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Aakash GuptaAakash Gupta

Claude Code Secrets for PMs: The Operating System, Skills, and Data Viz

Carl Vellotti returns for his 3rd episode. His first two crossed over 1M views. Today he shows how to turn Claude Code into a full PM operating system with context management, sub-agents, self-checking skills, and Jupyter notebooks. Full Writeup: https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/carl-vellotti-3 Transcript: https://www.aakashg.com/carl-vellotti-podcast-3/ --- Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 1:40 - Does Claude Code still matter vs Cowork and OpenClaw 6:51 - Setting up the context status line 10:41 - Ads 12:03 - Sub-agents for context preservation 17:49 - Creating skills live 23:58 - The ask user questions tool 31:13 - Ads 33:33 - Tool-powered skills with Tavily and Firecrawl 36:57 - CLI vs MCP vs API hierarchy 39:30 - Make slides skill with Puppeteer 43:32 - Auto-invoking skills with hooks 46:49 - Jupyter notebooks for data trust 55:09 - The operating system file structure 1:05:58 - Outro --- 🏆 Thanks to our sponsors: 1. Bolt: Ship AI-powered products 10x faster - https://bolt.new/solutions/product-manager?utm_source=Promoted&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=aakash-product-growth 2. 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 3. Pendo: The #1 software experience management platform - http://www.pendo.io/aakash 4. NayaOne: Airgapped cloud-agnostic sandbox - https://nayaone.com/aakash/ 5. Product Faculty: Get $550 off their #1 AI PM Certification with my link - https://maven.com/product-faculty/ai-product-management-certification?promoCode=AAKASH550C7 --- Key Takeaways: 1. Context management is the real skill - A single web search eats 10% of your context. Run /context to see what is consuming it. System prompt and MCPs take 10-16% before you type one message. 2. Sub-agents save 20x context - Delegate research to a sub-agent. Same task costs 0.5% instead of 10%. Your main session only gets the summary. 3. Replace MCPs with CLIs - MCPs eat context by existing. CLIs have zero overhead. GitHub CLI, Vercel CLI, Google Workspace CLI are all dramatically more efficient. 4. Powerful skills need zero code - Anthropic's front-end design plugin is just a good prompt. No APIs or tooling. Just rules that tell Claude "do not look like AI." 5. Give Claude self-checking tools - The make slides skill uses Puppeteer to screenshot output, measure overflow, and fix issues before you see them. 6. Repeat prompts for better quality - A Google paper showed pasting a prompt twice helps. Tell Claude to double-check against skill instructions after the first pass. 7. Use hooks to auto-invoke skills - A user_prompt_submit hook matches your words against skill keywords instantly. Zero context cost. 8. Jupyter notebooks solve data trust - Every analysis shows exact code, inputs, and outputs. Traceable and reproducible. 9. Build an operating system - Knowledge folder for people context. Projects folder for task isolation. Tools folder for scripts. CLAUDE.md for identity. 10. The people folder compounds - Connect meeting transcription. After every meeting, update each person's dossier. Every prompt gets more specific over time. --- 👨‍💻 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/aakashgupta/ Newsletter: https://www.news.aakashg.com #claudecode #aipm --- 🧠 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.

Aakash GuptahostCarl Vellottiguest
Mar 29, 20261h 6mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Turn Claude Code into a PM operating system with skills

  1. Claude Code still matters because it’s the most powerful “base layer” compared to UI wrappers like Cowork and autonomous runners like OpenClaw, especially when PMs must stay in the driver’s seat.
  2. Context engineering is the mastery lever: monitor context usage, reduce wasted tokens, and delegate high-context work to sub-agents to avoid frequent compaction and quality degradation.
  3. Skills are the core extensibility mechanism—ranging from “just a great prompt” (e.g., front-end design) to tool-powered skills (e.g., Tavily + Firecrawl) and code-executing skills (e.g., Puppeteer slide generation).
  4. Trust and auditability improve dramatically when Claude produces traceable artifacts like Jupyter notebooks that show exact code, transformations, and reproducible visualizations.
  5. An “operating system” file structure (Knowledge/Projects/Meetings/Data/Tools/Tasks + a well-maintained CLAUDE.md) turns ad-hoc chats into a durable, compounding workflow where outputs stay organized and reusable.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Treat Claude Code as a power tool, not a chatbot.

The episode’s core argument is that most value comes from building workflows—skills, tools, agents, and structure—so Claude collaborates with you rather than producing one-off responses.

Make context visible so you can manage it deliberately.

Customize a status line to display context usage and use /context to see what consumes tokens (system prompt, enabled tools/MCPs, plugins), then disable what you don’t need.

Delegate high-tool-call tasks to sub-agents to prevent context blowups.

Research and multi-step browsing can consume tens of thousands of tokens; sub-agents keep the heavy tool traces out of the main thread so you only receive a summary and avoid frequent compaction.

Use background execution to maintain flow.

When a sub-agent runs, send it to the background (Ctrl+B) so you can keep working; results “inject” back into the main session when complete.

Turn repeated judgment calls into a skill (e.g., when to use sub-agents).

They live-build a “Context Guard” skill that decides whether a task belongs in the main session or a delegated agent, standardizing best practices and saving context automatically.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

Everyone says it's not about prompt engineering anymore, it's about context engineering.

— Carl Vellotti

When you have a sub-agent like this... it has spun up basically a clone of itself that is now doing all that work.

— Carl Vellotti

The ask user questions tool is... my absolute favorite Claude Code feature.

— Carl Vellotti

Stop using MCPs, start using CLIs.

— Aakash Gupta

Where does that data actually come from, and how is it calculated is... a major area where people just do not trust AI.

— Carl Vellotti

Claude Code vs Cowork vs OpenClaw positioningContext limits, compaction, and context rotCustom status line and /context auditingSub-agents for context preservation and background executionSkills creation, safety risks, and marketplacesAsk User Questions tool for structured clarificationTooling hierarchy: CLI vs API vs MCPTool-powered research (Tavily) + scraping (Firecrawl)Visual/slide generation with Puppeteer self-checksAuto-invoking skills using hooksJupyter notebooks for trustworthy data analysisClaude Code “operating system” folders and CLAUDE.md practices

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