Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:32:11 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:32:11] S0: I think one of the most important things for Anthropic is to 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 Claude 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. [00:32:29] S1: So we've been talking about Claude Cowork, all these things. Something that I want to make sure people get, and I'm curious just how you use these tools. So there's Claude Code, there's Claude desktop/web, there's Cowork. What's the best way to understand when to use which? When do you use each of these three?
00:32:44 · Cat Wu
[00:32:44] S0: So I tend to use Claude 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, and so it's the most powerful of all the tools. So that's what I tend to use when I'm just trying to kick off one or maybe a handful of tasks at a time. 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. So if I'm building a web app, I'll often use Claude Code and desktop. I'll have the preview pane open on the right-hand side so that I can actually see the web app that I'm making in real-time as I'm chatting with Claude. It's also really great for people who want something a bit more graphical. A terminal can feel very unfamiliar to someone who's non-technical. You get a bunch of these scary popups 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 the terminal, and if that's you, I would highly recommend checking out Claude Code on desktop. Desktop is also great for getting an at-a-glance view of everything that's happening. So you can see your CLI terminal sessions in desktop, 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 point where you can see all of your tasks. 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 require you to be on your local laptop, and this is constraining because sometimes you're out and about, you're touching grass, you're going on a walk and you don't have your laptop open, and I can't count the number of people who I've seen 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 you don't need to bring your laptop everywhere and make sure that your laptop's open wherever you are.
00:34:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:34:57] S1: I love that. I've seen people on plane. It's just like such a meme now. Just I need to let this agent finish. I can't shut this down. I need WiFi. [00:35:06] S0: Exactly. And then I think for Cowork, 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 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 are or what the launch plan for a feature is. All of these tasks produce outputs that are non-code and Cowork is best positioned for that. So the way that I split the products in my mind is if I'm building something where the output is code, I'll use Claude Code or desktop or Claude Code on mobile, and if the output is anything that's not code, I'll use Cowork for it. [00:35:48] S1: People are just sleeping on the success that Cowork is having. It's just growing incredibly fast, and I think people still don't understand maybe what it's for. And so what if you give us a couple use cases just in your work as a PM? What are some really interesting, maybe unexpected ways you use Cowork to save you time, get more work done?
00:36:08 · Cat Wu
[00:36:08] S0: If you are getting started on Cowork, the first thing that you really need to do is connect all the data sources that are relevant to your role because Cowork 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... It has the flexibility to find relevant context, to ask questions, to pull in threads, and this substantially improves the quality of the result. The kinds of things I use it for are like last night we have this Code with Claude conference coming up and there's a few talks that I'm giving there. And one of the talks that we're doing talks about the transition of Claude Code from an assistant to a full-on agent, and one of the things that I wanted to do in this talk was to showcase all of the products that we've been shipping 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? And so I have my Google Drive connected, I have Slack connected. 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, and it actually just worked for an hour. It looked through Twitter to see what we launched, it looked through our evergreen launch room, it looked in our Claude Code announced channel, which is where our team posts demos of how they've been getting the most value out of Claude Code, and it synthesized all this together to this 20-page deck that I woke up to this morning and I read through it and it was like pretty good. There were a few tweaks, so I did have to give it a round of feedback. I like my slides to have extremely minimal words and it was a little too wordy, but it was far faster than what I would be able to produce. And because Cowork has access to our whole design system, it actually looks like an Anthropic designer put it together. When you visually see it, you're like, "Oh, this is incredibly polished." So these are the kinds of things that are so much faster.
00:38:32 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
Making this slide deck would've taken me hours, but instead it turns out a draft that is actually quite good so that I could focus on making sure that the demos are amazing that we plug into it. [00:38:45] S1: This sounds like a dream come true to PMs that... Putting decks together, so annoying. [00:38:49] S0: It's so slow. [00:38:51] S1: And I love people will see this deck whenever you present this. This will be out in the world. Obviously it's not the one-shotted version, but you've iterated on it. So just to help people try this for themselves, so step one is connect their... What did you say? Slack. What else do you suggest they connect? [00:39:07] S0: Slack, Google Calendar, Gmail, GDrive. You should connect your communications tools and where you store your source of truth data for what your team cares about, what you care about and what you're working on. [00:39:21] S1: Okay. And then what was the prompt roughly that you put in there to generate this deck?
00:39:21 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:39:21] S1: Okay. And then what was the prompt roughly that you put in there to generate this deck? [00:39:25] S0: So I just wrote make me a slide deck for the code with Claude Conference. This is what our PMM suggested it should cover. 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. And then Claude read a bunch of the links that I sent to it and created a proposed outline. So then I read through its proposal and all the different ideas that I had 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 an example of what the role of the PM still is today. It's like Claude is a great brainstorming partner. It's able to synthesize a massive amount of information really quickly 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. And then after this decision about the outline, Cowork just went off for a few hours and built the whole slide deck.