How Anthropic’s product team moves faster than anyone else | Cat Wu (Head of Product, Claude Code)

[00:00] I think it is very hard to be the right amount of AGI pilled. It's very easy to build the product for the super AGI strong model. The hard thing is figuring out for the current model, how do you elicit the maximum capability. I've never seen anything like the pace you folks at Anthropic are shipping at. We want to remove every single barrier to shipping things. The timelines for a lot of our product features have gone down from six months to one month and sometimes to even one [00:30] like they're approaching it very incorrectly.

The PM role is changing a lot. It's changing really quickly. The thing that is extremely important for building AI native products is iterating so quickly, figuring out a way for you to actually launch features every single week. What do you think are the emerging skills PMs need to develop? It comes back to product taste. As code becomes much cheaper to write, the thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write. [00:56] Today my guest is Kat Wu, Head of Product for Cloud Code and co-work at Anthropic. [01:01] Kat is at the center of everything that is changing in AI and product and building, and she and her team are building the product that is most changing the way that we all build our products.

[01:12] She is so full of insights and wisdom and lessons. This is an episode you cannot miss. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's product com for an insane set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. [01:27] With that, I bring you Kat Wu. [01:32] Kat, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. [01:37] I have so many questions. I'm so excited to have you on this podcast. [01:41] I want to start with giving people an understanding of your role alongside Boris. [01:46] Everybody knows Boris.

His episode is the number one most popular episode on this podcast, no pressure. [01:52] He created Cloud Code, he leads the Ench team, ships a bazillion PRs a day from his phone, just like... [01:58] I don't even know the numbers anymore. [02:00] I think people don't give you enough credit for the success that Claude Code has had and Cowork and all the things you all are building. [02:08] Help us understand your role on the team, how you work with Boris, how you split responsibilities. Just like what does the PMR look like on the CloudCo team?

I feel very lucky to work with Boris. He's been an amazing thought partner. He's our tech lead. He's very much the product visionary. [02:23] And he is great at setting like this is what the product needs to be in like three months, six months from now. This is like what the AGI pill version of the product is. [02:33] And a lot of my role is figuring out, OK, what is the path from where we are today to like [02:38] that vision three to six months from now. [02:42] I spend more of my time on the cross-functional, so making sure that our marketing team, sales team, finance, capacity, etc.

are bought in on the plan and that we're all rowing the same direction. [02:55] and the [02:56] once the feature is ready, that there aren't any blockers to shipping it. I think in many ways it works well because we kind of like mind meld, but it is actually like remarkably blurry of a line. Like I think we're like 80% mind meld. And then there's like this 20% of things that like maybe I care a lot more about them. Boris, like I'll drive those and like 20% where he cares a lot more than me.

And he just like drives those. [03:19] This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Vercel, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers [03:49] specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS.

And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. [04:19] WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to com to make your app enterprise-ready today. [04:30] Something that you shared actually before we started recording is the fact that you're interviewing [04:35] hundreds of PMs all the time, like [04:37] If I had a nickel every time someone asked me for an intro to someone at Anthropic to go work at Anthropic as a PM, I'd have 30 billion in ARR.

It's just like the number one place people want to go work at. So I can only imagine how many PMs you're interviewing. [04:50] You told me that you're just seeing people doing it wrong. [04:54] the way they're approaching what they think it takes to be a successful aipm [04:58] Talk about what you're seeing and what people need to understand about what it is, what it takes to be successful these days. I think before AI, technology shifts were a lot slower. So you could plan on the six to 12 month time horizons.

[05:11] And because you were shipping features at a bit of a slower rate, [05:15] there was a lot more emphasis on coordinating with all the other partner teams to make sure that [05:21] There are shipping features that unblock your features because code at that time was very expensive to make. [05:26] I think now with AI and with how much that has accelerated engineering, [05:31] and with how quickly the model capabilities are improving, [05:35] The timelines for a lot of our product features have gone down from six months, [05:40] to one month and sometimes to one week or even one day.

[05:43] And with that, we actually need to make sure that products ship quite quickly and [05:50] What that means is as a PM, [05:52] there should be less emphasis on. [05:55] making sure that you're aligning your like multi-quarter roadmaps with your partner teams and more emphasis on okay how can we figure out the fastest way to get something out the door how can we figure out how to make like a concept corner of our product suite where we can just [06:13] An engineer has an idea or a PM has an idea.

And by the end of the week, we are able to get into our users' hands. I think the PMs who do the best on AI native products, [06:23] are the ones who can figure out [06:26] how can I shorten the time from having this idea to actually getting the product in the hands of users and help define what are the most important tasks that need to work out of the box for my product? So what I love about this is what you're saying is just like people haven't grasped how fast they need to move and what [06:44] How much of the job now is just moving, is helping the team move fast?

[06:48] What what helps do that? What do you what do you do? What does your PM team do to help them move this fast? [06:54] other than have access to the most advanced models? I think the first thing is to set clear goals. Because LLMs are so general, that actually creates a lot of ambiguity in who we're building for, what problems we're trying to solve, what the top use cases are. And so I think a great PM is able to say, "Okay, our key user is professional developers. [07:15] The main problem that we want to solve for this feature is maybe there's like too many permission prompts and people are feeling fatigue.

[07:23] And the use case is we want professional developers at enterprises to safely get to zero permission prompts. And that actually sets a pretty clear goal because it rules out a lot of potential approaches for reducing permission prompts so that people can get a lot more done with one prompt. [07:42] Then I think the second thing that's very important is [07:46] figuring out some repeatable process for getting these features shipped. So for Cloud Code, what we do is we actually ship almost all of our features in Research Preview. [07:56] We clearly brand this when we ship something so that users know that this is an early product, this is just an idea, this is just something that we're trying to get feedback on and iterating on, and that this might not be supported forever.

[08:09] And what this does is it reduces our commitment for shipping something. We can just get something out in a week or two. [08:16] And the third thing that a PM should do is help create the framework for the team so that they know when to pull in cross-functional partners and what those cross-functional partners expectations are. So for example, we have a really tight process between engineering, marketing, and docs. So when engineers have a feature that they feel is ready and that we've dogfooded internally, they post it in our evergreen launch room.

And then Sarah, who leads our docs, and Alex, who leads PMM, and Tarek, and Lydia on DevRel, [08:46] just jump in and can turn around the marketing announcement for it the very next day. And because we have this really tight process, it lowers the friction for any engineer to ship something. PM is the role that should be setting this up. [08:59] How do PRDs fit into this? The fact that you [09:01] said that goals are really important, but just like being aligned on what does success look like? Who is this for?

Who is this now for? [09:07] Are you writing PRDs? Is it just like a couple of bullet points? How has that evolved in the world of APM? So there's two things that we do. One is we have very rigorous metrics and we do metrics readouts with the entire team every week. The goal of this is to make sure that everyone deeply understands all the facets of our business, what our key goals are, how they're trending and what drives them. [09:29] The second thing that we do is we have this list of team principles.

[09:33] This includes who our key users are, why those are our key users, [09:38] And the reason that we articulate all of this is so that everybody on the team feels like they understand how our business works. They understand what's important to us and what we're willing to trade off. And it lets people make decisions by themselves without. [09:52] feeling like they're blocked on PM or any other stakeholder. I love how so much of this is like, okay, we still need PMs in the future. There's so much talk of like, why do we need PMs?

We're just going to ship and build leading engineers. [10:02] Oh, we actually do PRDs sometimes. So I think for features that are like particularly ambiguous, it does help to write out just a one pager on what the goals are, what the [10:14] delightful use cases are, what the failure modes currently are that we need to fix. [10:19] And there are occasionally some projects, especially things that require heavy infrastructure. [10:24] that do take many months. And for those situations, we do write PRDs still. I want to drill a little bit further into just how you're able to move so fast.

[10:34] I've never seen anything like the pace folks at Anthropoc are shipping at. [10:38] like someone [10:40] made this calendar of launches across Anthropoc, and it was literally... [10:44] Every day there was like a major feature or product. [10:47] So one question people had online is, [10:50] You guys just launched this incredible model mythos that is still in preview because it's so powerful. People are a little afraid of what it can do. [10:59] Have you guys been using this? Is this part of the reason you've been able to move so fast?

[11:03] We've been moving pretty fast for [11:06] several quarters now, so I think it's not fully Mythos. Mythos is an incredibly powerful model. We do use the models internally. [11:15] And I think this has increased our rate of shipping a little bit, but I don't think it explains the bulk of the increase. I think a lot of it is the process and the expectation on the team. So we're very low on process. We want to remove every single barrier to shipping things. We want to make sure every single person on the team [11:33] feels empowered to take their idea from just an idea to like out in the world in less than a week, sometimes even in a day.

Cool. Oh, man. What an advantage to have the best model and also be building product at Sokol. We are very lucky to be able to work with the Frontier models. Oh, my God. What an awesome advantage. Just like build a thing and then use it and then accelerate faster. It's so interesting. [11:55] There's a couple of these other side things I want to just kind of go on these side quests on this conversation. There's so much happening with Anthropic, and I'm so curious to get your insight. [12:03] One is... [12:04] A week ago or so, the whole source code of Cloud Code leaked.

Somebody got it out there. I think it was a mistake. Someone made it. [12:11] Is there anything you comment there, just like what happened, what went wrong, what should people know? So we immediately looked into this when we saw it. [12:18] We realized that this was the result of human error. There is a human working with Claude to write PR. This was just an update to how we release our packages. And it actually went through two layers of human review. And so this was a result of human error. And we've hardened our processes to make sure that it doesn't happen in the future.

Is this person still adanthropic? Are they doing all right? [12:48] to add more safeguards so that doesn't happen again. And so that's what we've been focused on and most of those have shipped. - Okay, another question I had, [12:56] is Open Claw. [12:57] So recently there's been this move to... [13:02] keep people from using Claude's subscription with their open clause, [13:06] People got really upset. They're confused why this is happening. It feels like you're [13:10] There's like, you know, harm costs to the open source community. [13:14] What do people need to understand about what went into this decision?

So we've been seeing a lot of demand for Quad. [13:21] And we've been working very hard to both scale our infrastructure and also to make our harness more token efficient so that you can get more usage out of it. [13:29] It wasn't designed for third party products which have different [13:34] usage patterns at our first party ones. We spent a bunch of time [13:39] trying to figure out what is the most seamless transition that we can offer. And so I was very happy to be able to say that everyone gets some credits alongside their subscription.

[13:50] But yeah, we did have to make the hard decision that we needed to prioritize our first products and our API. And so this is [13:58] This is a decision that resulted from that. [14:01] Yeah, to me it makes so much sense. You guys are subsidizing... [14:05] This usage at like 200 bucks a month. It's like basically unlimited use of this. And I think people don't understand. Businesses are trying to make money. [14:14] We're trying to be profitable here. We can't just give away compute. [14:17] when it's so in demand.

So I get it. [14:19] Coming back to the PM team, what is just like the PM team look like at Anthropic? How many PMs are there? How are they kind of organized? [14:26] Yeah, so we have a few PM teams. I think we're maybe around 30 or 40 PMs right now. [14:32] So we have the Research PM team, [14:34] who Diane leads. And this team is responsible for understanding all of the feedback from our customers for models and then feeding that to the best research team to act on it. And they also shepherd the model launch.

[14:48] There's the Cloud Developer Platform team that maintains the APIs that Cloud Code is built on top of. [14:55] And they also release things like Managed Agents, which is a way for you to build your agents and we can host it on your behalf. [15:03] And then there's QuadCode that works on both QuadCode and the Cowork core products. [15:08] There's Enterprise that helps make Cloud Code and Co-Work easier to adopt for all of our Enterprise customers. This is everything from cost controls, RBAC, security controls, [15:20] and just making sure that these enterprises feel very confident and comfortable using our tools.

[15:27] Then we also have our growth team that is responsible for growing across our entire product suite. We work very closely with them on quad-code and co-work growth. [15:36] And I know they also work with our other teams on CDP growth, so growth of people who use the Cloud API. So speaking of growth, so Amal was just on the podcast. [15:46] You have this really interesting insight that most people haven't been sharing. [15:49] There's always the sense that we need fewer PMs in the future. Why do we need PMs? Engineers can just ship.

[15:55] His take is that because engineers are moving so fast, [15:58] PMs and designers are squeezed. There's less time to stay on top of everything that is happening. There's a feature shipping every day. [16:05] So his take is he needs more PMs because it's hard to keep up. What's your take there? Do you feel like there will be an increase in hiring of PMs? [16:13] What do you think is going on with the PM profession long term? I think all of the roles are merging. PMs are doing some engineering work.

Engineers are doing PM work. Designers are PMing and also landing code. [16:25] you can either hire a lot more engineers who have great product taste or you can [16:30] keep your engineering hiring the same and hire a lot more PMs to help guide some of their work. On our team, we're... [16:39] pretty focused on hiring engineers with great product taste. This way we can reduce the amount of overhead for shipping any product like [16:49] There are many engineers on our team who are fully able to end to end go from see user feedback on Twitter through to like ship a product at the end of the week with almost no product involvement.

And this I think is actually like the most efficient way to ship something. [17:05] So I think like. Engineering PM are kind of overlapping and you will get a lot of benefit from having more of either. I think product taste is still a very rare skill to have and. [17:20] We'll pretty much hire anyone who we feel has... [17:23] demonstrated this strongly. [17:25] And your background was in engineering, right? Yeah, I was an engineer for many years. [17:30] I was then a VC very briefly before [17:33] Join Anthropic. [17:34] And actually almost all the PMs on our team have either been engineers or ship code here on QuadCode.

And so that's one of the things that I think helps build trust with the team and also just enables us to move a lot faster. And then actually our designers also have been front end engineers before. Wow. Because that's the big question. Like there's definitely this merging that's happening. The Venn diagrams are combining. I think the big question for a lot of people is if you're coming from engineering or product or design, [18:04] which of those core skills is going to be most valuable. I could see it on Anthropic and on Cloud Code, engineering is very valuable.

I'm curious if other companies, [18:11] if you have a design background becoming a PM is more valuable or just a PM PM. I still think it comes back to product taste like as code becomes much cheaper to write. [18:22] The thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write. Like what is the right UX for this feature? What is the most delightful way that a user can experience it? [18:33] We get tens of thousands of GitHub issues asking for every single thing under the sun and [18:40] It takes a lot of...

[18:42] care and... [18:44] taste to figure out, okay, which of these is worth building and what is the right way to build it? And I think that [18:50] That skill set can come from any background, but I think that's the most important thing. [18:53] I think the reason why an engineering background is particularly useful, at least for the next few months, [19:00] is if you have an engineering background, you have a better sense for how hard something should be. [19:06] And that's often a factor in what you choose to build.

So like if something is very easy to build, then [19:11] Maybe instead of debating it, you just spend an hour doing it. [19:14] But if something is harder to build and you know that up front, then you know that, okay, this will just cost a lot more for our team to get this out the door. So it helps a bit with the prioritization. [19:27] You said for the next few months, is that just because the models will get so good potentially in the next few months, you may not even need to know that as much?

[19:37] I think the valued skill sets does change quite frequently. [19:41] And so it's really hard to predict more than a few months out. [19:45] So it's less a commentary on what shift I think will happen and more of a commentary that I think large shifts will happen. So you're not saying that's when Mythos comes out and will change everything and we don't need to know anything about engineering. [19:59] No, I'm just saying that every few months it seems like there's a... [20:03] There's a large... [20:05] increase encoding capability which then [20:07] changes what other roles are valuable.

I think the most important thing is that [20:13] To be able to [20:16] to have this like first principles thinking where you can figure out [20:21] how the tech landscape is changing [20:24] What? [20:25] the team really needs from you and to like jump in and fix that hole because [20:31] I think the work... [20:33] is becoming more amorphous, which means that [20:37] A great PM is able to [20:39] understand what all the gaps are to figure out what the highest priority ones are. And then to just like figure out, OK, how do I learn that skill set or what is like the skill set that I have?

[20:49] that I can apply to this challenge. [20:53] I think the current environment, [20:55] Values people who are [20:57] who are able to wear a lot of hats are able to swap them [21:01] and are like very low ego about what work they do to help the team move faster. I love this answer. There's this question I've been asking [21:09] people in your shoes, folks that are kind of at the bleeding edge of what AI is capable of and building with the latest tools, which is just like, [21:15] where will human brains continue to be useful and necessary for [21:19] a while until we get to super intelligence.

[21:22] What I'm hearing here is essentially... [21:24] Thank you. [21:25] picking the things to work on, [21:27] knowing where the market's going and figuring out what to prioritize essentially. And then it's [21:32] knowing if the thing you've built is good and right, and getting it out there in some early version at least. [21:37] Does that sound right? Is there anything else of just like where human brains will continue to be [21:40] useful for at least the next few months. [21:43] I think humans still... [21:45] provide a level of common sense that the models don't.

[21:49] And there's like a thousand moving pieces to any product launch. Some of them are very small, but there's [21:56] always a lot that could potentially go wrong. [21:59] I think the model doesn't always have a great sense of... [22:02] who all the stakeholders are, how they relate to each other, what their preferences are, what are the right venues to communicate with them to keep them on board. [22:10] I think a lot of this like more tacit common sense like EQ kind of knowledge is still very valuable. [22:18] Of course, we want the models to get better at this, and I think they will be.

[22:22] But right now, I think there's still gaps. [22:24] How do you just kind of deal as a human going through so much constant change just like [22:29] just being on the inside of the tornado maybe it's calm there but just like how do you how do you stay on top of what's going on how you stay [22:36] saying through all this craziness that we're moving through. [22:39] I think our team is all people who lean into the chaos. So we try to face every challenge with a smile because there's always so much going on.

There's all there's always so many risks and tricky situations that, you know, if you get too stressed about anything, you'll burn out. And so we really look for people who. [22:58] can kind of like look at a challenge, be like, whew, that's going to be hard, but I'm excited to tackle it and I'm going to do the best that I possibly can. And I know I won't be perfect. [23:08] But... [23:09] I'll be able to sleep at night knowing that I did my best. That's an interesting answer to just like what skills will be important in this future.

Because it's I forget who said this, maybe Ben Mann, that this is the most normal. This is the world will ever be. Yeah, it definitely gets harder. Like, I feel like. [23:25] There are a lot of weeks where maybe Sunday night there's some like P0 and then by Monday there's like a P00 and by Monday afternoon there's a P000 and you're like, wow, I can't believe I was so worried about that P0 from Sunday. [23:40] But I think you just have to acknowledge that there's only so much that you can do that you need to sleep well so that you can make good decisions next day.

[23:47] and just like brutally prioritize where you spend your time. What's the most important thing to get right and be OK letting things go like there's [23:55] There's products that we ship that aren't as polished as I wish they were. [24:00] But. [24:01] You know, our top goal is to help empower professional developers. And if a product isn't [24:08] Successful as long as it's not blocking the core use case, [24:12] It's okay because we'll hear the feedback and we'll fix in the next release. Oh [24:17] Launching a feature that is buggy is the kind of thing that would have kept me up at night.

[24:21] But it is something that I am now able to live with knowing that [24:27] We're going to get that quick feedback and we're going to fix it in the next release. [24:31] What I'm imagining is there's that gif, I think it's maybe from Pirates of the Caribbean, where it's this guy walking down a pair of stairs on a ship and the whole ship is just being demolished around him and he's so chill, just strolling down the staircase as everything's falling apart. [24:44] And that's interesting because everyone I've met from Anthropic is just so chill.

[24:48] and just so optimistic. You have to be. [24:50] Yeah, I think that's a really interesting insight is just like, [24:54] having this calmness and optimism versus just like, oh my god, everything's crazy and going nuts. [25:00] Yeah, I think if you don't have it, you'll get pretty burnt out. [25:03] I think we also tend to hire people who... [25:06] have been in the industry for a while and have experienced lots of ups and downs and [25:11] have a good sense for [25:14] what gives them energy and how to maintain their energy over time.

And I think that's helped us a lot. [25:20] So interesting. Something that I wanted to ask about it. So there's this roles blurring. Engineers are becoming PMs. Everyone's dogs are cats. Everyone's everyone. What do we lose in that in that world? Do we lose like career ladders and clear career paths? [25:33] Did we lose design consistency, code quality? You know, there's probably some downsides. [25:38] What are some things you find are just like, okay, that's something we're sacrificing for the greater good? [25:42] We're sacrificing product consistency. [25:45] Historically, when code was expensive to write, you would carefully plan out everything in your product suite, how every product relates to each other, what the use case for every single one is, how they integrate, and you would pretty much have one product for each use case.

[26:02] And now with AI moving so quickly and with so many ideas that we need to test out, we do sometimes have [26:10] features that overlap with each other. [26:13] A lot of the times it's because there's two form factors that we love internally, and we want the external audience to tell us which one is better. [26:22] What that means for someone who's a new user, though, is [26:27] A new user might not know, okay, what is the best path to accomplish X? [26:32] There is... [26:34] more education we need to do to help people understand what the core features are and what the best practices are for using them.

[26:41] I think this is the... [26:43] this is the cost of launching a lot of features. I think users also feel like it's hard to keep up with the latest. [26:52] Usually in traditional PM, you ship a feature every month or quarter. And so it's really easy for a user to understand, okay, I just need to check in on this once a month, and I'll learn some new things. And if I ignore it for six months, [27:08] it's fine, I don't feel like I'm missing out. [27:10] I think with these agentic [27:12] Tools?

[27:13] not just called code and co-work, but like across the whole ecosystem, people feel this need to like [27:18] Check Twitter every single day to see what the absolute latest thing is. [27:23] And, [27:24] I think there's more we can do to help people. [27:28] feel less like they're on this [27:30] ever increasingly fast treadmill. [27:34] and that they feel like [27:36] I would love people to feel like they can just open these tools, the tools will educate them. [27:41] or like teach them what they want to know and that they can [27:45] just.

[27:46] Feel more ball along. [27:48] Yeah, I saw you launch this really interesting feature the other day. I think it's slash power up. [27:51] where it basically walks you through all the cool ways and basically all the best practices to use cloud code. Is that kind of all in these lines? Yeah, exactly. So in the past, we didn't actually want to do something like PowerUp because we felt like the product should be intuitive enough that you can, that you don't actually need to go through any tutorial. [28:10] Over time, we've just realized that there's just so many features and there's so much demands for a built-in onboarding experience that we diverged a bit from our original principle saying no onboarding flow and added this because there's just so many users who wanted to know.

[28:27] There's 100 features. What are the 10 that I absolutely need to use? And so we put that together. Yeah, it's such a bizarre world. So Anthropic has been really successful with B2B enterprises, where traditionally you don't launch a bunch of stuff. You just kind of have quarterly release maybe, and it's like the opposite of every day we got some new. [28:43] So just maybe following that thread, the run Anthropic has been on is just [28:47] otherworldly. [28:49] Anthropic was way behind when it started. It was, Amol shared this, just like one of the least funded companies, didn't have distribution, wasn't the first to go, OpenAI was way ahead.

It was just like, no way. [29:00] Anthropica has any chance to compete significantly long-term. [29:03] Now it's just killing it, just beating the biggest companies, teams, so much. Just like the growth is just like $11 billion in ARR in one month. By the time this comes out, it'll probably be a... [29:18] even higher. [29:20] just being on the inside, what [29:22] What are some ingredients that have allowed Anthropic to be this successful and kind of come from behind and... [29:28] do this well. [29:29] The two most important things are one, [29:31] This unifying mission.

It's hard to state how [29:36] important this is, we hire people who care most about bringing safe AGI to all of humanity. [29:44] And this is actually something that we reference frequently in our decisions about what our entire product org should focus on shipping. [29:54] And because we put this mission above any individual product line, we're able to make very fast decisions that cut across the entire org and execute on them. [30:05] in a unified way. So I think this is like something that I've never seen at a company of R scale.

And so just to make sure that's clear, so essentially having the number one mission is safety, alignment, making sure AI is good for the world. And you're saying just having that as a clear, [30:21] mission makes decisions a lot easier to make. If there's two competing priorities, we'll talk about which one is more important for Anthropik's mission. [30:29] And it makes it a lot easier to decide which of the two we prioritize and then everyone [30:36] we'll all stand behind the one that we decide. [30:39] And so sometimes that means that like, hey, we want to ship something on cloud code, but this other thing is more important.

And so we deprioritize shipping this and we just wait until later. What's really interesting about that is that explains, I think, versus another company, maybe rhymes with Vopen AI, did a lot of different things. [30:55] And [30:56] what I'm hearing here essentially is like, okay, we're not going to launch social network. We're not going to launch [31:00] a feed of interesting information because it's not aligned to this mission and [31:05] And that has kept anthropic focused, which seems to be a core ingredient to the success. [31:10] Well, when I think about mission, I think about...

[31:13] putting anthropics goals ahead of any individual org or any individual product and so [31:20] For me, it's... [31:22] I think the second thing that we're very good as focus, I think mission to me is slightly different. Mission means that. [31:31] Teams are willing to make sacrifices that hurt their own goals and their own KRs in service of Anthropics goals and Anthropics KRs. [31:39] and [31:41] People are very happy to make those trade-offs. So like an extreme example is if cloud code failed, but Anthropics succeeded, I would be extremely happy.

[31:52] And like we're like the whole team is very willing to make decisions. [31:56] that follow that chain of thought. [31:58] I don't know if you can talk about this in depth, but do you feel like the open-claw decision is a part of this? Just like, okay, this is not furthering the mission of Anthropic. We need to... [32:07] stop this because it's not working in the way we want it to work. [32:10] I think one of the most important things for Anthropic is to... [32:14] grow the number of users that we're able to reach.

One of the ways that we're able to do this is with the cloud subscriptions with our first party products. And so we just very much want to double down on that. But that does come at the expense of third party products sometimes. So we've been talking about cloud, co-work, all these things, something that I want to make sure people [32:33] And I'm curious just how you use these tools. So there's Cloud Code, there's Cloud Desktop/Web, [32:38] There's co-work. [32:39] What's the best way to understand when to use which? When do you use each of these three?

[32:44] I tend to use Cloud Code in the terminal when I'm just kicking off a one-off coding task, and I want all of the latest features. The CLI is our initial product surface, and it's also the one where our features often land first. So it's the most powerful of all the tools. [33:05] So that's what I tend to use when I'm just like trying to kick off one or like maybe like a handful of tasks at a time. [33:12] I think desktop really shines when you're doing something that requires front-end work.

And so one thing that I love to do is to use our preview feature. [33:21] So if I'm building a web app, [33:23] or often use Cloud Code in desktop, [33:25] I'll have the preview pane open on the right-hand side, so I can actually see the web app that I'm making in real-time as I'm chatting with Claude. [33:33] It's also really great for people who want something a bit more graphical. [33:36] A terminal can feel very unfamiliar to someone who is non-technical. You get a bunch of these scary pop-ups on your machine, and you can't click around the way that you're used to in pretty much every other product that you use.

So there's a lot of people who just don't feel comfortable in a terminal. And if that's you, I would highly recommend checking out Cloud Code on Desktop. [33:57] Desktop is also great for getting an at-a-glance view of everything that's happening. So you can see your [34:04] CLI terminal sessions in desktop, [34:06] You can see your other desktop sessions. You can see your sessions that you kicked off on web and mobile. So it's a one-stop control plane where you can see all of your tasks. [34:16] I think the benefit of web and mobile is that it's really great for kicking things off on the go.

So CLI and desktop both. [34:23] require you to be on your local laptop, [34:26] And this is contraining because sometimes you're out and about, you're like touching grass, you're going on a walk. [34:31] and you don't have your laptop open and you don't. I can't I can't count the number of people who I've seen like holding their laptop open, like tethered to their phone while they're outside. And this just means that we're missing a product that solves that need. And so for me, what mobile lets you do is kick off these tasks on the go so that

[34:51] you don't you don't need to bring your laptop everywhere and make sure that your laptop's open wherever you are i love that i've i've seen people on plane like it's just like such a meme now just i need to finish let this agent finish i can't shut this down and then i think for co-work the the role that this fills is there's a lot of work that everyone does where the output isn't code so whether that's like [35:12] getting to Slack zero or inbox zero, or whether that's creating a slide deck for some customer meeting that's coming up, or whether that's writing a quick doc on what the goals of a feature or what the launch plan for a feature is.

[35:27] All these tasks produce outputs that are non-code, and Co-Work is best positioned for that. [35:33] so the way that i split [35:35] The products in my mind is if I'm building something where the output is code, I'll use Cloud Code or desktop or Cloud Code on mobile. [35:44] If the output is anything that's not code, I'll use co-work for it. [35:48] People are just like... [35:49] Sleeping on the success that I co-worked [35:51] is having it's just like growing incredibly. [35:54] Fast. [35:55] And I think people still don't understand [35:57] maybe what it's for.

[35:59] And so what if you give us a couple of use cases just in your work as a PM? What are some like really interesting, maybe unexpected things? [36:05] ways to use co-work to save you time, get more work done. [36:08] If you're getting started on co-work, the first thing that... [36:12] you really need to do is connect all the data sources that are relevant to your role. Because Core can only do a great job if it has access to all the context that it needs to be able to curate the output for you.

So what that means for me is I connected to my Google Calendar, I connected to my Slack, to my Gmail, to my Google Drive, so that it just knows [36:33] It has the flexibility to [36:35] find relevant context, to ask questions, to pull in threads, [36:40] And this substantially improves the quality of the result. [36:44] The kinds of things I use it for are like last night, I was working where we have this Code with Cloud conference coming up and there's a few talks that I'm giving there. [36:54] And one of the talks that we're doing talks about the transition of cloud code from an assistant to a full-on agent.

[37:03] One of the things that I wanted to do in this talk was to showcase all of the products that we've been shipping, [37:10] that enable this transition and also to figure out, okay, what are the success stories that people have had internally that we can use as demos? [37:19] And so I have my Google Drive connected, I have Slack connected. [37:25] Um, [37:26] Alex, who's our product marketer, put together a draft of what the points that he thinks we should cover are. And so I just fed this all into Cowork.

I told Cowork the narrative that I wanted to tell. [37:38] And it actually just worked for an hour. It walked through Twitter to see what we launched, it looked through our evergreen launch room, it looks in our quad code announce channel, which is where our team posts demos of what how they've been getting the most value out of quad code. [37:54] and it synthesized all this together to this 20 page deck that I woke up to this morning. [37:59] And I read through it and it was like pretty good. There were there were a few tweaks.

So I did have to give it a round of feedback. [38:05] I like my slides to have extremely minimal words and it was a little too wordy, but you know it [38:12] It was far faster than like what I would be able to produce. And because Co-Work has access to our whole design system, it actually looks like an anthropic designer put it together like it. [38:24] When you visually see it, you're like, oh, this is like incredibly polished. [38:28] So these are the kinds of things that [38:32] are so much faster like this.

[38:34] Making this slide deck would have taken me hours. [38:36] But instead, it turns out a draft that... [38:40] is actually quite good so I could focus on making sure that the demos are amazing that we plug into it. [38:45] This sounds like a dream come true to PMs that putting decks together. So annoying. It's so slow. I, and I love people will see this deck whenever you present this, this will be out in the world. This like, obviously it's not the, [38:56] the one-shotted version, but you've iterated on it.

So just to help people try this for themselves. So step one is connect. [39:04] What did you say? Slack? What else do you suggest they connect? Slack, Google Calendar, Gmail, G Drive. You should connect your communications tools and where you store your source of truth data for what your team cares about, [39:19] what you care about and what you're working on. [39:21] Okay. And then what was the prompt roughly that you put in there to generate this deck? So I just wrote, "Make me a slide deck for the Code with Cloud conference.

This is what our PMM suggested it should cover." [39:32] This is the current draft that I made that I don't like. This is one that I made manually that I don't like, but I linked it. Can you start by creating a proposed outline with details? Also, make sure it doesn't overlap too much with a keynote talk, which is more important. [39:45] Thank you. [39:45] Then, Cod read a bunch of the links that I sent to it and created a proposed outline. [39:51] So then I read through its proposal and all the different ideas that it generated for what we could cover.

And I just made a decision on what I wanted to actually be in the final deck. And I think this is like an example of what the role of the PM still is today. It's like, [40:08] Claude is a great brainstorming partner. [40:11] it's able to synthesize a massive amount of information really quickly. [40:16] and present all of the possibilities to you. But the role of the PM is still to make the end decision of, okay, what should belong in the final product? So for this, what I ended up deciding was that I wanted the talk to cover the progression from making local tasks successful to making every PR green to helping engineers land more PRs.

And for each of these, which demo would be the most compelling? [40:42] And then after this decision about the outline, Co-Work just like went off for a few hours and built the whole slide deck. This is so awesome. What a what an awesome [40:53] part of the job to not have to do anymore. And it feels like you're talking to essentially a deck designer. [40:59] that also has like actual knowledge about what you've worked on and [41:04] and can like make it actually the content [41:06] what you want it to be, not just make it look really nice.

[41:10] How did you do the design system piece? How does that work? How does it know the design system of Anthropic? So what I did for this is we actually already have like a standardized deck that we use across all of our external engagements. And so I just gave Claude access to that. [41:25] It's able to see what colors we use, the fonts we use, the different kinds of [41:31] What's it called? [41:32] slide formats that are possible. [41:35] And so it has like 20 of these example slides. So give an example.

Got it. See, like upload. Here's our template work from this. [41:40] You can also connect to your Figma MCP if you have your side format, save there and it can pull that in. [41:48] Along those lines, something I'm always curious about is what's kind of in your stack of tools as a PM in Anthropic. [41:55] obviously Cloud Code and Cowork and all the anthropic tools [41:58] What else are you using? What other Slack you mentioned? Is there anything else? [42:02] So my stack is pretty heavily Cloud Code, Cowork, and Slack.

[42:07] Anthropik largely runs on Slack. [42:09] I feel like it's like the core OS of our company. [42:13] And day to day, like, [42:16] A lot of I would say maybe 30% of my time is [42:23] pushing the boundaries of what cowork and quad code can do so that I have a very strong sense of what we're not good at and [42:34] I spent a lot of time talking with the model to understand [42:37] why it makes mistakes that it does. [42:39] We actually have a lot of internal tools that we make.

I think one of the things that QuadCode has really unlocked for our entire [42:47] company is it really lowers the barrier to making any custom app that you want. We've seen this surge in personalized work software that people are building for custom use cases instead of [43:02] using tools that don't perfectly fit the use case. [43:06] I got to hear more. What are some examples? What are things you've built, other people built that are really popular and useful? One of the sales folks on Cloud Code, he realized he was making these repetitive decks over and over and over again.

[43:20] And so he actually has this web app that he built with the examples of the core quad code decks that we know work well. So like a 101, 201 and mastering quad code. [43:32] And then he has a way to input specific customer context that pulls from Salesforce, that pulls from Gong, that pulls from other notes, so that we can customize the decks for specific customers. And so we'll pull out things like, okay, this customer is using like, [43:47] Bedrock or called for Enterprise or Console, which affects what features are available to them.

[43:52] It will pull out things like, okay, this customer is concerned about [43:57] like the code review stage of the sdlc [43:59] and so we'll add a slide about our code review features there. [44:03] It'll pull out things like, "Okay, this customer needs to be HIPAA compliant or needs XYZ security controls." We'll make sure to add a side or two in their deck about that. Then for example, if this is a customer that's on Vertex or Bedrock, and doesn't want to use Cloud for Enterprise, then we'll just take out some of the sides that are Cloud for Enterprise-only features.

Normally, this is manual work that could take 20, 30 minutes. [44:31] And so people will either spend that time doing it, or they'll just decide not to do it and use the general deck. [44:38] With this, it takes a few seconds and you get a tailored deck. [44:42] What's interesting about it, it's like Slack is like the tool that nobody's... It's just like... [44:47] Nobody's trying to create their own. Slack just continues to win and is just like the way you describe it as kind of the OS. [44:52] Of so many companies, it's so interesting.

People talk about Salesforce as just like SaaS. We don't need SaaS software anymore. We're going to build our own. [44:59] There's like Slack is... [45:00] adorable tool that nobody wants to try to compete with and build a better version. I think it's pretty important communications infrastructure. And I think they do the core task of helping everyone get real-time updates incredibly well. Yeah, like people hate on Slack, but it's really great at what it's trying to do. And like the most cutting edge teams are hooked on it. So interesting. [45:21] Yeah, and I also love how easy they've made to customize it.

And so we love making Slack bots and [45:30] this kind of like hackability [45:32] means that we're able to integrate with Slack the way that we want to. So really appreciate Slack's work on that. Time to buy some CRM stock. [45:39] I am so excited to tell you about this season's supporting sponsor, Vanta. Vanta helps over 15,000 companies like Cursor, Ramp, Duolingo, Snowflake, and Atlassian earn and prove trust with their customers. Teams are building and shipping products faster than ever thanks to AI. But as a result, the amount of risk being introduced into your product and your business is higher than it's ever been.

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com slash Lenny. [46:48] Okay, so you talked about all these different teams and how they use Cloud Code and CalWORK to operate. [46:54] Which teams do you find other than engineering? I imagine engineering is the biggest token spender. But if not, that'd be really interesting. What's kind of like the second place function right now for... [47:03] tokens? Oh, Applied AI is amazing at pushing the boundaries of what Cloud Code and Co-Works can do. [47:11] A lot of our Applied AI team spends time with our customers. [47:16] helping them adopt our API.

[47:18] And so sometimes our PyDyA team will, for example, make prototypes on behalf of these customers. [47:23] which Cloud Code makes so much faster than it used to be. [47:27] They also have the dual goal of needing to manage a lot of customer comms, a lot of like customer inbound and historical context, call notes. And so they're both extremely heavy on cowork and on cloud code. And just to understand applied AI, is that like... [47:44] Does that like forward to play engineering sort of role? Like what did they, how would you, how would most people describe what applied the applied AI team is doing?

Yeah. It's helping our customers adopt the latest API and, um, [47:56] model features across their company, both for powering their company's products and also for internal acceleration. Got it. It's like customer success, go-to-market-y, kind of like forward-to-play engineering sort of thing. Exactly. It's like a very technical go-to-market person. Got it. Okay, awesome. So that's, so you're saying that might be the second [48:16] org that uses the most tokens. [48:19] Yeah, and then we also see them pushing the boundaries of what co-work can do. So for example, if so, a lot of these folks cover multiple customers and in any given day can have like five to ten customer engagements on a high day.

[48:36] And so what they often use co-work to do is the night before they'll ask it to summarize, OK, what are all my customer meetings that are coming up the next day? [48:45] What are all the things that this customer has asked me for? What's top of mind for them? What are the action items from the past meetings? [48:53] and co-work will just put together this dossier, this brief of what they should be aware of going into the next meeting. And co-work can also research answers. [49:03] If a customer asked, okay, when is feature X going to launch?

Core can help the Pi to AI person research through Slack to get the latest ETA, add that to the [49:14] add that to the notes so that during the customer call, the Puede AI person has the absolute latest. These are just workflows that people are building for themselves and sharing with other people on their team. [49:24] So cool. [49:25] Something that kind of this question, this trend, [49:28] I don't know, question topic comes up a lot recently, which is... [49:33] tokens spend exceeding people's salary. [49:35] where people just use AI [49:38] And it costs more than how much they're making.

[49:40] Are there any numbers floating around in the topic of just like how much... [49:43] tokens spend, say engineers, [49:45] spend, I don't know, a month, a day, PMs, anything like that. [49:50] It's clear to us that as the models get better... [49:53] people delegate far more tasks to it, and they spend a lot more hours in tools like Cloud Code and Cowork. So we do see [50:02] the token cost per engineer or like per any knowledge worker increase every time that there is a model jump or like a substantial product improvement.

[50:12] I think it's still much lower than what the average engineer salary is, but we see the percentage increasing over time. [50:21] It's such an interesting, like we talked about how you have access to the most cutting edge models. Another advantage of working Anthropic. I believe you guys have basically unlimited tokens. You don't, you can use as much as you want. Is that right? [50:32] We can use a lot of tokens. Some people do run into limits. So... Okay, there's a limit. Okay. Boris, shut it down. Okay. It's so interesting how many advantages come from having the most advanced model.

It's such an interesting... [50:47] flywheel that starts to kick in. [50:49] I think we also believe a lot in empowering our internal teams to build as fast as possible. And we also trust that everyone understands how much capacity that