Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD)

[00:00] People often think that I get hired into later stage companies because I'm supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company. And in fact, I say I'm hired to remind them they can operate like a startup. Everybody wants this. Everyone's like, yes, move fast, amazing quality. What's an example of that for you? I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in the clock speed one click faster. If you think something needs to be done this year, it needs to be done this half. There may be a trend happening here of combining engineering products. [00:30] and engineering design functionally together. There should be no debates over what's best for product or what's best for engineering, what's best for design. What is best for the organization? - You built a tool called ChatPRD. My guess is it's the single most popular AI PM specific tool out there. - Is it gonna eliminate PMs next year? Probably not. Are the skills required gonna shift? Yes, could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Probably. [00:56] - Today, my guest is Claire Vo. [01:00] product officer at Color, Optimizely, and currently chief product officer at LaunchDarkly. She's also been a two-time founder, engineer, designer, and a marketer. [01:10] She's also the creator of ChatPRD, which I suspect is the most used PM-specific AI product out there, which she builds on nights and weekends. In our conversation, we dig into what PM skills AI will complement and potentially replace in the future, the story behind ChatPRD, and Claire's advice for how to stay ahead of the curve on AI within the PM role, the importance of feeling agency over your career, and how to bend the arc of the universe to achieve the things that you want to achieve,

[01:40] into what it takes to be a successful woman in tech, especially as an exec, how she creates a fast pace within larger companies while also keeping the bar very high, the rise of the CPTO role, combining product and engineering under one leader, plus a ton of career advice, both for early career people and senior leaders, and so much more. This episode has something for anyone that's in product or interested in the role of product, and I am very excited to bring it to you. If you enjoy this [02:10] and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Claire Vo after a short word from our sponsors. [02:23] This episode is brought to you by Orb. As a business, you care about revenue, but as a product team, the last thing you want to do is delay a product launch or pricing change because your team has to rebuild billing from scratch. Orb is a flexible, usage-based billing engine that lets you evolve your pricing with ease. The fastest-growing product teams at companies like Vercel and Replit trust Orb to power their pricing changes and launches. [02:53] pricing with ease and control. Check it out at withorb.com slash Lenny and skip the line for demo or sandbox by using promo code Lenny. That's withorb.com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Dovetail, the customer insights hub for product teams. Are you working in a feature factory building filler that nobody wants? Probably, because the sad truth is that most SaaS features

[03:23] billions every year. Let's change that. Product managers, Dovetail is holding their first industry conference. It's called Insight Out, and they want you to come. Over one day in San Francisco, the product community is coming together to learn how to better leverage customer insights and build products that people actually love to use. It's on April 11th, and you can hear from product leaders from Uber, Twitch, Meta, and Netflix as they share their strategies for driving [03:53] certainty, and balancing customer-centered work with business needs. And here's the kicker. It's absolutely free for online tickets. Just go to dovetail.com slash Lenny to register. This is thanks to Dovetail, the best way for product teams to get the most out of customer insights. Check it out at dovetail.com slash Lenny. [04:16] Claire, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. [04:22] I'm even more excited! [04:24] You're someone that to me has always felt inevitable would be on this podcast and that we'd be doing an episode together. Do you feel the same way? [04:30] or not, and it's okay if you don't. It's a privilege and a pleasure, and I'm glad I'm here. I've been so impressed with... [04:39] your guests and your content. It's been so exciting to see just the wide range of product leaders and thinkers in the space. And if I can be on a list of product leaders and thinkers in the space, then I'm doing something good. So thanks for having me. [04:51] It's absolutely my pleasure. [04:52] I want to start by talking about career advice.

[04:56] Okay, so I was perusing your LinkedIn and your career path is basically what most PMs probably dream of in their career. So just to summarize, you went from associate product manager to product manager to senior product manager to director to senior director to VP. [05:11] to SVP, to Chief Product Officer, [05:14] And I've been Chief Product Officer of three different companies. [05:17] And along the way, you're a founder, you're a designer, you're an engineer. [05:21] So here's my question. [05:23] If you had to boil down what you think your secret sauce has been, [05:27] to progressing so far and so quickly throughout your PM career? What might that be? [05:32] Yeah, so, you know, when you list it all out, you can probably guess underneath it all is like a relentlessly... [05:39] curious impatient eager to build person at their core so i just like building stuff and i i find a lot of fun and i think if you find a career or craft that's fun it's easy to accelerate your growth in that career so one thing i just i just love what i do but you know when it comes to career growth and that progression from actually started as a copywriter of all things copywriter all the way up to cpo or cpto that runs an engineering organization [06:07] You know, it boils down to something really simple, which is know what you want out of your career. [06:12] be clear and ask for it and then make it easy for your boss or whoever can support or champion you to get you from here to there and so i'll take a really specific example from earlier in my career [06:25] I had been in management for design and product management, sort of like a senior manager level over product and design at an e-commerce company.

[06:35] worked very closely with growth and marketing. [06:37] We were just two sides of the same coin and worked very closely and the head of marketing left. [06:43] And there was this big to do, you know, pretty quickly of like, well, what are we going to do with marketing and do we need to hire somebody? And I sat for about a half a day and I thought. [06:52] I think I can help here. [06:54] drew out an org chart, put my name on the top, walked into my boss's office and said, [07:00] This is one potential solve of your marketing organization question. This will bring product and marketing growth together. [07:07] I can be in this position. Here's how I change the management structure underneath. It's not just where you put me, but where do you put everybody else? And I think this could work for the company. And this is how I'd suggest we roll it out. And this would be my JD. [07:19] and I got that job. And, you know, I think when people ask me about career advice, [07:24] They want to hear, you know, what can I do really? Like, what do you want and how do you make it as easy as possible to make the case to your boss to get you here or there? [07:33] The other thing that I give people advice about is know what you want out of your current role. [07:38] and know exactly what you want your next role to be. [07:42] And I even know this, and I even say this to my boss, you know, when I was VP of product at Optimizely, I said to my boss, [07:49] I want to be chief product officer. Here's how I'm going to get us here to there. And I want you to partner with me on it. And even coming into this role, when I was interviewing at LaunchDarkly, [07:58] You know, my boss, Dan, the CEO of LaunchDarkly asked me, what do you want out of this role? And I said, I want my next role to be a CEO role. So.

[08:06] I want I want this role to fill in my gaps, learn, help me elevate my, you know, my experience to get me to that next step. And so I always know what that next role is going to be. And I'm always clear about it now. [08:18] i think there's a fine balance here there's one thing to be very clear about your goals it's another to suck the oxygen out of the air about only talking about getting promoted so these are probably [08:31] point zero zero five percent of my interactions with my boss are about my career growth and my path it's very small it's [08:38] Am I clear? Are we on the same page? And am I am I communicating as I'm making progress against those goals? [08:44] high slope people I think get promoted basically as fast as the org can support I've never thought [08:49] I've never I've almost never wished I promoted somebody earlier. I have wished I had, you know, I've seen managers or folks promote a little too early. [08:59] And so as somebody that's managing their own career, you have to be a balance of, [09:04] ambitious and assertive and take care of yourself and advocate for yourself and [09:10] The work needs to speak for itself at the end of the day, and that's what's going to drive for your career growth. And so know what you want, but [09:19] do the work and produce the results and you can have a career like mine. So maybe first to summarize some of the core advice you're sharing is know what you actually want, because you're not going to progress towards this amazing future career if you don't actually know where you're going. Otherwise, you'll kind of be pushed in directions that you're not necessarily interested in going. So have a sense of where you want to go to.

[09:40] tell people and ask for it. Here's what I want to be doing in the future. Help me get there. [09:45] And I love the other point you made of just like, don't over focus on that. There's many people that spend a lot of their energy on like, I need to get promoted. How do I get to the next level? I don't. I deserve the next level. [09:55] And I guess maybe along those lines, is there any other advice you could share of just how to [09:59] Avoid being that person that's just like constantly obsessed with, [10:02] promotion at [10:04] Any more advice on how to find that balance? [10:06] Yeah, I mean, one, you've got to lock to the norms and the talent norms of your organization. You should know how those things work. And they can work very casually if you're a very small startup. And they can work more formally if you're at a very large company. And one, understanding how promotions operationally happen inside an organization can help you have those conversations at the right time and the right moment with the right context. So that's one thing I advise, right? We're a slightly larger organization. [10:36] do promotion cycles. We have times during which we promote people. And so if you're talking to me four months before a promo cycle, maybe it's top of mind, maybe it's not. I can't do I sometimes functionally cannot promote people inside larger organizations whenever I want. So one is, I think, understanding how the talent calendar of your team, especially at a larger organization. [10:59] I think the second thing is really... [11:02] the conversation needs to be about what you being in a different position does for the company and why the company

[11:10] needs it. Often the conversation is, I want to be promoted because I want to be a director of PM, because I want to become a manager, because I need direct reports. Instead of saying, look, [11:23] your span of control you have you have nine direct reports you need leverage here [11:27] I have a lot of credibility with [11:30] this side of the product organization, I think we could be doing more [11:36] If... [11:37] this position existed and I think I'm good for this position because of what I've proven A, B, and C. That's solving a problem for the company. [11:45] that's not solving a career growth issue for an individual. And I think, you know, people who want to be promoted need to think in that orientation versus the other, because honestly, [11:58] especially now, like let's say post-ZERP, like there are not just these rote every 12 months, we're gonna give comp increases and merit increases and you get to be promoted. We really have to be thoughtful about the structure and size and organization of teams. [12:17] product teams are naturally pretty small. So there aren't just management and director and senior director roles to go around. And if you want to get into management, for example, you have to prove that you're good at organization design. So I think, [12:31] really focus on why a role is good for a company or necessary for a company and then why you are the best for that role rather than I want to get promoted.

[12:41] That is such good advice and such important advice that [12:44] Focus on how do you solve problems for your manager and the business? Not, hey, here's what I need for my career. This sucks. My career is stagnating. [12:52] I love that. And I love so much of your message is empowerment. It's not just here. There's the [12:58] place you're in and there's not a lot you can do about it. [13:00] Look for opportunities to help your manager, help your business. Here's what I can do to [13:04] move things further. [13:05] And I think there's an amount of timing that you touched on. [13:09] propose this at a time when something could happen. Like you shared this example of [13:13] there was a marketing gap. [13:14] Yeah. [13:15] Yep, exactly. Is there another example where you did the sort of thing where you kind of presented, here's how I can... [13:21] helped the org and that helped another promotion? If not, that's good. I mean, it's honestly how I expanded into leading [13:29] engineering teams in the technology organization. I was at Color and there was a real need to uplevel our engineering organization and I knew exactly what to do. I had high confidence I had the skills, both technical and organizational, to scale the engineering organization in a way that was really critical to the business, both from an architecture perspective and from a team and talent perspective. And so that was one where I knew there was a problem to solve. I knew that problem was [13:59] to solve it fast. And I was confident I had this, I knew I could do it. I had confidence that I could help there. And so I'm still doing it today. And, you know, at color I did, I took, you know,

[14:11] I came in as product. I very quickly began leading the engineering organization, which was fabulous. And then actually took on some of our non-clinical operations as well, where we had, you know, pretty operational leader. [14:25] We had some high-scale challenges to deal with, and it fit my talent set, and I knew I could help the company pretty quickly. This is the other advice I might give, particular to PMs. PM is such a generalist role, [14:38] it's okay to go a little left and a little right to go up and [14:43] you know i i took this marketing growth role that was actually my first director role it wasn't only for product it was for marketing and i had to learn marketing and i had to develop skills there but it was a foundation on which i could build a broader sort of leadership career and so i do think also looking left and right outside of your scope of product can be a really effective way to find growth opportunities [15:07] I love that advice. And yeah, it leads to so many unexpected opportunities. [15:12] One of the big questions with PMs, [15:15] And coming back to your original. [15:16] advice of know where you want to go. There's so many directions that PM can go. You can eventually become a founder. [15:21] Become a GM. [15:22] Become a CO. [15:23] Something else. [15:24] And it, [15:25] Trying these sorts of things often helps you understand, okay, here's what I'm actually excited about. Maybe I want to move into design. [15:31] Yeah, and one of the other things that I think [15:34] people don't understand. And maybe I experienced this as a founder and I really feel it inside companies. It's like the universe is vendable to your will. And what I mean is,

[15:44] In most, at least in the stage I operate in, in startups and growth stage companies and late stage startups, [15:51] organizations are very fluid and i like to organize around talented motivated individuals and so just because we're organized in a particular way now just because these organizations are separate or these are different you know together doesn't mean that's necessarily the way they have to be and so you should think about your career growth [16:12] in the existing structure of the organization. But as an org design thinker, it's a very important job that I have to do. You also have to think of this system as a living, breathing, [16:23] you know, entity that can shift over time, in particular around highly motivated, highly talented people. [16:30] And I think along the same lines, [16:32] Referencing this advice you've already shared of just thinking from the perspective of, [16:35] What is my manager and folks above? [16:38] What are they struggling with? And how can I propose? Here's a solution that happens to also have me move into a more interesting role. Yep, exactly. There's a direction I wasn't planning to go into, but I think it's really important and interesting is people like you that are incredibly good and successful end up taking on a lot. [16:55] And that often ends up not being what they want. SOS. Exactly. Any advice on, you know, like the classic, be careful what you're good at advice? [17:05] Any advice on just how to not end up with everything? [17:08] I really believe operating in your zone of genius. [17:11] I really believe in leaning into strengths and, you know,

[17:15] you know, if you are in a position in which [17:18] you're good at things and you've been giving a lot of responsibility but you have tremendous growth edges and you're spending more time on the things you need to level up than the things you are exceptional at i think that's not fair for the organization i think that's not fair for you so [17:31] I truly believe defining and understanding your zone of genius [17:36] where you are exceptional, where no one else can step into the job and do just as good of a job as you can, and where you derive tremendous intellectual, emotional, [17:46] joy out of the work is what makes [17:50] it's sustainable over time. And so I don't actually think it's about the volume or breadth of the work. It's about sustainability of the work and [17:58] you know, can you show up every day energized and engaged and excited about what you do? [18:04] And I think being very aware [18:06] if you are operating the space or if you're not and this might go back to i think um i have never regretted promoting somebody [18:15] too slowly i have regretted promoting somebody too quickly in that you know high slope individuals in particular areas [18:24] want to get more responsibility, quote unquote, want to have more scope. And I've seen sort of less experienced managers or directors or even people at my level [18:36] want to give opportunities that put people in a position where they're not, they're neither effective nor happy. And so I think being self aware of that is really important. And then I also think as a manager, being cognizant of that is really important.

[18:50] individually. I do do a lot, but I do feel like I'm in my zone of genius and I also [18:57] know that part of staying in my personal zone of genius is having this breadth of responsibility [19:04] But... [19:05] preserving builder time and what i mean from builder time is like i have to have time to produce real work that is that comes from me as an individual and that means that calendar management is is quite important [19:19] time management. [19:20] We're going to talk about some of the things that you built. [19:22] Yeah. In terms of finding your zone of genius, any advice for someone that's trying to figure out what it is that is in that zone of genius? I know there's like a TED talk of here's how to think about zone of genius specifically. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to I'm not going to relay it in in. [19:37] precision but one of the tactics that i've seen out there is basically [19:40] Go through your calendar for the last. [19:43] months or quarter whatever it is write everything down [19:46] and basically group them into [19:49] i hated doing this um i didn't love doing it but it was fine [19:54] I love doing this and I'm like, I love doing this. And if I could spend all my time on this, I would be the happiest person in the whole world. And like literally categorize your your the way you're spending your time into those buckets and then. [20:07] Let's put the bottom buckets away. Just focus on that top bucket and go, how can I be here now? [20:14] more. And often that is a true guide to where [20:19] you're really your passion is where your special expertise is and where you're going to add a lot of value because you're highly engaged. I think the other thing is really asking yourself and this maybe goes back to the career advice perspective, really asking yourself,

[20:33] What do I do that no one else in this organization can't do? [20:38] There are lots of you know, there are lots of things that I do that other people in the organization can do. But what are the things that I do? [20:44] that are [20:45] you know, you think about a differentiated product that are hard to replicate. And knowing what that is and leaning into that can make you [20:54] can drive a lot of exceptional career growth, but also just make you quite happy. What's an example of that for you? [20:59] I think I'm actually quite good at traversing across and up and down. So what I mean is, [21:06] I'm fluent across product engineering, design, data and operations and candidly revenue. [21:13] in a way that vertical or functional leaders maybe are less so. So I feel like I have a high level of fluency level. [21:20] broadly and can bring [21:23] conversations between functions together against a business objective pretty easily it's just the way i'm wired i was a founder it's just it's essentially second nature and the other thing that i think i can do pretty well that i find very joyous is traverse elevation and so yes i love to be up here and think about strategy and vision but i also like to drop into the details to move things forward and i think that operating you know horizontally and then being able to spend some time [21:53] on. [21:54] Wherever that vertical up and down happens makes me quite happy. I think I'm pretty good at it. [21:58] Amazing. We're going to touch on some of these things you just mentioned, actually. But real quick, you mentioned this idea of essentially an energy audit.

[22:04] There's actually a really good guide that I'll point to in the show notes by Matt Moshari that walks you through how to do this. [22:10] And we talk about this a bunch on this podcast, actually, this whole idea of just find things that give you energy, do more of that. Find things that's sappy of energy, do less of that. [22:18] Easier said than done when you have a job and you have to do stuff that people are paying you to do. But it's still really helpful, if nothing else, to help you point you where you want to be going in your career long term. [22:28] Okay, so you mentioned you're a founder. [22:31] And it feels like you're like a founder at Hark, but you've been working at larger companies. [22:34] for a while now. [22:36] And I hear that you're really good at setting a fast pace within larger companies and maintaining that startup. [22:42] focus while also having a very high bar. [22:45] for quality and product. [22:47] Everybody wants this. Everyone's like, yes, move fast. Amazing quality. That's what. Why would we not want that? I'm curious just what you actually put into practice. [22:57] concretely that allow for you to [22:59] build teams that move really fast and maintain a high bar? There are processes you find helpful, values, ways of working. Yeah, it's really exciting. People often think that I get hired into the roles that I get hired into in later stage companies because I'm supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company. And in fact, I say I'm hired to remind them they can operate like a startup. And so I think about it completely differently. And there are kind of two things I

[23:29] know what your internal pace is and essentially don't let it degrade to the pace of your recurring meetings i often find that [23:37] pace of organization locks to pace of the calendar and so i am really thoughtful that [23:45] reoccurring meetings do not drive next steps it's a very tactical thing but when somebody says oh well we'll we'll discuss this or we'll decide this in the next meeting it's no we should discuss this [23:56] now we should decide this tomorrow the other thing that i think about is setting one click faster pace expectations inside an organization so [24:06] I tend to come in and, [24:09] love this hated it's it's what i do which is if i look at an organization that is operating at a lower pace than i would expect [24:15] I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in [24:19] the clock speed one clip faster which means if you think something needs to be done this year it needs to be done this half if you think it needs to be done this half it needs to be done this quarter this quarter this month this week today [24:31] like end of day in this meeting and actually setting an expectation that [24:37] your natural pace is going to be slower than your ambition and being explicit about pulling things in i think can change the way expectations are set and honestly change the energy and momentum in organization the third thing on pace is personal sla [24:54] I never want to be [24:56] the bottleneck for the organization. This is one of the more challenging things about being in my role is you're often a point of decision making, tie breaking, next steps, approvals, socialization. And if my personal SLA is slow, then the rest of my organization cannot be as fast as possible. So I try to be fairly responsive. I try to like say do both very high rate and also very quickly.

[25:26] I love this clock speed concept of just let's move one. [25:29] uh, uh, [25:31] iteration faster than we would normally move. How do you actually do that? Is this just like you doing it and then everyone trickles down from the way you're approaching it? Is this like a principle on a team? Is there like a phrase you use? Yeah, it's kind of a phrase I use and something I asked our leadership teams to do. So I started at [25:47] one i'm going to do this and two my expectation is you look for opportunities to do this and the reason i think this is effective it's very tangible and it's very tactical it just is one of those things that in a moment when you're about to say a due date [26:03] You check yourself and you go, is this my, you know, is this right? Or do I need to pull it in by, by, um, [26:09] by an iteration. And so it's a very tactical approach. [26:14] piece of advice and expectation I give to my leadership team if they can show up that way [26:19] Then the expected pace of the organization goes up and then people tend to rise to the occasion. [26:26] And then it connects very directly to your first [26:29] piece of advice is [26:30] not rely on the meeting cadence to determine your action cadence. [26:34] I imagine that's a similar situation where you tell people, here's how I want to operate, and then you actually... [26:39] work that way and that starts to filter through. [26:41] yeah i i just think there's this anti-pattern that we'll make the decision in the next meeting or a follow-up on this in the next meeting that is an artificial [26:49] timeline can you know introduced by google calendar or whatever calendar you use like it's not a real it's not a real thing and so i want to put us on real timelines when can we make the decision how much information do we need and that and that doesn't mean that every decision is made now today tomorrow but it does mean we don't snap to artificial cadences to make our our

[27:11] our product move forward. Awesome. [27:13] Let's talk about quality. What are some lessons there? Yeah, I think in terms of high bar, there's probably two things that I think about as a leader. There's the talent bar being exceptionally high, and then there's the product bar being high. And I'll start with talent, which is on the talent side, I think you have to define the bar. You have to be really specific. And that means you have to think about pretty deeply. What are your leadership principles? If your leadership principle is, [27:42] bring the clock speed up one iteration, be explicit that that's what you expect to see, and then articulate that and hold people accountable to it. And so I do think it's really important to have a specific and measurable approach. [27:56] career ladder especially at the senior levels i often find that they're very [28:00] soft they're like [28:02] hires and manages, you know, multiple departments or, you know, uh, [28:08] takes in cross-functional stakeholder feedback like those are just not tractable specific uh [28:15] things and so i think um you know put on you pms put on your product definition or okay or hat or whatever and define some real goals for [28:26] these levels and be specific in a way that you can look at people and say definitively yes, measurably yes, they're meeting this bar, measurably no, they're not meeting that bar. And so I think that's very important. [28:38] The second thing I think is you have to normalize feedback.

[28:44] And, you know, Brene Brown, fellow Texan lover, clear is kind. I think conflict avoidant, feedback avoidant cultures are, [28:54] degrade. [28:55] the talent bar they just do because the expectations are not stated and you're not holding accountability and i do not think that's kind that is not setting up people for success in their careers that is not helping them become the best teammate that they can become so i really like to normalize feedback and take the as i say take the temperature out of the room when it comes to open and candid feedback and that means being very clear when people are not meeting expectations making it very clear that questioning ideas is not questioning innate talent and i think that has some [29:25] something that people need to hear to normalize feedback. [29:28] But I think feedback is quite important. And I think the third thing is, you know, unfortunately, when... [29:33] you're working to build a high talent bar and high talent density, then when folks aren't a fit and it's not working, [29:41] Moving against that quickly is part of the job and it's a hard part of the job. It's part of the job that most managers really avoid. But I think it's important because it keeps your overall team operating in a really healthy way. [29:54] effective, performant way that makes everybody happier, including people that that probably weren't a great fit for the for the org of the role at the time. [30:02] Is there an example of you being... [30:05] surprisingly candid to someone. [30:08] Or... [30:09] giving feedback, hard feedback to someone about quality, something that's just like, oh, wow, that's what I should be doing. There were two leaders in my organization. I won't say which one, but I won't say when. But two leaders in the organization, partners across product and engineering, and they could not.

[30:27] get get it together they could not work together they were having miss you know they were having misalignments and priorities strategy they could not communicate they were having conflict in front of the team [30:38] and you know the the managers that managed them were taking this very soft pedal approach of you need to [30:46] work on your cross-functional stakeholder and like here am i expecting all this kind of performance management stuff to happen and i called both of them individually and i said [30:57] the way you are operating is not meeting [31:00] our leadership expectations if you do not change you cannot be part of this organization anymore [31:06] I believe [31:08] you can operate differently i do and i and i did i believe these are very very talented people who could offer i believe you can operate differently but it's your responsibility to do so [31:17] And I need to see change starting tomorrow. I wanted them to succeed. And in fact, they did it like snapped in. They got it. [31:25] and [31:27] one of the, you know, turned into one of the most influential, effective [31:33] managers in our team over the course of probably the next six to nine months and i think just clearly saying you are not meeting expectations you will not be successful here if you continue on this path [31:44] I believe you can get here, but it is your responsibility. That is the conversation that is clear. [31:50] and kind and honestly very effective in most instances [31:54] That's an amazing example. [31:56] clearest kind, as you said.

[31:58] It reminds me of Kim Scott, who's on the podcast, shared the story about Bob. [32:03] I don't know if you remember that story at all of just this guy at their company who was just doing a bad job and everyone knew he was doing a bad job. And then they had to fire him and then he's just. [32:11] when they're firing him, he's just like, why didn't you tell me? Why didn't anyone tell me that I was doing? Nobody thought I was doing a great job. [32:16] Yeah. [32:17] Yeah, and I honestly think saying, [32:20] you are not doing a good job is much kinder than I think you can improve on this aspect or that aspect or I've gotten some feedback that you could be better at like that's not kind because it doesn't set somebody else up for success either in your organization or somewhere else. [32:35] Okay, let's go in a different direction. Let's talk about [32:38] Being a woman in tech. Oh, yeah. This doesn't get talked about a ton on podcasts like this. [32:44] I know you have a lot of thoughts. Obviously, you've been through a lot. You've had a lot of experiences, probably a lot of stories you haven't shared in other places. So I just want to give you a chance to share what you've been through, what you've seen and any advice you may have. [32:57] yeah and i'm happy to talk about this i know a lot of people don't want to be like defined or consistently asked about being a woman or a mom in a c-level leadership role like let's not have women in tech panels anymore but i've been reflecting a bit on this lately because i just came from a few years in healthcare which from my experience it's a lot more women in leadership roles i was a little spoiled um as even even in our our technology organization and now i'm back in you know startups and tech where the ratios are [33:26] completely opposite, especially in roles like engineering, which is a team that I run. And look, this is just, it's math. I think Carta said that 13 something percent of founders last year were women.

[33:38] It's declining year over year. [33:40] female-led founded teams were at least two percent of venture capital women hold 30 percent of senior leadership or or roles women are 30 of software engineering teams like this is just math we're just facts we're not in the room in equal proportions and as somebody who has despite kind of the numbers had a fairly successful career so far in technology i feel like i owe it to the industry to say like it hasn't been easy and it's still not easy even even at my level and [34:09] What I want to be clear about, because it gets talked about a lot in forms like this, is this is not about imposter syndrome. How can I have any right to imposter syndrome? I've proven myself. I've been a founder. I've raised venture capital. I've had a successful exit. I've been, as you said, a CPO across increasing large teams. [34:29] I get to invest in rad companies. I'm on boards. I get to be on this podcast. I'm a TikTok influencer. This is not about... [34:36] feeling like an imposter, it's really about like it is. [34:41] hard and it is different and the numbers pencil out in a way that is not favorable to to women and [34:48] As you said, there's been a lot of stuff in the past that you look at me now and you say, oh, she did associate and all the way up. But I had to fight for my all-girls school to carry computer science at the same rate that the all-boys school had it naturally. [35:04] I... [35:06] grew up in teeny tiny startups in the early aughts like i saw some nonsense you know i had vcs tell me don't get pregnant when i was like these things

[35:16] happened and yet like here i am and it's and it's fine and i'm not complaining i just think [35:23] You know, I think what people also don't understand is that stuff still happens. You know, I don't need to litigate. [35:29] who it happens with where it still happens i've i have arrived [35:33] and it still happens and the reason i bring this up is i think it should be a point of reflection for industry and i think it can be a really effective point of reflection for women who want to get into leadership roles and the way i approach it is i'm just very curious i wonder [35:51] What is structural about technology that creates these things happen? What is cultural? What is external? Like what has happened to me or happens around me? What is internal? What do I bring into the room that doesn't serve me? And so I, you know, I try to stay very curious and then, you know, constant product thinker, like what are the points of leverage I can, I can use to move things not just forward for me, but for the industry broadly, [36:21] thinking, where can I not, where can I walk away from things? And then as for the internal aspect of it, I think this is also a very powerful thing, which is, [36:29] i try to stay in empowered an empowered space i know you know my value [36:35] and i have no time for imposter syndrome it's not a it's not a constructive um thing for me but i do think knowing that as i said earlier like the universe is vendable to your will

[36:47] there are things we can change. I don't think these numbers are not tractable. And so my recommendation and what I'd love to say to [36:54] the industry generally, [36:56] to women in particular is like curiosity and empowerment have been my path to joy in this sometimes complicated industry. And I, you know, I think there's a lot better we can do, but, um, there's, there's a little bit of ways to go. [37:10] Is there a story that you could share if you're comfortable with just something you've gone through or been through that maybe people are like, oh, wow, I see. [37:17] I see what stuff she's dealing with or other women are dealing with that I had no [37:21] sense of i've been trying to wrap my head around this one which is [37:25] I consistently get asked if I'm technical enough or if I'm not even technical enough. [37:29] Let's put enough aside if I'm technical. And it's fascinating to me because [37:36] It's a technical co-founder of my startup. [37:39] I wrote code for the first 12 months solo. [37:44] It was the kind of like led the engineering team there. [37:47] That code is still in production in very, very large environments. [37:51] I have run multi hundred people, engineering teams for many years. [37:58] And... [37:59] I spend my Saturdays and Sundays shipping code like this is what I do. And truly the first question most people ask me is, oh, well, you're not technical, though. You're like your product person. And I've been really trying to unpack where that is coming from. It's hard for me to imagine somebody else that looks different, that has a different name, this different gender, getting that question with my background. And so that's one of those things that has really been spinning my head again.

[38:29] but I am quite curious. [38:32] where that orientation comes from. And if it comes to somebody like me who has really, you know, had some proven success, I know it's happening to other people. And I'm hoping that I can do something from from from my position to. [38:47] you know, turn that a little bit. [38:49] And this connects to what you shared, the advice you had of just like try to get curious about why it's happening, which is exactly what you just said. Is that just mostly to help you not get... [38:58] upset and frustrated, like, let me just understand why is this happening again and again? [39:02] One, it's I do think sitting in your power is very effective. And so curiosity means that I'm in control and I do think I'm in control more than more than I'm not. So that's one one part of it is I think. And the other thing is. [39:18] I think a lot of this is... [39:22] it's complicated it's structural it's it's cultural it's what you see and what you don't see not just in the workplace it's what you see and don't see in media it's am i reading my seven year old and my four year old books of my grandma's a software engineer you know books are called the mom test which i actually think is like a great book but it has this underlying presumption of who is technical who's not who understands things who doesn't and that all bubbles up into how

[39:52] Well, at the end of the day, it's about economic participation. It could be about individuals and aspirations, but it is also about economic participation. So the reason I'm curious about it is because I do think it's complicated. [40:02] And I do think you can be successful. [40:05] But I don't think we're being successful at the rates I would love to see. And I think we're missing a lot of innovation and a lot of economic growth by not having incredible, technical, capable women start companies and lead organizations. And so I think we're all missing out for that. And I'd love I'd love to see more of it. [40:25] And is there an answer to how do we [40:28] do this better. [40:29] Uh, [40:30] anything you think you've seen work. [40:32] to help get us past this. [40:35] I think normalize seeing it. So thanks for bringing me on this podcast. But I do think normalize seeing it is one of the simplest ways. You know, if you close your eyes and imagine a software engineer, my dream is like you imagine a diverse set of folks. You don't imagine a very specific archetype. And so I do think. [40:55] you can't believe it unless you see it. And so the more that you can provide platforms for diverse voices to talk about their journey in technology, expose that there are leaders out there that come from different backgrounds, technically, culturally, all those things. [41:11] the more the industry can imagine different types of leaders in different types of roles. And so, you know, I just want to see it more. I want to invest more and raise the voices of female founders. I want to call out their amazing female CTOs out there, all those things. And I think if you can see it, you can start to unlock these.

[41:30] very, very embedded [41:33] concepts of who is and isn't is and is not a technology leader who is and is not [41:39] Thank you. [41:40] Awesome. I love that advice. It's something I try really hard to do with this podcast. [42:10] compliance alongside reporting and tracking risk. Plus, you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI. Join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny. [42:36] I know you have a fun story about when you were very pregnant. [42:39] Selling your startup. [42:41] Yeah. [42:42] to optimize lee can you share that story i haven't actually yeah yeah this was this was a fun one again this is like the universe is bendable to your will and lean into your power which is i had been running experiment engine which was a um [42:55] platform for enterprises to run high scale experimentation programs. So not necessarily the underlying A/B testing technology, but all the stuff around.

[43:05] hypothesis gathering, insights, aggregation operations, like keeping things on track. [43:12] Because I really know, as you do, that high scale experimentation programs can be very impactful to businesses. That being said, it was like a niche inside an industry as opposed to a large TAM problem. And so I think we just fundamentally hit a TAM ceiling here. We had a great product for a great market. [43:32] that was very narrow and you know three years four years into running the company i knew that to be true and i knew that we would be better served by being part of a um a larger organization and one of those organizations could be a large testing company and so i remember that was like noodling on my mind but we were also really trying to sell to enterprises and [43:53] I, [43:55] heard that Microsoft, who was one of our biggest customers, was doing a [44:00] experimentation day with optimizely and i knew optimizely was a natural acquirer [44:04] And... [44:05] i knew i had to get into that room so i called microsoft and i said hey friend at microsoft [44:12] I'm going to be up in Seattle seeing our other customer, very large Seattle company this week. [44:20] week of experimentation day. [44:21] Could we stop by? And they're like, oh, yeah, sure. Well, then I went to other, you know, other big Seattle companies that hey other big Seattle company. [44:30] I'm going to be up visiting Microsoft at their experimentation day. Would you be? So like I got these two meetings to manifest against each other.

[44:37] And then I walked into that experimentation day and [44:42] I eyeballed the CFO of optimizely and I sat in front of him and started pulling up the product and coding at the same time. I was like, I'm going to sit in front of him in a row and I'm going to do this. [44:53] I have my screens. And then I went up and did a demo. And I'm not saying that's the thing that... [45:00] made it happen but i will say very quickly after that we became very close partners and ultimately they they acquired me and i give this advice to founders because one of the things that founders and pms one of the things that i really hire for is scrappiness i think you have to be able to do [45:15] a lot with a little. And I think you have to know where you're getting and, you know, come hell or high water, figure out a way to get there. And this was a very fun example of, [45:25] Working my way into the right room, setting myself up for the success that I wanted and having the backing, the good job, the great product, the outcomes to earn it. But you also have to get yourself in the room. [45:38] And how many months pregnant were you? I was extremely pregnant. [45:44] a ticking time bomb of a belly is a really good negotiation tactic in a deal i think i remember when we were negotiating the final term sheet i was 30 [45:53] four weeks pregnant, something like that. And they said, can you fly out to San Francisco? I was in Austin at the time. And I said, literally, you can fly me out today and back tomorrow. And then I'm not allowed on planes. And that's how, you know. [46:04] It was very fun. It was fun. And what a happy acquisition. I can talk all day about how that was great. Great experience. And I love it's another example of the phrase you've been coming back to of bending. I don't know if it's bending the world to your will. Bending the universe towards your will. Bending the universe even bigger.

[46:20] I love it. It feels like a recurring theme here is [46:23] to take agency and control of where your career and life is going. [46:27] And that's such a good example of just finding a way into this room that would be very hard for someone to get into. [46:33] You've touched on the C- [46:36] TPO role? [46:38] that I haven't heard much about. And I know that this is a big [46:42] topic for you and I feel like there might be a trend happening here of kind of like combining engineering product. Can you just talk about this role and why you think it might be merging? [46:51] yeah i get asked about it a lot because it's it's not super rare but it's not super common either and i think it could potentially be right be rising and so i believe that the cp and i'm using cpto for short credit code of like running product and engineering design functionally together it's very different i've done both it's very different than a pure product or a vp product role [47:13] And so first, you know, I talked a little bit about how I got into this role. I do think you have to be technical to do do a role like this. I think a lot of people look at my professional background and think that I use my broad leadership skills and the leverage of a great SVP to keep engineering team going. [47:43] that works on a scalable platform. And so I spend a lot of time making sure that we're building the right architectural decisions, that our infrastructure meets the needs of our team, that our edge team is operating in a way that drives velocity. And I just don't think you can do that job if you don't understand how software gets built on a technical level. So I'm the kind of person that when we're doing a product review, I have like the PRD up and GitHub up, and I'm like comparing both because I think both sides matter. I think the other thing that's different

[48:13] quite operational. [48:15] And so you really have to know about operations and organization design and teams are by nature much larger than product organizations. Like you just think about the classic ratios. There are more people in engineering than there are in product. And the talent changes challenges are significantly different in engineering, whether it's the high volume of. [48:35] recruiting culture challenges are different. You have to really think about org design. And so, you know, you have to have a different level of mindset around organization design and operations when you're in a CPT role and [48:50] You have to you're you're in pager duty, right? You're like you're getting paged at one in the morning if a service, you know, there's a set zero and it goes down. That is not what it's like to be be a product leader. So you got to know what you're getting into and you have to be technical. And the thing I would be remiss to say about this role is the P and the T get a lot of airtime. [49:08] product and engineering get a lot of air time design data these are such functional very important organizations and [49:16] Why these roles get so that's kind of like what the role is and how how you could be good at it or whether it would be a fit for your skills Question of why have this kind of role and I think there's two there's two reasons and [49:28] There's the obvious strategic reason of like, [49:32] They're all... [49:33] the same thing right they're all building capital p product um they're all builders they're the same types of folks they're all builders and bringing them one under one house allows you to optimize for the whole as opposed to optimize for the function and if you can find a leader that is effective at that i think you can get a lot of value out of it and and honestly the second thing

[50:03] At the end of the day, R&D is a very expensive and complicated investment the company is making. And having a single person responsible for R&D is a very expensive and complicated investment. [50:13] investment at the executive level is quite important, especially when you're [50:18] candidly spending a lot there. And so I think it's those two things. It's these are one team, [50:25] There should be there should be no debates over what's best for product or what's best for engineering, what's best for design. It should be what is best for the organization at whole. What do our customers need and what do our business needs? And then it's the accountability, candidly, of this. [50:38] quite meaningful investment against business objectives and having a single singularly responsible individual. [50:44] to care for that investment. [50:45] - Hmm, sounds wonderful, having one person to deal with across all these functions. - Well, that's what an isn't. I'll just say, like, I've done both, right? I've been a CPO next to an SVP of Eng. [50:58] I've run both together. [51:00] founders can play this role. And again, this is why I sort of say you have to optimize around talent in your organization. [51:09] If your CEO can has the skills, bandwidth, et cetera, to do this, they can do this. You can keep the organization separate. They can hold that. [51:16] if they have a different area of expertise if they've never done that before if it's just not working operationally they have broader areas of focus [51:23] then bring it together under someone. I don't think there's a perfect... [51:27] organization structure. This has just been one that's worked well in the shape of organizations that need someone like me.

[51:34] Yeah, and along the same lines, designing an org around the person. I imagine there's not many... [51:38] Very engineering... [51:40] background experience people that are also really good at product and can do design. [51:45] I guess how deep do you need to be in each of these functions to be successful in a stroll? Because it feels really rare. [51:49] Um... [51:51] you know, start a company and then you have to do it in some ways. I mean, I think this is, [51:57] you know i i've worked for both and they've told me i've worked for two they go i'm not a founder but i'm the ceo and i go that's fine i'm an operator but i'm going to bring your founder mindset and so i think as a founder [52:11] especially early stage, [52:13] you do all this you see how all of this is one person because honestly sometimes [52:18] it is one person and sometimes that person is you and so i do think working in a small very small startup [52:25] gives you the opportunity to experience a breadth of [52:29] functional skills and develop a breadth of functional skills [52:33] that can set you up for this kind of role much further, further down the line. [52:39] So I do think early stage startup experience is one of those, one of those, [52:43] shortcuts to getting getting visibility here you know i think the other thing is again i said this earlier so many people get siloed into like i'm a product manager and so my job is this but it's not that and i can only do this [52:58] and if designs are needed i am blocked and i will just wait and i just give permission for people to make we have a have a leadership principle inside our team that's like

[53:10] There are no lanes. [53:11] So like they're like our lanes are dotted. They're not solid in that. You can shift over and pencil out a design. An engineer can write a spec. Like all those things are fine. They're natural. They're normal. And I actually think they're quite healthy. And it's that kind of thinking that probably is going to breed the type of leaders that could do this, this type of role. [53:29] Awesome. It reminds me of GitLab. I just interviewed [53:32] They're head of product or CPO, and they have a core value of short toes. [53:36] Don't worry about stepping on people's toes. Have short toes. Don't worry about people getting into your stuff. It's all good. [53:42] - Yep. - Okay, you mentioned AI, amazing segue. [53:46] to my next topic that I want to spend some time on. [53:49] You built a tool called ChatPRD, [53:53] My guess is it's the single most popular AI PM-specific tool out there, other than, like, some big companies' tool, like, I don't know, Sprague or Figma or something like that. Okay, so first of all, just what is chat? [54:03] PRD, and then why did you build it? Yeah, so chat PRD comes out of, again, pace setting, and I'll actually tell you the real genesis of chat PRD, which is, [54:16] a previous company we had a quite technical product we needed to build we're scrappy and resource constrained and [54:24] our platform pms were working on something very important but this was critical we needed to get get it done and we didn't really have a platform technical pm to to spec this thing out and it was quite complicated and i raised my hand and i said all i see this i think i know what we need [54:38] And...

[54:41] Between the beginning of the meeting and the end of the meeting, I had used chat GPT and a prompt to come up with a very serviceable. [54:50] PRD spec for this very technical product. And, [54:54] I took that prompt and that long-running ChatGPT thread [55:01] and crafted [55:03] the Claire version of a product leader or product person that could, with really solid consistency, output product specs, give good feedback, build out plans, build out tracking mechanisms and goals. [55:19] And so while I say like she may just be a prompt, but she is my prompt. This is lovingly crafted over several months. And so when the GPT store came out, [55:29] for my team i just said hey you all know i've been writing prds with chat or chat gpt [55:34] I created as a GP team. [55:36] and just gave it to my team. I was like, here, you can use this if you want it. And [55:41] They really liked it. [55:42] And other people started asking about it. And I eventually ran into the monetization and access wall that is the GPT store right now. And so I've also been having a lot of fun coding again. And so I thought this is easy. We're just going to stand up a standalone app and wrap. Come on. It's a wrapper. Wrap some of these capabilities and just publish it and put a fairly reasonable price tag on it and see what happens.

[56:12] thousands of people using chat PRD every day. People are creating dozens of specs and PRDs every month. It's everything from, I'm an engineer on a team with too few PMs and I get blocked, so I'm going to build my own requirements, to I'm a solo founder and I need to put some structure on my thought for my team, to I'm going to be able to build my own requirements. I'm going to be able to [56:30] I'm a PM and this has saved me truly a [56:33] hours of work to get the basics of my product requirements done so I can spend time on the details. And then I've added on more functions and capabilities in the standalone app. So it is my personal product copilot that I've released for the world. [56:49] Okay, so first of all, where can people check this out as a chatprd.com? [56:53] chat.ai. Come on. .ai, of course. Yeah, chat.prd.ai. [56:57] I saw some stat about that. The country that has .ai is just making so much bank right now. All these domains. Okay. [57:04] Then in terms of the stack, just to be clear, so it started as a chat GPT prompt, custom prompt, you kind of evolved. [57:09] Then it became a [57:10] GPT, a custom GPT, and now [57:14] It's your own app that is using the OpenAI APIs? It is, yeah. It's using the assistance APIs. And what's different about the standalone app versus the GPT is every person that uses the standalone app gets a customized assistant. So it learns from their specific content, it learns from their role, it learns from their company. So if you use the GPT version, you're not getting that customization. When you use the standalone app, you are getting that customization. And then I've layered on a

[57:44] it will actually create the document for you and iterate on the actual doc for you. And then working on some additional tools and integrations in the future. [57:54] Okay, great. [57:56] what are the most common use cases again just so people can get a sense of oh let me use this for these things yeah about 60 of people use it to put in an idea and get a prd out um so just like get the specs of [58:10] what are my objectives and user goals? What are user stories? What is out of scope? Walk through the UX. I have in our standard template, [58:19] have what's called a narrative which is like [58:21] how do you pitch this product, which I feel like is a thing product managers miss a lot, which is like how to position and pitch it. [58:28] sequencing and milestones, measurements and goals, all those sorts of things. Now that's the out of the box template. As I said, you can actually customize what your PRD template is in chat PRD. So if you do something different or want something different for your company, so about 60% of people are using it for that. [58:44] 30% of people that they are using it to, [58:47] put in a spec or a PRD or a strategy doc or a roadmap and improve it. And then the rest are using it to brainstorm ideas, internal PM work, like how do I come up with a good agenda for X, Y, and Z, that kind of stuff. [59:02] Amazing. [59:03] Okay, so I wrote a post recently of how sharing a bunch of examples of how people are using different GPT specifically at work. And I think it's spurred a lot of people to experiment with this stuff.

[59:14] If there's one tip that you could share, [59:16] for someone that's trying to build a GPT or their own custom app using OpenAI. [59:22] APIs, any advice? [59:24] prompt matters. We went through this whole cycle of prompt engineering is a thing, it's not really a thing, fine tuning is a thing. [59:31] prompt really does matter. And like a good PM, I do competitive analysis. I use the same input and look at different, I look at like GPT or chat GPT. I look at the GPT store version. I look at other PM tools that do this. And I look at mine. I think mine is actually better. And then, you know, I'm getting into a mode now where I may do some model experimentation and tuning behind the scenes. So it might not be open AI. It may be other things. [59:58] But, [59:59] it matters the instructions matter the context matters for the quality of the output [1:00:05] is something that I would say when building these kinds of products. I think the other thing is, there is no solution right now for monetization. Knock on wood, open it, I will figure it out. If I had more time, maybe I would create a platform out of what I've created for chat GPT to let other people sort of monetize their GPTs and add on capabilities. But it's not out of the box yet for folks. And I think there's probably, there's a lot of work that I had to do to get it from here to there. And are you making real money with this thing? And is the idea that this [1:00:35] becomes the thing you do someday, maybe long term. [1:00:38] So my original goal, and I like said this out on X, some original goals, I just want to buy like a nice glass of wine a week. That was my goal. I can buy like cases of wine now. This is very exciting, exciting for me.

[1:00:50] It's making! [1:00:51] what I would consider real money. Is it a venture scale thing? No. Does it need to be? [1:00:58] No, I have a goal around my kids education expenses. I would love for for this to cover a little bit. So I have a ambitious but not audacious goal. [1:01:10] for for chat chat purity the other goal that i have which is is let's put monetization aside [1:01:17] is this is... [1:01:18] my joy space. Like, [1:01:21] So zone of genius, joy space. And my goal with chat PRD is it has to be 100% fun for me. Like this is my hobby. So I'm not doing anything that makes it [1:01:32] not fun. It is a pure bliss space for me. I get to code on the weekends. I get to do customer support at night and I get to build things that I would use to learn new technologies. [1:01:44] I want to keep it in that space because it provides a lot of joy for me. So like put money aside, I just want it to be fun. [1:01:50] Love that. [1:01:52] Okay, so some people listening to this, especially PMs, may be like, Claire, what the hell are you doing? Are you going to replace product managers in a year or two? [1:02:00] This connects to something I've just generally been thinking about. [1:02:03] and that's come up a bunch of just [1:02:05] over time, which skills and jobs of a product manager will be [1:02:10] greatly enhanced by AI, and which will be? [1:02:13] completely replaced by AI, if any. [1:02:16] so that people can understand which skills they should be investing in, which maybe are less important.

[1:02:21] So I guess just broadly, do you have a sense of just here are skills that are going to continue to be incredibly important and AI will not take these skills and jobs off your plate versus, okay, these are going to be the less important AI will. [1:02:34] do these. [1:02:35] At the highest level, I tend to be very short term. [1:02:39] pessimistic, although I'll frame that short term pessimistic and very long term optimistic. So I am a big believer that technology has made society generally [1:02:49] much more, much, much more, like wealthier, happier, healthier, like, [1:02:55] I am a big believer in technology and I am optimistic about its impact on the human race. There are lots of things that are not going well, but I really do believe that innovation and technology like I'm excited for my kids future. I'm not I'm not I'm not afraid of it. [1:03:10] Now, that being said, I am of the mind, [1:03:14] excitedly that this is going to change stuff in [1:03:18] companies incredibly quickly. And part of building ChatPRD is I hold myself to the bar as a technology leader. I need to be leading [1:03:30] the league on understanding what this can disrupt using these tools to make a better better team and actually shifting the size and shape of my organization in response to the technology around us so is it going to eliminate pms next year [1:03:43] Probably not. Are the ratios between PMs and other teams going to shift over time? Yes. Are the skills required going to shift? Yes. Could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Yes.

[1:03:55] probably so i think there's a lot of change coming and i i want to be prepared for it now [1:04:01] what do i think this replaces and what does it replace like it was really i was reflecting on this question and [1:04:08] Like, [1:04:09] communication lowercase c I feel like is one of the places that's going to be replaced and [1:04:15] you know there's and i call it lowercase c is like the functional trading of information [1:04:22] that allows other people to do jobs. Like, I think that these language models and these tools are really good [1:04:30] synthesizing information, [1:04:32] putting together communication, [1:04:34] and can coordinate who that coordination goes communication goes to and get it out in many modalities of of content and so i'm really thinking about you know [1:04:44] The PM is the keeper of cross-functional relationships and communication. [1:04:49] is really i think potentially going to change now but capital c communication of [1:04:55] are you influential are you convincing are you bold can you get this system of humans [1:05:02] to follow you down a path that's i think going to be much much harder uh to replace and so i'm thinking about the edges of of communication and um where they'll change and what they won't [1:05:13] That's really interesting. [1:05:14] I did a poll on Twitter and LinkedIn asking people, [1:05:18] of between communication, execution, strategy, and product sense. [1:05:23] which skills are most likely to be basically taken over by AI. And,

[1:05:28] Communication was number one by far. I have a contrarian perspective and strategy was the least, least voted. [1:05:35] I feel like... [1:05:36] So strategy work is essentially, here's everything we know about the world and competitors and the market and our advantages. [1:05:43] here's a plan to win in the market, essentially. I feel like that's what AI is incredibly good at. I agree with you. I totally agree with you. I think, and again, this comes to like synthesis, right? [1:05:55] good decision making and communication. If you can synthesize [1:06:01] distill into a plan and communicate that plan, the, [1:06:04] I found these tools exceptional. Use chat PRD and give it a try. Now, I think it's... [1:06:11] It's sort of the human aspect, though, of... [1:06:15] boldness seeing the future in a way that they [1:06:19] thing trained on priors cannot like those things i i still think and then and then charisma and attracting like all those things to actually make the thing happen [1:06:31] are pretty hard to replicate which is why i love using chat purity right like [1:06:35] I'm not going to come up with the most genius... [1:06:38] way to do data export for Snowflake for Sun. Like that is a solved area that we should just scaffold up. I should customize it to what we do. [1:06:48] and then we should ship it. That is not a place where my magic skills as a human are going to impact. But I don't think a lot of PMs see it that way. [1:06:57] I think there's this real identity shift that's going to happen where,

[1:07:01] PMs think that their value [1:07:04] is coming from there. [1:07:05] you know ideas that they manifest into the world and how they individually manifest them and i think we're going to shift to like are you are you building the right stuff are you building it quickly and is it is it delivering [1:07:16] no matter what the tool chain is. [1:07:19] Yeah, I think your point about getting buy-in and getting everyone aligned, that's, I don't know how... [1:07:25] an AI bot does that unless everybody's got their own little bot and they're all like talking to each other. They all just get along. We're in, we're in. Now let's purchase this a little higher. Yeah. I actually made this list. I feel like this could be the entire podcast, but I made it like a quick list of here's the jobs of a PM. [1:07:40] And it's interesting, and this is just, I don't know if this is really a question, but it's just interesting to think about which of these will... [1:07:45] some [1:07:47] chat PRD may be due in the future. So what is the job for you? You're writing PRDs, you're setting goals, proposing a roadmap, aligning a team behind a roadmap, [1:07:55] Developing a strategy. Developing a vision. [1:07:58] Communicating timelines, finding blockers, and unblocking people. [1:08:01] getting buy-in from [1:08:03] high upon high. [1:08:04] getting budget resources for your team, giving feedback on product and design, [1:08:09] Those are just some of the day-to-day jobs. I'm so curious just which of these AI can actually just do. [1:08:15] and not have to worry about it. I think a lot of them AI can do. And so the question is, which of them do you want to hand the keys to? [1:08:23] an AI tool and which of them are going to be much more valuable as a tool that [1:08:29] an individual or a team's intellect can use to do a better faster higher impact impact job and so i think i you know again i believe in technology and i think this stuff you know what's interesting about this moment right now is every week i see something

[1:08:44] that i would not have in a million years thought was possible [1:08:48] Three years ago. [1:08:49] Every week something new comes out where it just changes my my mind of what's possible. So I believe all of those are. [1:08:57] 80 good functionally attractable the question is is [redacted address] to do that or can we take a certain type of person with a certain skill set backed by a purpose-built toolkit [1:09:10] and make it 3x better, 4x better, 10x better? I think that's the more interesting question. [1:09:16] I think on the point of amazing things are happening every day, like we had to [1:09:20] SpaceX launched the Starship and it was like barely mentioned anywhere. Like we have the spaceship that can take us to Mars now. Yeah. I'm like, nah, we don't need to talk about that. I mean, you know, we get the kids up and like streaming on YouTube. Oh, that's awesome. I think it's just, it's magic. Like we live in this magic time. I think it's so fascinating, but I agree. We're getting, we're getting spoiled by innovation. [1:09:41] You said that there's this ratio that might shift with product managers, engineers. I'm curious which ratio, because engineers are also getting more efficient. [1:09:47] And so it's interesting if the ratios will be consistent as engineers become more efficient, PMs get more efficient. I wonder if whole roles get eliminated and replaced and then ratios aren't even the right way to think about things. You know, there's the ratio of... [1:10:04] this PM role to this many, 1 PM to 7 to 10 engineers or 1 EM to 7, like there's those ratios. I also think there's going to be this interesting shift of as a manager, as a leader, how you allocate budget against tools and people, I also think is going to shift. And I saw something where somebody said that every role that they got asked to open, the team had to spend a week trying to automate it.

[1:10:30] before they were allowed to open the JD. And it's just this very interesting, you know, and [1:10:34] In my mind, you know, people think that's scary and it's going to reduce jobs. [1:10:39] Yes. And I do think there's also potentially other jobs that open up that can become very interesting. And so I don't know how it's going to pencil out. I really don't. [1:10:49] What I do know is things are going to change. And I, as a leader and a person that cares for people's long term careers, want to be much more forward thinking than close my eyes to what the possible potential. [1:11:03] maybe dramatic changes are in our industry. So I'm thinking about it. I'm experimenting with things. And I'm hoping that, you know, in our team and LaunchDarkly, we're leading from the front here as opposed to on our back foot. [1:11:16] I'm thinking many people listening are like, okay, I need to get on top of this. I need to stay ahead. I want to follow Claire's lead. Is your advice simply create GPTs, play with chat GPTs? Is there anything else there to help people? I also think... [1:11:32] pms need to be thinking about building product skills particularly around these like non-deterministic products it's been quite into part of why i built chat gpt is not just to stress test how is or chat purity is not just a stress test how [1:11:46] these sorts of things are going to change the product function it's literally like [1:11:49] This is a new type of product built by a new type of technology, and it's moving very fast and learning how to build. [1:11:58] these kinds of products if you can do that i just think back to like when mobile happened if you're a pm that jumped jumped on mobile

[1:12:06] You had the... [1:12:07] pick up the litter when it came to jobs in very interesting startups. And so I think we're in the same moment here where [1:12:15] if you can ratchet down and specialize and learn a new technology, you actually can get into very interesting positions. So those are both of my motivations on chat. BRD is is understand how it impacts the function that I lead, but also understand how to build a great product with these underlying technologies that are just much different than the technologies that. [1:12:34] I personally built on before. [1:12:37] And so for someone that's a not super engineering [1:12:41] oriented. I guess, how do you reckon people on your team explore this sort of thing? Is it [1:12:45] Yeah, I do think studying products that are out there is quite interesting. You know, I love this idea of doing... [1:12:54] outside in product teardowns like what is good about this what is bad about this how would i have written the prd here what would i be measuring how would i think about error states how would i [1:13:04] if this is a great product a good product or an okay product i do think doing that sort of crit on an external product can be a really accessible way to start to stress test your own skills around this and figure out where there are gaps so that's that's one thing i think you can do too i think there's a lot of no code low code stuff you can play with so even if you can't you know put your hands on keyboard and write code you can certainly [1:13:32] stitch together things and and try some no code tools so that's that's another way to do it the other thing is like find where it's fun

[1:13:40] I think... [1:13:41] you know how fun is mid journey how fun are some of these more creative tools and so [1:13:46] Find where there's something fun and build art out of it as a mechanism for learning. It doesn't always have to be commercially driven. It doesn't have to be part of work. It can just be find a space that you're personally interested in and play with what's out there. Awesome. [1:14:01] One last question about ChatPRD. [1:14:04] So with Copilot, there's all these stats. It's making engineers 50% more efficient, whatever percentage. Do you have any sense of efficiency gains so far with ChatPRD? So I have qualitative feedback. [1:14:18] from product managers who have used ChatPRD who have said, this has saved me. [1:14:24] dozens of hours [1:14:26] i would have spent on writing documents and another person said [1:14:31] I am a single PM. [1:14:33] on a team that's growing and i don't think we're gonna have to hire another pm now [1:14:38] So like, you know, there's like both the people, like there's both the individual aspect and the hours aspect, which is it's helping individual PNs get higher leverager costs. [1:14:48] you know, a broad engineering or building team, and that it's helping them spend their time more effectively. [1:14:53] Many people don't want to hear this, that they don't need to hire PM. There's many people looking for jobs right now. It's true. But we can't... [1:15:02] I mean, I think we saw this in the last couple of years. [1:15:06] inefficiently hiring and building

[1:15:10] unsustainable cost into a company leads no one to success and if that's a lesson that i can teach [1:15:18] anybody it's sustainability and organizations is the responsibility of a leader so yes i would love to give [1:15:26] everybody positions they're not positions to have and the best i can do for the people in the team is be really responsible and really thoughtful about that because that helps me grow their careers and helps me sustain their careers long term so it's incredibly complicated but also on the flip side this is a very small startup they can't afford another pm and they're extending their runway to build something transformational by not growing the team and so yes people [1:15:56] for teams and have these jobs and [1:16:00] You know, startups can't can't afford it and they still have great things to do in the world. Great answer. [1:16:05] To start to wrap up our conversation, [1:16:08] I have these two segments, failure corner and contrarian corner. [1:16:13] And we can pick which corner you want to head to. [1:16:15] Would you like to share a story of your career where you failed and something you learned from that or something you believe that most people don't believe? Which corner sounds more interesting? [1:16:24] I'll take contrarian quarter. Let's go for there. I need some sound effects for these quarters. Do share. [1:16:31] I'm sharing this because you just released your podcast with Marty again and [1:16:39] I am a sales led product apologist unabashedly, which is

[1:16:44] I think that it is okay to listen to the people. [1:16:49] to the market and to be commercially oriented in products in ways that probably would make some folks in some types of product organizations [1:16:58] squirm a little bit and the reason why i believe this is [1:17:04] I think there are tremendous businesses built on sales motions, and I disagree with the fact that that means you do not care for the craft or the experience of users. I think it can be the best of both worlds. So I love sales. I say if I was not in this role, put me on a quota and make me Enterprise West. I love I love to sell. But I think product teams. [1:17:30] this like opposition we have sort of industry-wide with sales led i'm not convinced is healthy in every organization and i was listening to podcast and i think you all were talking about you said you know you know sap is like this and who wants to be sap like man alive there are a lot of companies out there that would love to be sap now [1:17:49] with a better product, with, you know, with better experience, with more love from the industry maybe, but like what a powerhouse, [1:17:57] company. And I think we as PNs turn our nose up to powerhouse companies too often because we want companies to be product led, not sales led. Amazing. I'm going to not get deeper into this topic because I don't want to be speaking on behalf of Marty's perspective. [1:18:13] But I love there's so much debate that came out of that episode, and I love that it trickles.

[1:18:17] to more opinions being shared about ways product can work [1:18:20] So I guess just to understand your takeaway here is, [1:18:22] Sales-led companies can be awesome. They can build amazing businesses, and it can be great to be a PM at a company like that. Yeah, and they can build great products. [1:18:29] Great. [1:18:31] Claire, is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? [1:18:39] I will say, because we've been talking a lot about AI and replacing PMs, I love to sell. I love to help people get jobs. So if there are ways that I can help people find great fit companies, it's one of the things that I get a lot of energy out of. So I just want to say that in the world. It's something that sparks a lot of joy. I get a lot of inbound, can you help me get in here? Can you help me get there? But if there is a tractable way that I can help you get to a connected, [1:19:04] to a company or a role that you think is great for you, that's fun for me and I'm totally open to it. How would people reach out to you to [1:19:12] try to help you get them engaged. Yeah, so I am, I'm of course on LinkedIn, I'm on X at Clairvaux on one word, and then if you really want to go into the archives, I have a [1:19:22] a very fabulous TikTok where I'm chief product officer. It's all one word. [1:19:27] Amazing. So we'll link to all these in the show notes. [1:19:30] Okay, and we'll refresh these two facts at the end of the podcast anyway, because I always ask this anyway. [1:19:36] Before we do that, [1:19:37] Welcome to our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? [1:19:40] I'm so ready. Okay. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? [1:19:46] High Growth Handbook.

[1:19:47] I love and I like scaling people. So these are two books that the reason why I recommend them to people is because they have [1:19:56] Solid [1:19:57] playbook answers [1:19:59] to like 80, 90% of [1:20:02] kind of [1:20:03] everyday leadership scaling people questions. And so they're just like great reference books for what I think like great leadership inside startups can look like. And they solve some of the things that you don't need to solve novel, novelly. And then one on the fiction side that I've been recommending is Circe, which is a retelling of Circe's story from her perspective. And I, it's like a great read and everybody I've recommended it to really loves it. From Game of Thrones? [1:20:29] No, Cersei from the Odyssey. So Odysseus bent. She turns men in a pit. It's great. My kids are very into Greek mythology. So this is me meeting them on my side. Amazing. The first two books are both Stripe Press. Shout out Stripe Press. Yeah, Stripe Press. And I have both books in the back there. And my laptop's actually sitting on the ceiling, people. [1:20:51] Fush! [1:20:52] Next question: What is a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? [1:20:56] I have kids, so I don't get to go see movies. I mean, movies are like, that's an adventure. It's basically a vacation. So I haven't seen, I saw Poor Things, which if you like capital W, weird, capital A art, highly recommend Poor Things. [1:21:10] You know, the show that I recommend to people, I love Mythic Quest. [1:21:13] You know, like everybody references Silicon Valley, but Mythic Quest gets at some of I was in gaming once gets some of my experiences in the technology organizations, got a technical female lead and I think it's quite funny. So I like the quest.

[1:21:28] Do you have a favorite interview question that you'd like to ask candidates? [1:21:31] I like to ask candidates how they would improve our business model. [1:21:34] i think so many pms come in with a point of view of like the product and the target market but like [1:21:41] don't actually understand the underlying mechanisms of how we make money and what our unit economics are and how that could be improved and the candidates that do come in and have a strong point of view on business model often are pretty successful in my organization. [1:21:54] And what do you look for in a good answer that's like, oh, wow, this Canada is great. It's sort of thinking along the chain of value to from how do we identify people in the market? What is our pricing model look like? What could they hypothesize our underlying unit economics cogs are? And then where are their points of leverage along that whole funnel? So it's really do they have a mental model for thinking about? [1:22:18] a business model have they thought at all about how we make money either [1:22:22] top line or margin and then can they identify places where they might improve it awesome basically understanding the business [1:22:31] really well. Great. [1:22:32] Do you have a favorite product that you recently discovered that you really like? [1:22:36] Okay, I'm going to make you laugh because... [1:22:38] You've gotten all these cars, right? I have such expensive cars. You've gotten expensive cars. It's not new. I love my minivan. [1:22:49] I am a big fan of my minivan. As my friend says, it's like driving around your living room and when you have two kids. [1:22:56] You know what I want to do? I just want to drive around my living room, like bluey included. And so, you know, no Rivian, no Mercedes Benz, but I really love my Pacifica. Pacifica? Okay, I was going to ask. But the actual car product that I really love, I love Waymo.

[1:23:11] You know, we're in San Francisco. We've got these autonomous vehicles. It is. [1:23:16] top to bottom. [1:23:18] just a lovely product experience from the app to when it shows up the sound design is great the cars are comfortable the displays in the car are great like it is now every time a tourist comes in a friend comes in to visit san francisco i make them take a round trip ride in a robot car so [1:23:36] And then even I've had a customer service experience with the Waymo team where my friend left an iPhone. [1:23:43] and it was very fast and customer experience was great 24-hour service like [1:23:49] Top to bottom. [1:23:50] Great product design, great service design. [1:23:53] I just got into Waymo actually in the wait list. And so I'm excited to actually try it. I was actually treated as press early on to write in Waymo with like a person from the company just to experience it. [1:24:05] And then I never got access to it after. So now I finally can try it. Enjoy. It's so nice. It's my preferred mode of travel. The future. Yep. [1:24:13] We've talked about a lot of ways the world is changing. That's another great example. [1:24:17] Nope. [1:24:17] Two questions to go. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often... [1:24:22] Come back to share with friends or family they find useful in work or in life. [1:24:25] Fast beats right. [1:24:27] Like, [1:24:28] Every time. [1:24:30] When debating between do I like noodle this for a thousand years and try to come to the perfect solution or do I make a decision and get executing a direction I have conviction on? I always I like consistently see and believe that fast.

[1:24:46] at the end of the game, at the end of the day, [1:24:48] wins. So fast piece right. [1:24:50] Final question. [1:24:52] You mentioned TikTok. You put a bunch of awesome content out on TikTok. [1:24:56] Any advice slash is there a tip you could share with someone that is trying to be successful on TikTok from your experience? I've been neglecting my TikTok for a little bit with with new job and winter with sick kids. This is my advice. [1:25:09] And I think you know this. [1:25:11] Consistency. [1:25:12] drives audience growth, which is when I was on TikTok, [1:25:17] posting every day you would get followers and engagement and the algorithm would you know bless you and when you don't you don't so i think consistency in almost all things wins the other thing that i i think is a really good advice for any [1:25:31] quote unquote creator of whatever scale of whatever ambition is i think thinking about content creation as documentation not creative generation is really helpful so [1:25:42] I just like to talk about what I think about at work, and I like to have an interesting meeting or interesting interaction, document why I thought that was interesting or what could be done better, and that becomes the basis of a very natural flow of what I think about. [1:25:53] of content for me. So it's a tactic that's worked really well for me and helps me do stuff in my free time. Amazing. It might be time to start exploring Instagram also with all this TikTok news. I know. Yep. [1:26:06] Claire, before we started this podcast, I asked you what your goal for this was, and it was to be helpful to people. I think we've 100% done that in so many different ways. [1:26:14] Thank you again so much for being here. Two final questions. We already covered these, but just to refresh people's memories, where can people find you online? They want to reach out, and then how can listeners be useful to you? So LinkedIn, X, I'm Claire Vo, all one word, and then on TikTok, you know, get me back into it. Give me a follow. Maybe I'll start posting some of my excellent content, but it's chief product, at chief product officer.

[1:26:36] Awesome. And then how can people be useful to you? [1:26:39] I help each other. That's that's what I want the most, which is I do. I do really see it is a tough time in tech right now. And there are a lot of people looking for jobs. So one, I think help each other. And then the other thing that I really if I could ask your audience anything is if you have a job where your job is. [1:26:57] typing into an internet box to create products out of nothing really acknowledge the like privilege and joy of that job and and try to have some fun because a lot of people want to sit where you're sitting so have fun appreciate what you have [1:27:10] enjoy it, enjoy each other. [1:27:12] Great and important advice to leave people with. Claire, thank you so much for being here. [1:27:17] Thank you. Bye, everyone.