The Skip Podcast
00:27:59 · Dianne Penn
[00:27:59] S0: I think it's both, but I think it stems from the latter because again, it started as a research lab. A lot of the, like the co founders, they're really, really strong at first principles thinking. And so part of it is this technology works because we didn't take the assumptions of the past to be the same. Right. And so that nature of, especially on like within really strong researchers questioning other assumptions, doing an experiment to prove something, if it works or doesn't work, that types of hands on nature is like really at the core of how the company operates. There's a huge culture of transparency. Most channels are public. You could, somebody could be debating up detail about a product feature and then somebody who you didn't know was in the conversation might interject and be like, have you thought about X? In a kind way, but it's very much a like how yes and or yes and then type of culture. I think maybe one other thing to add to the note about what makes successful PMs. I think folks who are really obsessive about this technology, that might sound like very obvious, but I think the PMs who come in and immediately are spending time dogfooding our product features that are prototype stage or testing the latest models and sharing out their thoughts or opinions into our public channels. Like, that tends to be a, like, show rather than tell of being a good PM and how to contribute on making our products and models better rather than like I'm spending all of my time, you know, in the corner writing a PRT, like participating on making the model and the products work actively. Like that is, I think, also another way some of the really like strong PMs distinguish themselves.
00:30:01 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:30:01] S1: Yeah. That kind of hands on hustle, I think tends to resonate with people particularly early in career. And I'm curious, like there's a number of things you've said, which made me make me feel like, do you feel, and this is contrary to public opinion right now where early product management people are saying, oh, there's not as good jobs out there and it's hard to find a product management role. Do you feel like early in career product managers are actually advantaged today because they have either less to learn or less to unlearn, I should say, and they have this sort of healthy naivety they bring into the role. When you've built your team, are you seeing both resonance from early in career, but perhaps even advantages?
00:30:46 · Dianne Penn
[00:30:46] S0: I definitely am seeing our earlier tenured PMs be extremely effective and high ceiling exactly for the reasons you mentioned. There's definitely a bit of like unlearning of org structures. For example, like, you're not waiting for somebody to tell you and give you, like, a sign on your document that you might... You can now go do the next step. The folks who are high hustle, high agency who come out with a, like, get stuff done attitude. Like, I'm just gonna... I I think this is what I am owning. I am owning making this capability work, and I'm gonna run through walls. I'm gonna talk to the customers. I'm gonna talk to whoever researcher. I don't care if they're like research lead, etcetera. I'm gonna go figure out what to do in my area. Like people who had that mindset are, like, extremely effective. And so I think especially for earlier tenure PMs, you have less of the, oh, I must go through a set process or I guess more, like, larger company PMs that you don't have to do as much of the, I must get each group, like one step before the other type of box tracking, I think tends to be really effective. That isn't to say like, I would say like our medium to like more tenured PMs don't have that. I have folks who were tenured PMs who then became founders. Like that's another group, right? Like you're just running through walls and, or folks who had a track record internally doing something really hard, where they did have to like run through walls. So it's more the like, did I do something that like the organization or there was a ton of inertia and I had to overcome that inertia, that grit, that, like, get stuff done attitude tends to, like, be more powerful than almost anything else. Because that means you'll be curious. That means you'll go figure out answers so you don't have questions and answers that you currently don't know. Right? It just means you're... You'll be, like, self empowered rather than disempowered.
00:32:55 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:32:55] S1: Stripe is built for whatever comes next. Your business is moving fast. Your banking should too. Stripe Treasury is a new financial operating system built for what's next. With Stripe Treasury, the place your business accepts payments is also where you can store balances, move funds, and pay vendors worldwide. When you're operating across markets, your money needs to move when and where your business does. Stripe Treasury gives you a finance stack that's automated, intelligent, and always on. Stripe Treasury is business banking on the same platform millions of businesses already use to get paid. Learn more at stripe.com/treasury. Stripe is not a bank. Banking services provided by Fifth Third Bank National Association member FDIC. What's unique about your work at Anthropic is you're probably the one product leader we have in our industry who's built maybe the most sizable and most tenured research product organization out there, just given the time and the size of Anthropic's research team now. And I think a little bit about back in the early days of product management at Google, you know, Marissa sort of made the observation that product managers as defined by the industry wasn't quite cutting it at Google and they wanted more technical folks, what they call the APM or the Associate PM program to teach product management so it would be successful at Google. In many ways, was the template for a lot of what modern product management became. In the last couple of years, everything's kind of flipped upside down. I think a lot of the notes you've made are pretty than what you experienced at a place like the APM program. What I'm interested in is how did you teach what product management needed to look like as you discovered it at Anthropic and make sure that your team was kind of all kind of singing the same tune, knowing that it wasn't traditional. You know, you mentioned, you know, really hard starter projects and being able to sort of weed people out, but there's also a skill development of trying to get people to understand what good looks like. Did you end up doing formal training or mentorship or, you know, did you just work all the time and get coaching advice? How did you end up getting people to understand it?
00:35:13 · Dianne Penn
[00:35:13] S0: It's funny you mentioned the early Google example, because I actually use that in my interviews. So I mentioned it as like product management as how we define it has to come back to like early days of like a new technology rather than this is the exact set of like things that in responsibilities a person has. And I think in particular, the core principles and the core outcomes is still around the user and how do you bring user value in a way that, is compounding compared to the past. And so the actions then fall out of that rather than like, I think my... Our current set of actions that the team does is, I think, still gonna be the same in 2027. But like, I'm constantly questioning to get the best outcome for users. Are we still doing the right thing? Rather than like, when you come on, you will definitely write evals. Maybe evals are no longer going to be the best format in a year to describe users' outcomes, right? Maybe it's actually prototypes. Like everybody builds prototypes. That could be the next thing. But the core outcomes are the north star is still the same. So what we teach might be different. There's a couple of ways we try to onboard PMs. One is having this like pretty rigorous initial onboarding process. You're just drinking from the fire hose. There's understanding users, writing an eval, writing a roadmap. I expect that within the first two to three weeks, which is like pretty fast. Usually folks are like, wait, can I have like two more weeks to do that? And it's more of like you're bringing the like velocity and the hustle, you're just getting them into like, I gotta go like at the pace of the company? I think other things we try to do, my team actually hosts a annual bootcamp teaching initially other product managers outside of the research PM team, but now we've opened it to all of Anthropic. And this is around just what we've seen in terms of how do you make interesting products that what we call ride the exponential, meaning they get better as models get better. Like they get more valuable as models get better. How do you improve Claude? How you do things like prompting and writing good emails? So we have like an annual bootcamp and we share the videos for that for every new hire. And then I think it's really around being close to an area that is a p zero.
00:37:41 · Dianne Penn
Like, I lean more on having actually smaller teams, but giving people space such that, like, they have maybe two to three areas that they're looking after. And so as part of that, like they're naturally stretched to go talk to different people to then come up with new ideas, like read up on what's happening. And so whatever they're working on is like very high priority and therefore they have more like urgency to like deliver and just bring them on pace, getting stuff done like that, I think has been important. We also have a spin up buddy for everybody on the team. So folks who are more tenured on the team always is a buddy for somebody new. We have a lot of products like Claude Tag, which helps folks with onboarding. And I think the culture of working in public and like public channels, part of it is just like I tell folks like, go back, scroll back two months, read what's happened because you're kind of joining a conversation when you're joining a company. So when everybody's talking, it's okay to say like, hey, can everybody stop and tell me what's going on? It's better to do a bit of your homework and then be like, hey, I understand this seems to be X, Y, and Z. Here's what I think. What do you all think? Right? So it's a bit of coming to the company rather than waiting for it like Anthropic to come to you as a new hire. But those tend to be some of like the initial ways of working to help people onboard.