Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:40:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:40:50] S1: This is so awesome. What an awesome part of the job to not have to do anymore, and it feels like you're talking to essentially a deck designer that also has actual knowledge about what you've worked on and can make it actually the content what you want it to be, not just make it look really nice. How did you do the design system piece? How does that work? How does it know the design system of Anthropic? [00:41:15] S0: So what I did for this is we actually already have a standardized deck that we use across all of our external engagements. And so I just gave Claude access to that, and so it's able to see what colors we use, what fonts we use, the different kinds of, what's it called, like slide formats that are possible, and so it has 20 of these example slides. [00:41:37] S1: So give an example, got it. So you upload, here's our template, work from this. Yeah. [00:41:41] S0: You can also connect to your Figma MCP if you have your slide format save there and it can pull that in. [00:41:48] S1: Along those lines, something I'm always curious about is what's kind of in your stack of tools as a PM at Anthropic? Obviously Claude Code and Cowork and all the Anthropic tools. What else are you using? What other... Slack you mentioned. Is there anything else?
00:41:48 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:41:48] S1: Along those lines, something I'm always curious about is what's kind of in your stack of tools as a PM at Anthropic? Obviously Claude Code and Cowork and all the Anthropic tools. What else are you using? What other... Slack you mentioned. Is there anything else? [00:42:02] S0: So my stack is pretty heavily Claude Code, Cowork and Slack. Anthropic largely runs on Slack. I feel like it's the core OS of our company. And day-to-day, I would say maybe 30% of my time is pushing the boundaries of what Cowork and Claude Code can do so that I have a very strong sense of what we're not good at, and I spend a lot of time talking with the model to understand why it makes mistakes that it does. We actually have a lot of internal tools that we make. I think one of the things that Claude Code has really unlocked for our entire company is it really lowers the barrier to making any custom app that you want, and so we've seen this surge in personalized work software that people are building for custom use cases instead of using tools that don't perfectly fit the use case. [00:43:06] S1: I got to hear more. What are some examples? What are things you've built, other people built that are really popular and useful?
00:43:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:43:06] S1: I got to hear more. What are some examples? What are things you've built, other people built that are really popular and useful? [00:43:12] S0: One of the sales folks on Claude Code, he realized he was making these repetitive decks over and over and over again, and so he actually has this web app that he built with the examples of the core Claude Code decks that we know work well, so like a 101, 201 and mastering Claude Code, 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 Bedrock or Claude for enterprise or console, which affects what features are available to them. It'll pull out things like, okay, this customer is concerned about the code review stage of the SLC, and so we'll add a slide about our code review features there. It'll pull out things like, okay, this customer needs to be HIPAA-compliant or needs X, Y, Z security controls, and so we'll make sure to add a slide or two in their deck about that. And then for example, if this is a customer that's on Vertex or Bedrock and doesn't want to use Claude for enterprise, then we'll just take out some of the slides that are Claude for enterprise-only features. And so normally this is manual work that could take 20, 30 minutes, and so people will either spend that time doing it or they'll just decide not to do it and use the general deck. With this, it takes a few seconds and you get a tailored deck.