Tom Verrilli (Whatnot CPO) borrows Elizabeth Stone's group-development framing — storming before norming — to describe the current AI-driven churn in what a product manager's job even is. The claim is that today's volatility (role definitions, best practices, team shapes all in flux) is a phase, not the new permanent shape of the industry; a norming period follows once the field converges on shared practice.
As evidence of the storming phase he points to senior technical leaders taking individual-contributor roles at Anthropic — CTOs from Workday, Instagram, Box, and super.com — read as a broader signal that seniority is flowing back toward hands-on work industry-wide, not just inside Whatnot's own org design.
He pairs this with an explicit disclaimer: "I don't think there is one way to do product management and I don't think there is one way that AI will shape the industry" — the storming framing is offered as description, not as Whatnot prescribing the destination.
Related: AI-Driven Bifurcation of Product Manager Roles, IC-First Product Leadership (Keep Top PMs Doing the Work), Vision Time Horizons Are Compressing Under AI-Driven Change.