Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:10:03 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:10:03] S1: Because the roles are blowing, it's shifting more to this builder. Everybody starts being a builder, I would say. The other shift that I've recently done is I actually have a Claude Code remote session that I enlist in all of our repos. And so this way I have full visibility into the work that everybody's doing. And this instance, it also has access to all our Slack channels and I'll have access to how are the metrics of everything we track. And so every month when I'd be like, "Hey, you know what's fun? Let's take a look back." And so we'll actually do it together. I'll share my Claude Code, I've shared my screen, then we do our Claude Code session and it's just about, "Hey, what were the focus areas? What were some of the products that got shipped? How did it do? Oh, what were the feedback channels?" And so even though before I would've just used these sessions to generate PRs and bug fixes, I actually have these sessions to enable me to have conversations with folks that I support. [00:11:03] S0: Say more about that. So this is a management technique, let's say, to help people not just ship but actually ship better, understand if they're shipping things that have impact. Is that kind of the idea here? Just use Claude to keep on top of all the things people are shipping and then make that a conversation with them?
00:11:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[00:11:03] S0: Say more about that. So this is a management technique, let's say, to help people not just ship but actually ship better, understand if they're shipping things that have impact. Is that kind of the idea here? Just use Claude to keep on top of all the things people are shipping and then make that a conversation with them? [00:11:20] S1: Exactly. So yeah, outside of just the action of shipping is how did it do in market or, hey, did we caught some bugs? And it's okay to, I have this saying, make new mistakes. It's okay to make mistakes, just make new ones so that we're always learning. Because if you aim to make zero mistakes, that probably means you're not moving fast enough or being a little bit too cautious. And so by having Claude, so then it can also look at, for example, actually, I was just looking at, oh, given some of the incidents that we have, let's look across all of this. Can we generate a theme? What's a good area investment for us next, especially we think about quality. Are we seeing any hotspots of where there could be a gap? I think that used to be just a much more manual process, I would say. If I look back a year ago, I don't think I would've been able to have some of these insights with Claude. [00:12:12] S0: Yeah. Well, partly it's because there's that and also people weren't shipping as much so you could just make a little bullet list. Here's the things I shipped last quarter, this feature, that feature, this feature, that feature. [00:12:22] S1: That's right.
00:12:22 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:12:22] S1: That's right. [00:12:22] S0: So, I think what I'm hearing here is this is one of the only ways to stay on top of all the things a teammate is shipping. So this is a really cool thread of just how you found ways to stay on top of this 8X increase in code. What else has worked in helping you and your team stay on top of and maintain quality of all the stuff that y'all are shipping because that's obviously a challenge, a bigger challenge. [00:12:42] S1: Yeah. And so definitely the feedback channels are really important to us, but then we also get a lot of feedback. And for example, even I myself, usually my morning ritual would be I get my morning cup of coffee and then I look at the feedback channels and then I try to pick, oh, if I have some maker time, what's something that maybe I would be able to help out or what I could see some gaps like that. It just used to be something I would do every morning. And yeah, I think maybe a month or two ago we launched Routines and that's also completely changed. Now I just have a routine that automates all this for me. And then there's also, it's almost like before I would be able to generate some prompts, but now with Routines, it's almost like I'm having an agent help me generate the prompts and the PR. So for example, one is, "Hey, keep a look on this feedback channel, what are some of the themes?" And then when I wake up, then I have a really good summary of that and then even some PRs that I'll be able to take a look and review.
00:12:42 · Fiona Fung, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:12:42] S1: Yeah. And so definitely the feedback channels are really important to us, but then we also get a lot of feedback. And for example, even I myself, usually my morning ritual would be I get my morning cup of coffee and then I look at the feedback channels and then I try to pick, oh, if I have some maker time, what's something that maybe I would be able to help out or what I could see some gaps like that. It just used to be something I would do every morning. And yeah, I think maybe a month or two ago we launched Routines and that's also completely changed. Now I just have a routine that automates all this for me. And then there's also, it's almost like before I would be able to generate some prompts, but now with Routines, it's almost like I'm having an agent help me generate the prompts and the PR. So for example, one is, "Hey, keep a look on this feedback channel, what are some of the themes?" And then when I wake up, then I have a really good summary of that and then even some PRs that I'll be able to take a look and review. [00:13:38] S0: And the feedback channel, where's that feedback coming from? Is that like emails, Twitter, or a combo of everything?
00:13:38 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[00:13:38] S0: And the feedback channel, where's that feedback coming from? Is that like emails, Twitter, or a combo of everything? [00:13:46] S1: Our feedback channels are definitely like we have a lot from internal ends, but also emails, channels. Actually everybody when we all get feedback on either when friend's ping us or on LinkedIn or socials, we'll all actually post all of that in Slack as well. And we also have of course partnerships and so we have different channels for all the various sources, but that's what I mean. I need Claude's help to help me stay on top because there is so much incoming feedback. [00:14:14] S0: Got it. Okay. So this is cool. So this is a way of working that you've built to stay on top of all the stuff shipping, which is this kind of daily ritual/routine where you as a manager look at what people are saying about the current state of Claude Code and Cowork and used to just like, "Okay, someone go fix this, go fix that." Now it's like, "Here's the PR that'll fix this thing. Check it out. We're ready to ship it if you want." Awesome. [00:14:15] S1: That's right. [00:14:41] S0: Okay. Obviously a big challenge for people is also just code review. I imagine Claude is also doing a lot of its own code review. Is there anything there you've recently figured out that allows your teams to ship faster stuff that they are confident is great?
00:14:41 · Lenny Rachitsky, Fiona Fung
[00:14:41] S0: Okay. Obviously a big challenge for people is also just code review. I imagine Claude is also doing a lot of its own code review. Is there anything there you've recently figured out that allows your teams to ship faster stuff that they are confident is great? [00:14:55] S1: Yeah. And honestly, it's crazy when you think we didn't even have Claude Code reviews last year. And so speak of bottlenecks, that was a really, really big bottleneck of the human reviewers. So we definitely, for the important areas that need deep subject matter expertise, we definitely want to make sure we have the proper humans still reviewing. I would say what helps us though is the more that we can automate to almost check in the framework for what good looks like. Claude is very good when you give it a framework to validate against those frameworks. So I had mentioned recently we just updated the content design to have a skill in it. And this is why I think if you have specs or check those into the repo and then make sure the spec also keeps up to date with the code frequently. But that's what I found works really well of anytime you have a statement of what good looks like, get the end to the repo and then Claude Code review can make sure it's still matching what you set up to do. [00:15:53] S0: And basically it's like the evolution of test driven development.