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Aakash GuptaAakash Gupta

Claude Code Advanced Masterclass in Under 81 Mins

Carl Vellotti is back. His first episode hit 30,000 views. This time he shows the advanced Claude Code masterclass for PMs. MCPs, Skills, GitHub automation, and end-to-end workflows from survey → PRD → tickets → automation. My Claude Code OS: https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/pm-os Full Writeup: https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/carl-vellotti-podcast-2 Transcript: https://www.aakashg.com/advanced-claude-code-for-product-managers-from-mcps-to-github-automation/ ---- Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 2:14 - Why Claude Code Hit $1B ARR in 6 Months 9:35 - Ad Start 10:59 - Ad End: Setting Up MCPs 11:04 - Setting Up Linear MCP (Live Demo) 14:07 - Essential MCP Stack for PMs 21:25 - End-to-End PM Workflow Begins 28:00 - Skills Introduction 30:01 - Ad Start 30:53 - Ad End: Skills Deep Dive 38:00 - Image Generation with Gemini API 44:12 - Creating PRD from Survey Analysis 51:00 - Hooks Feature 55:30 - Creating Presentation from PRD 1:01:49 - Creating 19 Engineering Tickets in Linear 1:08:08 - GitHub Integration & Remote Worker Setup 1:19:39 - Outro ---- 🏆 Thanks to our sponsors: 1. Amplitude: The market-leader in product analytics - https://amplitude.com/session-replay?utm_campaign=session-replay-launch-2025&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_content=productgrowthpodcast 2. Pendo: The #1 software experience management platform - http://www.pendo.com/aakash 3. Jira Product Discovery: Move discovery and roadmapping out of spreadsheets - https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/product-discovery 4. Miro: The all-in-one collaboration workspace - http://miro.pxf.io/PO4WZX ---- Key Takeaways: 1. Claude Code hit $1B ARR in 6 months - fastest product ever. Anthropic optimized for power users doing deep work. Fewer users, insanely deep usage. Carl: "I spend all day in Claude Code. It gets to the point where you never really have to leave." 2. MCPs connect Claude to everything in 2 minutes - Model Context Protocol invented by Anthropic. One command to install Linear, Google Workspace, Slack. Essential stack: documents first, task management second, communication third, data sources fourth. 3. End-to-end PM workflow takes one morning instead of one week - Survey creation → analysis → PRD → presentation → 19 tickets. All through MCPs. Carl didn't use templates. Opus 4.5 handled everything. 4. Skills are pre-built templates but don't always auto-trigger yet - Solution: specify explicitly. "Create presentation using your presentation skill." Build Skills for anything you do more than twice. That's the compound effect. 5. Real Google Slides, not images - Carl's presentation skill created 19 fully editable slides from PRD. Takes a few minutes because Claude creates slides in parallel. "This is saving you hours. We used to spend entire afternoons turning PRDs into decks." 6. GitHub turns Claude into remote worker - Create issues from your phone. @mention Claude. It works while you're away. Carl's journal is a private GitHub repo. Voice transcriptions → issues → Claude updates markdown. 7. Workflows beat agents for production - Level 1 workflow: 5,000 tokens, 40 seconds. Level 3 agent: 90,000 tokens, 90 seconds. Carl's rule: "If something can be expressed as code, code it. Leave agents for cognitive work." 8. Production best practices separate hobbyists from pros - Set error workflows. Add retry logic (3 attempts, 1-second delays). Pin data during development. Use reasoning effort appropriately. Write detailed tool descriptions. 9. Real challenge is building reusable workflows - Learning basics takes a day. First workflow takes hours. But having 50 workflows built over months means everything is automated. Carl: "Because I have workflows for all these things already built, I can do it all in one shot." 10. Tools improve faster than you can learn them - Carl: "By the time you see this, there might be Claude 5." Your workflows from today will 10x when better models drop. PMs who started 6 months ago aren't just 6 months ahead, they're 100x ahead because systems compound with every improvement. ---- 👨‍💻 Where to find Carl Vellotti: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlvellotti/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/carlvellotti Newsletter: The Full-Stack PM 👨‍💻 Where to find Aakash: Twitter: https://www.x.com/aakashg0 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagupta/ Newsletter: https://www.news.aakashg.com #claudecode #aipm #productmanagement ---- 🧠 About Product Growth: The world's largest podcast focused solely on product + growth, with over 200K+ listeners. 🔔 Subscribe and turn on notifications to get more videos like this.

Carl VellottiguestAakash Guptahost
Jan 12, 20261h 20mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Advanced Claude Code for PMs: MCPs, skills, workflows automation

  1. Claude Code’s advantage is depth for “power users,” enabling long-running, tool-connected workflows that replace constant context switching across apps.
  2. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is presented as the standard way to connect Claude Code to work systems (Docs, Linear, Slack, Notion, etc.) to pull and push data without copy/paste.
  3. Skills are reusable, semi-automatic workflow recipes (from repos, marketplaces/plugins, or custom-built) that standardize outputs like PRDs, editing, research synthesis, and document creation.
  4. The episode demos an end-to-end PM workflow: draft a survey, analyze responses, write a PRD, generate a deck (Google Slides), and create prioritized engineering tickets in Linear.
  5. GitHub integration turns Claude into a “remote worker,” letting you @Claude in issues to make repo changes even when you’re away, with notes on basic git concepts (pull/push/branches).

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Claude Code wins by enabling deep, repeatable workflows—not one-off prompts.

The key productivity jump comes when you notice recurring work, encode it as files/rules/skills, and then run the workflow “in one shot” instead of step-by-step prompting.

Start by connecting your document system via MCP for immediate PM ROI.

Because PM work is largely document-driven, hooking up Google Drive/Docs, Notion, or Confluence first makes it easy to draft in Claude Code and publish where stakeholders already collaborate.

MCPs provide “tooling for free,” while APIs require you to build and maintain glue code.

MCP servers expose many pre-defined actions (e.g., Linear’s many issue/project tools) that Claude can use immediately; APIs (e.g., Gemini image generation) typically require scripts, keys, and documentation context.

Turn on only the MCPs you need to preserve context window capacity.

Each enabled MCP consumes some context, so the practical pattern is to keep a small active set (e.g., Linear + Google) and enable others (e.g., Reddit) only when needed.

Skills are the lever for consistent quality—but don’t rely on auto-triggering yet.

Skills can encode templates and “house style” for PRDs, editing, or research synthesis, but the demo shows triggers can be unreliable; explicitly instructing Claude to use a specific skill is a safer current practice.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

I spend all day in Claude Code because it can do more and more parts of my workflow. It gets to the point where, as a product manager or anyone working with these tools, you never really have to even leave Claude Code.

Carl Vellotti

Opus 4.5 is basically AGI, where you can give it a task, and you can kind of just trust it to, like, walk away from your computer, and it will just keep going forward in the task.

Carl Vellotti

I think that's really what it is, is it's just thinking about the whole system that you're building with Claude rather than just having it do individual tasks.

Carl Vellotti

Creating tickets as a product manager depends on how your team is set up. Sometimes engineers do it, sometimes PMs do it. But just in general, it's always, like, such a painful process, 'cause you know the information, and you just have to, you know, go through the UI and click all these buttons and, like, kind of make sure everything's all organized. Whereas now with Claude, it can just literally create all those tickets for you.

Carl Vellotti

Any time you're starting, like, a new task or, or something else, just see, "Can I do it in Claude Code?" is my best advice. Just, "Can I do it in Claude Code?"

Carl Vellotti

Why Claude Code scaled so fast (focus on coding/work)MCP setup and authentication (Linear, Google Workspace)Choosing MCP vs API integrations (Gemini image API example)Skills: sourcing, safety concerns, and reliability limitationsPlugins/marketplaces (Anthropic document skills)Hooks for automation and notificationsEnd-to-end PM workflow: survey → synthesis → PRD → deck → ticketsGitHub + @Claude as an asynchronous agentPractical limitations of terminal UX and session management

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