Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:14:26 · Cat Wu
[00:14:26] S0: Yeah, so we have a few PM teams. I think we're maybe around 30 or 40 PMs right now. So we have the research PM team who Diane leads, and this team is responsible for understanding all of the feedback from our customers for our models, and then feeding that to the best research team to act on it, and they also shepherd the model launch. There's the Claude developer platform team that maintains the APIs that Claude Code is built on top of, and they also release things like Managed Agents, which is a way for you to build your agents and we can host it on your behalf. And then there's Claude Code that works on both Claude Code and the Cowork core products. There's enterprise that helps make Claude Code and Cowork easier to adopt for all of our enterprise customers, and so this is everything from cost controls, our back security controls, and just making sure that these enterprises feel very confident and comfortable using our tools. And then we also have our growth team that is responsible for growing across our entire product suite. So we work very closely with them on Claude Code and Cowork growth. And I know they also work with our other teams on CDP growth, so growth of people who use the Claude API.
00:15:43 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:15:43] S1: So speaking of growth, so Amol was just on the podcast. You have this really interesting insight that most people haven't been sharing. There's always this sense that we need fewer PMs in the future. Why do we need PMs? Engineers can do ship. His take is that because engineers are moving so fast, PMs and designers are squeezed. There's less time to stay on top of everything that is happening. There's a feature shipping every day. So his take is he needs more PMs because it's hard to keep up. What's your take there? Do you feel like there'll be an increase in hiring of PMs? What do you think is going on with the PM profession long-term?
00:16:15 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:16:15] S0: I think all of the roles are merging. PMs are doing some engineering work, engineers are doing PM work, designers are PMing and also landing code. You can either hire a lot more engineers who have great product taste, or you can keep your engineering hiring the same and hire a lot more PMs to help guide some of their work. On our team, we're pretty focused on hiring engineers with great product taste. This way, we can reduce the amount of overhead for shipping any product. There are many engineers on our team who are fully able to end to end go from see user feedback on Twitter through to ship a product at the end of the week with almost no product involvement. And this I think is actually the most efficient way to ship something. So I think engineer and PM are kind of overlapping and you will get a lot of benefit from having more of either. I think product taste is still a very rare skill to have, and we'll pretty much hire anyone who we feel has demonstrated this strongly. [00:17:25] S1: And your background was in engineering, right? [00:17:27] S0: Yeah, I was an engineer for many years. I was then a VC very briefly before joining Anthropic, and actually almost all the PMs on our team have either been engineers or ship code here on Claude Code, and so that's one of the things that I think helps build trust with the team and also just enables us to move a lot faster. And then actually our designers also have been front end engineers before.
00:17:27 · Cat Wu, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:17:27] S0: Yeah, I was an engineer for many years. I was then a VC very briefly before joining Anthropic, and actually almost all the PMs on our team have either been engineers or ship code here on Claude Code, and so that's one of the things that I think helps build trust with the team and also just enables us to move a lot faster. And then actually our designers also have been front end engineers before. [00:17:54] S1: Wow. Because that's the big question, there's definitely this emerging that's happening, the Venn diagrams are combining. I think the big question for a lot of people is if you're coming from engineering or product or design, which of those core skills is going to be most valuable? I could see it Anthropic and on Claude Code, engineering is very valuable. I'm curious if other companies, if you have a design background becoming a PM is more valuable or just a PM-PM.