Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
01:01:08 · Amol Avasare
[01:01:08] S1: I think we're close. I think we'll get there later this year, to the point where that's very, very effective. That's my gut. I think that level of proactivity and looking across a bunch of context and distilling insights, I think is... The thing I mentioned earlier, learning about the alignment piece, that's like a version of it, right? Now you're just looking at across more data sources. This is something that I use. So I talked about some of the standard PM stuff, brainstorming, data, UXR. There's a lot of like, admin stuff. I just hate life admin and paperwork. I just hate it. And so I get Claude to book my meeting rooms. I got to book meeting rooms. Claude archives sort of my email first pass at clearing out my inbox. I don't do any of my reimbursements and expenses. Claude will go to Benepass and file the reimbursements. It'll go to Brex and file the expenses. So all of that side of things, I'm just like, just hand it to Cowork, just get rid of it. And then the stuff that's quite interesting, I think is the manager lens, where I talked about alignment is one thing. So I look also across my direct reports. Claude can look into what have they done this week. You look at our team goals and OKRs, look at the transcripts from our discussions and understand. It can basically ask for like, what are the key takeaways and observations I should keep in mind and what feedback do you think I should give them? And that's something that is like, again, you can just set that up weekly. The quality is hit or miss right now. It's decent on something. Sometimes you're like, "Holy shit, I am so glad that I caught this." And that's very, very helpful. And then I do that for myself as well. My manager, Ami Vora, was I think, a podcast guest of yours, right?
01:03:00 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:03:00] S0: Yeah, yeah. [01:03:01] S1: So I say, "Hey, based on what you know of Ami both publicly, she's written extensively about product, and then internally, and then our discussions, based on everything that I've done or not done this week, what feedback do you have for me as Ami?" And I get that every week, right? So a lot of these things can already be done today. I think that as the models improve, I think it's just the accuracy and the signal of these things is going to continue to improve rapidly. [01:03:31] S0: I don't think you realize just how much awesomeness you're sharing here. Everyone of these is like, "What?" Okay. So this Ami example, you have one on ones with her. Do you ask Claude Cowork to go through all of her writing, basically build like a model of her and you ask, "What should I be doing differently based on what you know about Ami"? Is that different?
01:03:58 · Amol Avasare
[01:03:58] S1: Yeah. Effectively, there's a number of ways you can do this. I think if someone has a public profile where they've written extensively, it's helpful because Claude can just get all that information. Otherwise, you can have a project or you can have a skill, but increasingly, Claude is better at just understanding. Because you can tell Claude like, "Look on Cowork." You can say, using the Slack MCP, "Look at everything that this person has said in the last week, et cetera." And based on that, what are their top priorities? What are priorities my manager has based on how they're spending their time that I don't know? And so all of this layer of stuff, which is like, I think about it as soft coaching, I think that that is unlocked, in my opinion already. I think it's just that you're working with a coach who is kind of like drunk at times. Not drunk, but sometimes says something, you're like, "Why would you bring that up? That's clearly wrong." But other times, you're like, "Wow." There's like, one of the guys, Scott, who leads our enterprise team. There was a few cases where he found major areas of misalignment that would've caused teams to spin their wheels significantly or do overlapping work. And you think about the impact of that. Your shipping in this world as bigger companies is going to be constrained often by all the cross-functional coordination, right? And I think we're now starting to see at this cross-functional coordination layer, some of that work AI is really being able to be used to reduce that foil. And I think that six months ago, that wasn't possible. And I'm like, "Shit, six months from now, what is going to be possible there?"
01:05:45 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[01:05:45] S0: Oh, man. And I think the fact that all this data is there, Slack, there's Granola, or whatever people use, all these notes from conversations and discussions are really key to this working. [01:05:55] S1: Yes. [01:05:56] S0: So for someone that wants to do something like this, how do you set this up? What's the steps? [01:06:01] S1: Yeah. You go on to Cowork, download the desktop app on Cowork, connect the Slack MCP. That's where you need to, depending on how big the organization is, you may need to get sort of team or enterprise admin permissions, someone with those permissions to enable that. But once you have the Slack MCP connected and on [inaudible 01:06:25], you just ask Claude. That's it. [01:06:27] S0: Amazing. Okay. I'm going to go into a different direction. I want to talk about the focus that Anthropic has had over the years. So if you look at the numbers that you're all putting up, what's really incredible about it is the focus that you all have had. And I think this is the reason it has worked out so well. There's a certain competitor in the market that is realizing they should have done this and are starting to shift to a similar approach. As an external observer, it feels like Anthropic has been very good at doing very few things, but going super deep. So B2B, for example, just going deep on B2B, and then going really deep on coding use cases, Claude Code being an example. And it has worked out really well. Who's been driving that focus? Who has helped keep that focus from the beginning?
01:07:16 · Amol Avasare
[01:07:16] S1: Yeah. I think it's a foundational part of the company. I think it's been there from the very, very early days. And it really comes from leadership and I think they've just done a phenomenal job of distilling that. I saw this doc come up recently. I don't know where it was shared. It was something that Ben Mann, as one of our founders that you had on the podcast, had written. It's dated in 2021, I think a few months after they started the company. And it was like, "Here's why we should just focus on AI coding." And this was like, five years ago. This was long before anyone knew what the actual market opportunities were around this. And I think this is just like a deep focus that we have had internally from the start on the importance of coding and B2B. I think there's two lenses to it. It's like maybe a view of, "Okay, that this is going to be commercially beneficial to tackle, and then also, the side of it around accelerating research." So I'd say it's a pretty mainstream view now. I've now heard people from various labs talking about this, the importance of coding to accelerate research. But that has just been a very firm view that we have been laser focused on internally of, "Okay, if you have the best models, that's going to accelerate your researches and that's going to accelerate the research loop." And I think that's something that Dario has seen very clearly for a number of years. So I would say that that's probably one of a lot. I think a lot comes from Dario. I think a lot comes from leadership and just our DNA. I think the second though is probably just necessity, where it's now changed. We're a more well-known company, raised lots of money, blah, blah, blah. But historically, we're very much the smallest, least well-funded player in this space. In many ways, it's a complete miracle that I think, we've gotten to the stage that we have. We didn't have the free cash flow or the distribution of a Meta or Google. We didn't have the first mover advantage of an OpenAI. And so what do you do? I think there's this broader principle I have just around life of like, the freedom through constraints, that when you have a bunch of constraints applied on you, whether that's in personal life or at work, I think that it can bring a lot of freedom because it just frees up all this excess choice.