Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:44:42 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:44:42] S1: What's interesting about this Slack is the tool that nobody's... It's just like nobody's trying to create their own. Slack just continues to win, and this is just like the way you describe it as the OS of so many companies. It's so interesting. People talk about Salesforce as just SaaS. We don't need SaaS software anymore. We're going to build our own. It's like Slack is a durable tool that nobody wants to try to compete with and build a better version. [00:45:04] S0: 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. [00:45:13] S1: Yeah, people hate on Slack, but it's really great at what it's trying to do, and the most cutting-edge teams are hooked on it. It's so interesting. [00:45:21] S0: Yeah, and I also love how easy they've made to customize it. And so we love making Slack bots and this kind of hackability means that we're able to integrate with Slack the way that we want to. So really appreciate Slack's work on that.
00:45:38 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:47:04 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:47:04] S0: Oh, Applied AI is amazing at pushing the boundaries of what Claude Code and Cowork can do. A lot of our Applied AI team spends time with our customers helping them adopt our API, and so sometimes our Applied AI team will, for example, make prototypes on behalf of these customers, which Claude Code makes so much faster than it used to do. They also have the dual goal of needing to manage a lot of customer comms, a lot of customer inbound and historical context, call notes, and so they're both extremely heavy on Cowork and on Claude Code. [00:47:42] S1: And just to understand Applied AI, is that forward to play engineering sort of role? How would most people describe what the Applied AI team is doing? [00:47:52] S0: Yeah, it's helping our customers adopt the latest API and model features across their company, both for powering their company's products and also for internal acceleration. [00:48:05] S1: Got it. So it's like customer success, go to marketing, kind of for deploy engineering sort of thing. [00:48:11] S0: Exactly. It's like a very technical go to-market person. [00:48:13] S1: Got it. Okay, awesome. So you're saying that might be the second org that uses the most tokens?