Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:08:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:08:59] S1: How do PRDs fit into this and the fact that you said that goals are a really important part, just like being aligned on what does success look like? Who is this for? Who's this now for? Are you writing PRDs, is it just a couple bullet points? How's that evolved in the world of a PM? [00:09:12] S0: So there's two things that we do. One is we have very rigorous metrics and we do metrics readouts with the entire team every week. The goal of this is to make sure that everyone deeply understands all the facets of our business, what our key goals are, how they're trending, and what drives them. The second thing that we do is we have this list of team principles, and this includes who our key users are, why those are our key users, and the reason that we articulate all of this is so that everybody on the team feels like they understand how our business works, they understand what's important to us and what we're willing to trade off, and it lets people make decisions by themselves without feeling like they're blocked on PM or any other stakeholder. [00:09:12] S1: I love how so much of this is like, okay, we still need PMs in the future, and there's so much talk of why do we need PMs? We're just going to ship and build. We need engineers.
00:09:12 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:09:12] S1: I love how so much of this is like, okay, we still need PMs in the future, and there's so much talk of why do we need PMs? We're just going to ship and build. We need engineers. [00:10:05] S0: Oh, we actually do PRDs sometimes. So I think for features that are particularly ambiguous, it does help to write out just a one-pager on what the goals are, what the delightful use cases are, what the failure modes currently are that we need to fix. And there are occasionally some projects, especially things that require heavy infrastructure that do take many months, and for those situations, we do write PRDs still. [00:10:29] S1: I want to drill a little bit further into just how you're able to move so fast. I've never seen anything like the pace folks at Anthropic are shipping at. Someone made this calendar of launches across Anthropic, and it was literally every day there was a major feature or product. So one question people had online is you guys just launched this, not launched, but built this incredible model Mythos that is still in preview because it's so powerful, people are a little afraid of what it can do. Have you guys been using this? Is this part of the reason you've been able to move so fast?
00:10:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Cat Wu
[00:10:29] S1: I want to drill a little bit further into just how you're able to move so fast. I've never seen anything like the pace folks at Anthropic are shipping at. Someone made this calendar of launches across Anthropic, and it was literally every day there was a major feature or product. So one question people had online is you guys just launched this, not launched, but built this incredible model Mythos that is still in preview because it's so powerful, people are a little afraid of what it can do. Have you guys been using this? Is this part of the reason you've been able to move so fast? [00:11:03] S0: We've been moving pretty fast for several quarters now, so I think it's not fully Mythos. Mythos is an incredibly powerful model. We do use the models internally, and I think this has increased our rate of shipping a little bit, but I don't think it explains the bulk of the increase. I think a lot of it is the process and the expectation on the team. So we're very low on process. We want to remove every single barrier to shipping things. We want to make sure every single person on the team feels empowered to take their idea from just an idea to out in the world in less than a week, sometimes even in a day. [00:11:41] S1: Cool. Oh, man. What an advantage to have the best model and also be building product. That's so cool. [00:11:46] S0: We are very lucky to be able to work with the frontier models.
00:11:46 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:11:46] S0: We are very lucky to be able to work with the frontier models. [00:11:49] S1: Oh my God, what an awesome advantage, just build a thing and then use it and then accelerate faster. It's so interesting. There's a couple of these other side things, I want to just go on these sidequest on this conversation. There's so much happening with Anthropic, and I just am so curious to get your insight. One is a week ago or so, the whole source code of Claude Code leaked. Somebody got it out there. I think it was a mistake someone made. Is there anything you comment there, just like what happened? What went wrong? What should people know? [00:12:15] S0: So we immediately looked into this when we saw it. We realized that this was the result of human error. There was a human working with Claude to write PR. This was just an update to how we release our packages and it actually went through two layers of human review, and so this was a result of human error and we've hardened our processes to make sure that it doesn't happen in the future. [00:12:40] S1: Is this person still at Anthropic? Are they doing all right? [00:12:42] S0: Yes, yes. It's a process failure, and the most important thing is to just learn from it and to add more safeguards so that doesn't happen again, and so that's what we've been focused on and most of those have shifted.
00:12:42 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:12:42] S0: Yes, yes. It's a process failure, and the most important thing is to just learn from it and to add more safeguards so that doesn't happen again, and so that's what we've been focused on and most of those have shifted. [00:12:54] S1: Okay. Another question I had is OpenClaw. So recently there's been this move to keep people from using Claude's subscription with their OpenClaws. People got really upset. They're confused why this is happening. It feels like there's harm caused to the open source community. What do people need to understand about what went into this decision? [00:13:18] S0: So we've been seeing a lot of demand for Claude, and we've been working very hard to both scale our infrastructure and also to make our harness more token efficient so that you can get more usage out of it. It wasn't designed for third-party products, which have different usage patterns than our first-party ones. We spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what is the most seamless transition that we can offer, and so I was very happy to be able to say that everyone gets some credits alongside their subscription. But yeah, we did have to make the hard decision that we needed to prioritize our first-party products and our API, and so this is the decision that resulted from that.
00:13:18 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:13:18] S0: So we've been seeing a lot of demand for Claude, and we've been working very hard to both scale our infrastructure and also to make our harness more token efficient so that you can get more usage out of it. It wasn't designed for third-party products, which have different usage patterns than our first-party ones. We spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what is the most seamless transition that we can offer, and so I was very happy to be able to say that everyone gets some credits alongside their subscription. But yeah, we did have to make the hard decision that we needed to prioritize our first-party products and our API, and so this is the decision that resulted from that. [00:14:01] S1: Yeah. To me, it makes so much sense. You guys are subsidizing this usage at 200 bucks a month and it's basically unlimited use of this. And I think people don't understand. Businesses are trying to make money. We're trying to be profitable here. We can't just give away compute when it's so in demand. So I get it. Coming back to the PM team, what does just the PM team look like at Anthropic? How many PMs are there? How are they kind of organized?