Welcome. How's it going? Good.
Doing great. How are you all?
So nice to see you all. [cheering] Isn't this a great event? I feel like it's just it's so happy.
Yeah. So, I want to start this conversation off with the question that I think is on everybody's minds, which is a year ago we were told that AI might make PMs obsolete [laughter] and now I feel like the vibes are that everyone needs to become a PM. You know, one of the things I love about getting to talk to both of you is just by being at Anthropic and working with the models in the way that you do, you have a little bit of like a sense of where the future is going, especially for different job roles. And I'd really love for both of you to talk to us about what does a great PM at Anthropic look like. Is the PM role going away? Is it changing? And if so, how?
I think the job of product is always to be a bridge between the real problems that people have in the world and the technology that you can use to solve it. And like that's always been true. And I think a thing that is weird right now is that it used to be that the technology would change like every 10 years or 5 years and now it feels like it changes like every two months. And that's really hard. That's just like a like as a human I feel like it's really hard to learn how to deal with that sort of change. And so what I always think about is like the technology side is changing but the human side like the human side doesn't change that fast. We have the same problems. And so what I always think about is like how can I be obsessed with like solving the human problems and then stay super fresh-eyed about how the technology works? Like how can I basically throw away most of what I know about what used to work to solve this problem and then try again like knowing everything I do about the problem.
And so I feel like that part hasn't changed. What I think has changed is it's almost like rewinding the clock. Like when I back when the dinosaurs were in the earth and I started in product, like we didn't know, we didn't have definitions. Like we just didn't we didn't know what the job was. And so you were just like a general problem solver and you'd like walk around and try to solve a problem until you like ran into a wall and then you would ask somebody or figure it out. And I feel like that's what we can do now is go back to a bunch of the roles blurring, but like you just keep going and try to figure out what's going to work and then when you hit a wall, you have all these different sorts of scaffolding.
Yeah, that makes sense. Mike, anything from you?
I think for me, I had a real like sort of realization moment recently and so earlier beginning of the year shifted to an IC role. So, I'm mostly building. And we were getting close to shipping something. And recently, and one of the like PM leads works with Ami pulled me aside and was like, "Mike, I know you love to build. This project's going well. Like, it's looking really exciting. Like, we really need a PM on this project." I was like, "I don't know. Like, do we need a PM? Like, Claude's got it. Like, we've got a lot going on." And she's like, "No, we really need a PM." And it like such a reminder like once they joined like all of the things and all the glue and all of the connective tissue and all of the things that were about to get dropped if I had not done that would that would have happened. And it was like just such a cool eye-opening like before and after. So much so that the week later I pinged her and I was like, "Cat, you were 100% right." [laughter] And thank you.
And it was just and I think about all the things that that encompassed. Was, you know, actually bringing along, we're a company that serves everybody from, you know, programmers all the way to really large enterprises. Like, have you brought all of that contingency along? Right? When we need to go and figure out how to enable our customer success team to like talk about the changes as questions come up in real time. Has somebody thought about that? Has somebody looped in safeguards? It's obviously very very important. Are people getting kept like kept on track? All of these things. And nobody has infinite capacity even with you know the assistance of these tools. So to be able to have like call it what you will but somebody playing that role of making sure that everything is going to go well everything is going to get connected. We've kept the end user needs in mind, to Ami's point, and that the builders who are like heads down and are like, you know, in full-on Claude mode can keep doing that without having to then pop out and do the very different activity, which is how do you actually make sure all these things go well is like I think very essential. And I think all that's happened now is that because we can move faster, that role is like you have to be operationally excellent in that role in a way that like even beyond what you had to be before. But it definitely has not gone away. In fact, I have felt this like renewed like yes, this is a like if you're recruiting for a team and you need people to wear these hats, this hat is increasingly important.
Can I ask you a serious question though?
So, only serious questions. Serious. This is serious.
Why didn't you just have Fable do it? [laughter] Like, what is And I presumably there's some like Fable 7 you've got access to that we don't have access to yet. So, like what is that person doing that you couldn't just have Fable do?
I mean it is interesting like the we have as you can imagine we like run on Claude Code and we have a lot of like you know Claude provided connective tissue too and it does catch things where you say hey like there's another thing going on in this other part of the organization that you should be aware of you know like we found it via the slash search. So there is that sort of piece as well. I don't think Claude is a convenor yet. I had this I gave a talk a couple weeks ago on like what's the role of the human in the like post super powerful AI age and there's like a bunch of archetypes I was thinking about but one of it was like the convenor like somebody still needs to bring the clouds and the people together to like get the work done and so I think that is the role that I Claude organizational pull or the scheduling ability I've yet this is going to be a moment Dan when Claude schedules a meeting with me or for me where I'm like who scheduled this meeting it's like oh did I thought you two should talk chat that has not happened yet [laughter] but not because it can't I guess we just like turned on that setting, you know. Stay tuned.
I think we're also living in a world where like the tools are really good and you can build a lot of things and you can build them really fast. In some ways that just like expands the universe of what is possible to build and you still need to have really good judgment about like what to build based on sometimes pretty limited information cuz it feels like everything's moving really fast. So you have to like figure out what to build and then I think you in some ways you have to be even more relentless about making sure it happens because there's so many forking paths that you could take. Yeah.
I have an idea of what we need to do and I have the feedback loop to the people who are going to use it and I know what the human problems are and I'm just going to go for it. And I think that sort of relentlessness and like judgment in the face of ambiguity is is really important.
That is definitely something that I have found, you know, every time there's a shift, every time new models come out, it's it's sort of like you're looking out on the ocean, you're like, what's beyond the horizon? And then you get to fast forward beyond the horizon and what do you see? Well, there's more stuff. There's like a whole new landscape, you know? It's not it's not like a utopia and it's not like horrible. It's like there's just new lots of new things to discover and navigate. And I think the same is true for just models in general.
When we were talking Ami in and in in planning for this conversation, one of the things that you said and you've had a long career in product management but prior to Anthropic is that you spent decades learning how to answer specific kinds of questions as a product leader that you now no longer need to answer. And so I'm curious about okay, what are the skills that you spent such a long time building that you actually don't feel like are that useful anymore? And what are the things that you're leaning on now more and then how does that how does that filter down into the team and your expectations for people that you hire?
I think it's really true like I spent a really long time trying to understand how to put myself in the mindset of a user and how something would fit into their lives and like what we should build because it was so expensive to build and ship something. So, you know, literally this would happen where people would have reviews and what we'd talk about is like, am I where should we put this button, you know, and we would talk about the interaction pattern and where like someone's finger would go on their phone and what situation they they would be in where they pulled their phone out of their pocket and what they wanted. And I feel like I tried really hard to get good at that at that mix of like product and design. And I just like I don't think anyone's ever going to ask me that question again.
That's a Fable. That's a Fable one. [laughter]
That's in the past. Like now it's actually faster to just build three versions and try them out and be like, "Oh yeah, this works for this one." So a thing that I prided myself on is like not actually that useful anymore. And I do think that's really hard just in terms of identity. We talk about the innovator's dilemma when it comes to companies where like you're so good at one thing, you keep on trying to do it even when there's this other thing that maybe you should try doing, but you can't because you're already so good at one thing. And I feel like that's also true on a personal level where I sometimes feel like, oh, I know what I'm good at. I'm just going to keep on trying to do that even when there might be a different way to do it that might be more important in the future. And so that's what I just encourage everyone to think about. Like when you think about that product bridge, part of the technology changing every two months is you have to throw away what you knew about yourself in the job using that technology and just try something different. And most of the time I don't know if I'm going to be any good at it, you know, like I've never worked at a model company. Like I just this is not a place where I expertise and I I just kind of I feel like every couple of months I have to constantly be like, "All right, well, let's try this other thing and see if I can figure it out." You know,
What are the characteristics of someone that is able to do that well? And what have you had to develop in order to do that well?
I mean, I think it comes back to the the sorts of things we were talking about. I think like raising your ceiling on tolerance for change and being willing to embrace change is super important. Like so I think adaptability I mean I'm sure this is not new. Like adaptability is just such a key thing given how rapidly the world is changing. I think that sense of like judgment and relentlessness as we talked about, those are like the things that I keep coming back to and really what I try to think about for the team is like I think it's important to talk about those things because otherwise it can feel really lonely like you're the one who has to constantly adapt but actually everybody has to constantly adapt and I think it's hard on all of us. But I also talk about trying to frame the chaos so it doesn't feel as taxing,
You know, like I think I think when there's times of uncertainty sometimes it's tempting to like try to map out here's exactly what's going to happen. Like here's exactly the products we're going to build. Here's exactly how my career is going to go, you know, like and that's a way to exert control. And I just I I think that locks you out of trying all the new stuff. And so what we have to do is like frame the chaos so it feels safe and it feels plausible to engage with it. But that's where like a bunch of the magic and productivity is going to be. So just like talking about it, making it safe, acknowledging that there's also emotions around all of this and it's not easy, but it is a way to just participate and understand and work with the future. I think that's something we talk about a lot.
I think there's an organizational leadership question that I think Ami you do really well which is like you can have the chaos but you also need very clear leadership and DRI-ship within some areas. So like you can have a bunch of people sort of exploring something very frontier but having a clear like this is the person who's ultimately going to make the call whether this is you know the thing to pursue or not. In labs we call them leads or like bet we have call them bets within labs. So the bet lead is a really important role and they are the DRI for saying like I think we should double down on this or like actually we should wind this down. This team needs more people, this team needs less. And like that role is even more important because we're moving so quickly, because things are shifting really rapidly to still have that like we're all lost together, but somebody's got the like, you know, the pen on like what what's the next most important thing we can do to derisk, to understand, to learn, to move things forward, too.
