove the model generalizes, but it demonstrates that the structure can persist beyond the startup phase.
What Verrilli’s argument does not settle is where the limits are. The cost math holds as long as the senior individual contributors exist and can be recruited. The supply of people capable of operating at that level without management scaffolding is not unlimited, and the compensation premium required to attract them narrows the savings the model promises. Verrilli’s framing assumes the three high-impact people are available to hire. That assumption deserves scrutiny before the arithmetic is treated as a general prescription.
Still, the challenge to the default is serious. The layered org chart is often treated as the cost of operating at scale, a necessary overhead. If that overhead is itself the inefficiency rather than the flatness founders are warned against, the design question for growing product organizations shifts considerably. The evidence from Whatnot is one data point from one company, presented by someone with an interest in validating a choice already made. That is a reason to hold the conclusion lightly, not to dismiss the arithmetic. The cost case is real. Whether the conditions required to make it work are reproducible is the question practitioners should be asking.