Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:52:48 · Amol Avasare
[00:52:48] S1: It really depends on the size of it. And this kind of goes back to the two-week thing. So why we have that two-week thing, it's more like, how do I have some filter to say if we're investing heavily into something, we should apply more thinking behind it versus if it's a smaller set of investments, just go for it? And as a growth team, again, you do have a decent amount of these smaller things that you do. So for very small changes, like, "Oh, there's a thing coming. We need to have an upsell for it. What is it the thing we're doing?" This is just on Slack. This is just purely on Slack. It's just messages back and forth. And I think it also depends on having a good caliber of engineer in there, but engineers can understand, like, "Hey, I know you said this, but what about that for the audience?" And so we're lucky we have good product-minded engineers in that sense, but all these smaller things are very much just on Slack back and forth, and that's what you do. For the larger things, I think I very firmly believe in a proper kickoff. So we still do ... Just there's so much going on at this place. No one's got time, no one knows what's going on. And so doing a cross-functional kickoff, get legal, get safeguards, get everyone in the room and just be like, "This is what we plan to do. What do you care about? What do you care about? What do you care about?" That 30-minute meeting for larger things is just, I think, still so important to just streamline all the mess that may happen later if you don't do that work early on.
00:54:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:54:17] S0: What's your approach to crafting that PRD in those cases? Is it ramble into Claude? Is it, do you have a template? [00:54:24] S1: Even in those cases, there are times I don't craft a PRD because everything's moving so quickly, right? So there's still some of those cases where I just set up the meeting and then five minutes before, I'll put it into Cowork, some of my thoughts, what credit. "Here are the things that I need to think about," spin up a basic doc and we use it to talk. Other times I won't even have a doc. But if I am creating a PRD, I have basically, a skill that they've created, and then there's projects with all the previous PRDs in there, and then it's pretty simple. It has the format down so I'll just say, "Here are the things I care about. Here's the why. Here's the problem," and flesh out the key considerations, flesh out the cross-functional stakeholders, those types of things. But again, my default is if I can avoid the doc and if we can just jump to action, then that's what we should do and increasingly just jump to prototyping the thing. [00:55:24] S0: Yeah. And that's where I think it'll get so interesting once we can automate more of that, just like your assistant talking to the legal assistant, just ironing out all these little, what's important to you, what's important to the ...
00:55:35 · Amol Avasare
[00:55:35] S1: Yes, and it's coming. And I think the legal team has done good enablement around this. We work as versions of, how do you ... You can think about how can you mimic what someone might say and set up a Claude. Right? So there's things like that, that I think that we have now. And then as Claude gets more and more context and gets better at parsing long contexts, I think these are things that Claude will just get better at knowing. One of the things, Lenny, it's a slight tangent, but one of the, I think, most effective ways I use Claude, or one of the most interesting ways I use Claude, which I see a number of people doing internally is to help you identify misalignment. This is, I think something that I found really, really helpful. So with Cowork, you have the Slack MCP, and you can tell Cowork to say basically, "Look across Slack. You know the projects that I'm working on. These are the things that are top of mind. Go and find me areas of potential misalignment right now." And it does a really, really good job. So this is something that I've scheduled runs every week. Claude's looking at things and coming back to me and saying, "Hey, I think these things you should be aware of." And so you can think about in that shipping context, it's a similar thing where Claude can basically be looking at what's happening across the company and say, "You're thinking about shipping this thing. Here's who you need to talk to. Here's what you need to keep in mind."
00:57:00 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:59:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
I'm curious just what else is working, what else your team has done to help save you time, be more productive? [00:59:17] S1: We use it pretty extensively across the board, right? So there's this standard PM stuff like writing docs, brainstorming, looking at data. For data, I personally have like, Cowork runs on a schedule and looks at 20, 25 different charts every morning. And then so when I come in the morning, there's just so many charts, so many products to track. Cowork will tell me, "Okay, here are the things that you should pay attention to. Here's what is concerning, and here are just some interesting insights." [00:59:45] S0: And it sends you an update in Slack, or what's the workflow? [00:59:49] S1: For me, it just shows, it comes up in Cowork. So Cowork has a schedule- [00:59:52] S0: In the desktop app? [00:59:53] S1: Yeah. In the desktop app, you can have a scheduled task that you create. And so I have a bunch of Hex links that it will go and look at. It uses the Chrome extension for some things and it uses MCP for other things, and then it'll just give me a summary, and then I know... I saw this one, a few charts that I just like to look at because I was just like, "I'm a numbers guy. I just like charts." [01:00:18] S0: They all open to the right too. So that one was, yeah, nice.
01:00:18 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:00:18] S0: They all open to the right too. So that one was, yeah, nice. [01:00:20] S1: Yeah. I like to see the chart. But then there's the long tail of things, and even the medium tail where it's like, you don't have time to look at it every day, that if Claude is proactively looking at it and you start to feel good over time of, okay, it's like the false positive rate is going down, the false negative rate is going down of the things that Claude brings to you, then you just get a little bit more confidence and peace of mind there. [01:00:46] S0: This touches on an idea I've always had that Teams will have is a strategy bot, which just imagine an agent that's just constantly watching metrics, the market, the roadmap, what's working, what's not. And just like, Tamil, "Here's what I think we should do now. Here's the pivot we should take. Here's where we're going to win." It feels like we're very close to that.