Use these skills to supercharge your claude code setup | Oji Udezue | 3x CPO

1. 0:00 – 1:31

   Intro

   1. OUOji Udezue0:00

      The era of mono-skilled professionals is dead, so I'm going to demonstrate the future of product builders.

   2. AGAakash Gupta0:07

      Meet Oji Udezue, former CPO at Typeform, Calendly, and Parsable, as well as former head of product of creation and innovation at Twitter. How much of this thinking, like viability gates and sharp problem tests, should we really be outsourcing to LLMs? Is LLM basically the first draft just to get some thinking going, and then we improve and react?

   3. OUOji Udezue0:28

      You really do need to look through all the output and make sure that it makes sense for you. We do this all the time because, you know, I think it's hard to fully trust 100% LLMs.

   4. AGAakash Gupta0:38

      Can you open up that scaffolding skill, and we can see what is inside it and how it looks?

   5. OUOji Udezue0:42

      Yeah. So it's, it is multi skills here. You can see that it has a master skill.md, and then it has a bunch of subskills where it will do market research. I've been a product manager for 25 years, and I've never really felt that coding was worth my time until now.

   6. AGAakash Gupta1:03

      Before we get into today's show, please take a second to check that you're subscribed on YouTube and following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. If you want access to all of my favorite AI tools, I've gotten them to give you an entire year of their paid plans. Check out bundle.aakashg.com for an entire year of Bolt.new, Airtable, Speechify, Descript, Magic Patterns, Linear, Dovetail, Arise, and Mobbin. And now, into today's show.

2. 1:31 – 2:43

   What you will learn today

   1. AGAakash Gupta1:33

      Oji, what are people gonna learn today if they stay till the end?

   2. OUOji Udezue1:36

      Well, people are gonna learn-- The most important thing they're gonna learn is that we won't just focus on code skills. The landscape of product right now, or coding or engineering or the shipyard, whatever you wanna call it, is full of repos in GitHub with skills to token-max or token-minimize or to change costs, all on the coding layer. But we know that a tech company, a successful tech company, is really three layers. It's the software and the hardware. It's the product, which is about customers and about the business model. And it's about the business, you know, thinking about allocating resources to the rest of the chain. What you're gonna learn is how to take the raw harness, like Claude Code, and apply not only coding skills, but product skills, product judgment on tap, and business skills that will help you make the very best decisions about how to build a successful product.

   3. AGAakash Gupta2:38

      So I'm really excited about this. Where should we start?

3. 2:43 – 4:46

   Why PMs became the bottleneck

   1. OUOji Udezue2:43

      So, Aakash, uh, where I wanna start is, uh, something I think is really important. So we see-- ProductMind consults with lots of big companies, big and small, and the things that we get asked to do is, first of all, come in and reconceptualize a product as much more AI native. Well, very quickly what happens to us is that we get pulled into the shipyard, like how people are organized, new skills for people in a AI era, how, uh, how do things work together, how do people work together? And what we're seeing immediately is the developers are speeding up very quickly, surely if they're early adopters, and then we see everyone else being a bottleneck. And particularly, we see PMs who are not speeding up their product judgment, speeding up their orchestration skills to match the new speed of the engineers. So what I'm about to show you is, uh, we made a set of product judgment skills. Not just code skills, but product judgment and business skills that product managers can use to think at the business layer, at the product layer, while not sacrificing code fidelity and things like testing and quality and so on. The best instantiation of this is the pro- new project scaffolding skill. There are all kinds of skills here. We have things like finding the aha moment for your new product, whether it's agentic or not. We have things like figuring out whether there's a sharp problem. But the scaffolding skill is special because it starts with you describing a business problem, and then it really makes decisions, helps you make decisions, whether it does market research for you, tells you whether it's a viable problem and how to solve it if it's not a viable problem, uh, makes architectural decisions for you based on asking you questions, figures out how to test the, the thing, right, based on those architectural decisions, and even sets up, you know, continuous integration and continuous delivery for you. So we're gonna work directly in Claude Code, not in Claude Desktop or anything, just in the same

4. 4:46 – 8:34

   Scaffolding a new product live in Claude Code

   1. OUOji Udezue4:46

      way that, uh, developers work. So what I'm gonna tell this thing right now to scaffold a new project, one of the things I'm obsessed about is the fact that people won't read any code. So what I wanna build is either a SaaS or an agent that helps vibe coders, people who don't have a lot of software experience, helps them figure out if their code is any good. Security, robustness, complexity, simplicity, all of that. Tells them the story of their code because no one is looking at it, even in a corporate environment. And so hopefully, if we tell it to scaffold this, it'll run all the processes of the scaffolding for us. So I'm gonna hit Enter. If you h- pause and read it, you'll see that it's just a f- a first idea. And so what, uh, this is gonna do is it's, uh, it'll run a viability gate. It will take a look at some frameworks and try to figure out if this project is even viable at all. And so that first gate, um, is still sort of, uh, loading the skill. There you go. It's an 11-step workflow. That makes sense because it's a very powerful skill. And it'll skip straight to the viability gate. And let's see.

   2. AGAakash Gupta6:00

      Can you open up that scaffolding skill, and we can see what is inside it and how it looks?

   3. OUOji Udezue6:05

      Oh yeah, let's do that. So if you look at the skills, you'll see a bunch of the product, uh, s- uh, product skills, uh, sharp problem. So the first one is... Yeah, so it's, it, it's multi skills here. You can see that it has a master skill.md, and then it has a bunch of subskills where it will do market research. It will actually fetch skills for you, new skills for you if you need it for your project type. It will set up testing, do s- you know, and, you know, the core skill is to basically the viability gate. So let's go back to see what it's doing here. And so what it's trying to do is to do web search. So I'm gonna tell it that it can absolutely do web search in order to find out what's going on. So it's conducting market research. So I think I interrupted it, so I'm gonna go hit Continue. And it's gonna conduct market research on the idea, and the next thing it's gonna do is to write a product brief. And once it's done with the product brief, it will start to get to the code level at all. Uh, Claude takes his time [chuckles] a little bit, but what it's doing is that it's spinning up a, a web search session. Sometimes it will do that through Chrome, uh, if you have Chrome tools installed. Sometimes it'll do that itself with HTTP. Um, and of course, um, I didn't give Claude all my permission, so it's there. So yeah. So the viability gate, this is gonna be interesting. It's gonna tell me whether this thing is worth my time or worth your time very specifically. And you have to understand that what it's really doing is taking frameworks from product management from our book, and it's trying to see, is this thing worth spending time on? Some of the dimensions include things like the frequency of the problem, whether do we have a clear customer, um, and there we go.

5. 8:34 – 13:43

   The viability gate verdict

   1. OUOji Udezue8:34

      Let's run that. So what does it, what does it tell us actually with the viability gate? Viability gate passed, proceed. Zero weak, three strong, three moderate. Not a silent pass. Three moderates are flagged as de-risking agenda. Now step four, market research. And if we go into the repo, we will start to see this document show up. So if we go away from skills and go to Code Memo One, um, it'll start to actually write for us what it's finding out from doing a web search. So right now we know that the... I- it's... Usually if there are three weak things, it'll, it'll, it'll kill it. It will recommend you stopping. But according to it, uh, the viability gate is strong. So it has like six dimensions: revenue, technical feasibility, differentiation, competitive landscape, target user definition, and the problem clarity and urgency. So if we go back to its, uh, its work, it's literally going in and doing deeper market research for you now. It's scanning competitors. It's scanning pricing. It's scanning what people have done in the space. And so right here it's pr- it's created it. It's done your market research package for you. Um, I set it so that it's not narrating itself in full. But you can see it has a market overview. It has trends shaping the space. It has direct or near competitors and what they're charging for. It has key takeaways. It has adjacent products. This is really, really comprehensive, guys, about what it's doing for you. And now it's writing a product brief, right? Uh, we have tools that help you write a PRD. This is literally your new project brief, where it codifies that into a problem, into target customers, val- core value proposition, success criteria that will help you know whether you succeed or fail. And then starts to write goals for you that will help you sort of gauge where it's going. Okay, now it's done that. It's done some of the business level skills, and what it's working on now is trying to find out how to scaffold the rest of the project in code for you. So now to the code layer, you can see that. Code Memo's core is an LLM analyzing repos. I'll wire it for Claude with current, correct current model IDs.

   2. AGAakash Gupta11:30

      So the scaffolding skill is basically an orchestrator skill. It seems like it's calling some of these other skills, creating documents, walking through this 11-step process.

   3. OUOji Udezue11:39

      Yes. It, it, it's-- So if you look at these skills here, they're all really dense. They have built-in product frameworks that, uh, some of them we've written from our book, "Building Rocket Ships." Some of them are, um, well-known product frameworks, uh, that we've included in part of this. Um, "Building Rocket Ships" is actually pretty comprehensive, and it's a very good resource. But what it does is it combines some of these things. The most important one it combines actually is the sharp problem test. So it's doing an internal sharp problem test, and it's orchestrating a few more skills within that In terms of new product scaffolding. Well, the thing that's special about this one is that by the time it's done, you will have a full repo. So you can see that it's created a prototypes folder. It's created your package of thinking. It's also created your first milestone folder for you to get started. By the time it's done, architecture is settled, continuous integration is settled, and if you give it its GitHub repo, it can start the project and push the-- make the first push into GitHub for you. Why is this important? When you are a PM and when you are a vibe coder, the things that are difficult for you are all the things, right? It's doing the right kind of market research, figuring out if this is the right thing to work on. But then immediately, the way you hand off to developers is also a problem. It's like, what's the architecture? What's the, uh, you know... I've seen a lot of vibe coders who don't have continuous integration. They don't know how to test the code because they don't know how to do that. So this sets it all for you so that you have the bones of a really solid product and a really solid code base to start to work on. I think that's the power of the scaffolding.

6. 13:43 – 15:25

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   1. AGAakash Gupta13:43

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7. 15:25 – 20:15

   Inside the scaffolding skill step by step

   1. AGAakash Gupta15:25

      Hmm, can we scroll through that file a little bit just to see how it's put together?

   2. OUOji Udezue15:30

      So which particular file?

   3. AGAakash Gupta15:32

      The scaffolding skill.

   4. OUOji Udezue15:34

      Oh, yeah. So the skill. So yeah, if you go to New Project Scaffolding, you have the main skill here. And then-

   5. AGAakash Gupta15:43

      Yeah, so if we scroll through that, how is it, um... Okay, so it's got each step defined, and if we keep going, like for instance, the sharp test, is it gonna go crawl-- call that skill?

   6. OUOji Udezue15:59

      Yeah. So for example, the workflow is to gather context. It'll ask you questions if you don't have it. It'll find a project type. Is this an iOS app, Android? Because of my prompt, it was pretty clear what it was. Uh, it will look for reference projects around the internet, some of the best practices, and it will try to understand how to build this. Uh, it'll run a viability gate. This is a compressed version of the sharp problem state, where it will go through problem clarity, target user, competitive landscape, differentiation. The, the, the sharp problem test is even more specific. The thing that differentiates that is that it tries really hard to focus on three times value that you create. That's not in here. This sort of looks at the market space and see is there a lane for you to be in this, in this lane. And the sharp problem test will do something even deeper than that. Um, whether you will make money, that's really what, uh, sharp problem space is. This is about is there a lane for you? And if the three dimensions are weak, it will just recommend that you don't do this at all. This is very important. Uh, LLMs very rarely tell you no, and this skill will tell you absolutely no, don't do this. Um, and I-I will demonstrate that in a second. I'll show you... I'll tell it to scaffold a new thing that, uh, I think if we look at it, it might look on a boundary, but it will say, it'll probably say that we can't do this. And then market research is huge. Um, you know, we tell people like, you know, market research is weird. Like, you sh- probably shouldn't do market research with only LLMs. Um, but you can do a lot, sixty percent, seventy percent with LLMs before you go find real sources. And, you know, I wanna step back and also tell people, um, you know, the danger in, in this kind of workflow is that you take it as gospel, right? You really do need to look through all the output and make sure that it makes sense for you. Uh, we do this all the time, uh, because, you know, I think it's hard to fully trust a hundred percent LLMs. So if you go here for... Okay, we're still in skills, so let's finish that and we can see. So it'll generate a perfect CLAUDE.md for you for this project. So if you look, you'll see people spend a lot of time thinking, "Okay-" How do I author my CLAUDE.md? What's the thing in the front matter and the, in the rest of it? This says, "For this project, here is a CLAUDE.md that works the best for you." Uh, it'll create a CLAUDE.md that does the project well, hunts bugs, follows the patterns of the folders, follows the patterns of the prototypes, and it's perfect for this project. Um, and then it will create a folder structure. So it will say, "Here's where you need to put the documents. Here's where all the milestone things..." And by the way, all this is in the CLAUDE.md, so this is basically a self-organizing repo already, uh, if you're gonna use it. Here are where the prototypes go, and for each folder, it just tells you, it tells Claude and it tells you exactly what goes into it. It creates a test folder for you, and then crucially, it sets up your continuous integration, your quality system. So every time you check in, all your code is tested. And it sets up security. It starts to find things that you shouldn't-- Your secrets are particularly get ignored, so it knows how to do that, so you don't have leakage when you push things to, um, GitHub. And it starts quality, right? It starts key quality documents, you know, how to ca-ca... you know, qu- do bug classification. How to learn. It starts to catalog over time bugs that are made and how to learn from those bugs. So there's a lot that goes into this, [lip smack] and then some of the harder things that it offloads are the CI templates, CLAUDE.md patterns, so it gets the perfect CLAUDE.md. So these are all called within that skill. And so if you go back here, uh, what you have is essentially, we started out with a very clean, empty, uh, folder. Well, this is all you have now, right? And so it gets ready for you to commit your first, is to commit your first check-in on this project. Okay? So why don't we

8. 20:15 – 24:22

   Running the gate on a second idea

   1. OUOji Udezue20:15

      try this? Why don't we try another project, okay, um, that may or may not, we won't say anything, may or may not pass the viability gate. Should we do that?

   2. AGAakash Gupta20:29

      Let's do it.

   3. OUOji Udezue20:31

      Okay. Okay. So let's do this. Run the scaffolding. Scaffolding. Run the scaffolding skill on a new problem. Use a new folder for it in this one, in this repo. Okay, let's do that. And so I am going to try to solve a standup problem. I'm gonna try to ask it to build something for a project called Standup Zero that sort of uses Slack comments and creates a daily standup digest, and ask it to run a viability gate first and see what happens.

   4. AGAakash Gupta21:29

      So while this is running, how much of this thinking, like viability gates and sharp problem tests, should we really be outsourcing to LLMs? Is LLM basically the first draft just to get some thinking going and then we improve and react?

   5. OUOji Udezue21:42

      [lip smack] Yeah. I, I, I th- the, the very specific thing that we are trying to solve is that if you start in chat and start with, "Hey, I have an idea," you know, unless you prompt really well, and unless you're sort of sold on adversarial prompting, or even some people go as far as they will check with multiple different kinds of LLMs, [lip smack] what you're gonna see is it'll tell you that you have a good idea. The thing about this is that it's built in, it has an, you know, it has a built-in sort of, uh, responsibility to tell you whether you're smoking crack or not, and I don't-- I mean that jo- jokingly. Tell you whether your idea makes any sense. And it doesn't just ground it in the model's sense. It grounds it in a really clear framework that has evals, that it goes through very systematically. Um, so I think that's the main difference. Now, should you trust it completely? I've already said you shouldn't. Um, it produces real artifacts that you should go check. So it'll create a viability gate document. You should look at that viability gate document and see if you agree with it, see if you can do extended research with it. But it's your first draft. It's your first thing out of the gate that has the ability to say yes or no, and here's where you need to go. Okay. So it doesn't have enough information, so it's asking me questions. What should Standup Zero be built as? Let's call it, uh, Slack. TypeScript and Slack. How far should this scaffold go? Let's go to the gate first and then pause because if the gate says no, then what, what are we doing? Submitted our answers. All right, let's see what it says. So it's gone off and do- done some crawling, some competit- competitive research, as we saw, and it's trying to figure out if this is worth it. Um, I've read some of the, the... I've read some of the stuff it comes up with for the market research, and it's really good. It will do a real, basically as high quality as Perplexity will do to go look for whether there's a space for you. Okay

9. 24:22 – 27:25

   Vet a Feature for existing products

   1. AGAakash Gupta24:22

      And does this apply only to new products? Or what about, like, features for existing products?

   2. OUOji Udezue24:28

      That's a really, really good, uh, question. So, uh, because we realize, you know, a lot of vibe coders will say, "I can never build before I need to build." So this is perfect for that. Um, when I started the first demo of Code Memo, I used these skills to do it. But really, most PMs don't start brand-new projects, so we have features for them. So for example, this is called the Vet a Feature. I have a feature idea. Should I even bother building it? I have opportunity cost of other feature ideas. And so this particular skill will take a feature idea and tear it apart, look for anti-patterns, confidence. So it's like a scaffolding skill, but very specific for a feature within a product.

   3. AGAakash Gupta25:24

      Mm-hmm.

   4. OUOji Udezue25:24

      Um, and I think this one's actually even more interesting 'cause this one actually focuses very hard, not just on the lane, but whether it's worth building at all amongst other features you have. So the sharp problem test is baked in really hard into this.

   5. AGAakash Gupta25:42

      So the key lesson here for any PM is, like, create a skill, like Vet a Feature. You can grab OGs, which we're gonna link down below in the description. But fundamentally, you need to work with LLMs to actually figure out, is this a problem worth solving? Is this the right problem space? And before, we used to do that all by ourselves or skip that step entirely, and this is really helping us have a thought partner, make sure we actually do it every single time.

   6. OUOji Udezue26:09

      That is correct. That is correct. We, we want you to think about the full stack of the problem. Again, business, product, and code together. Um, you know, when you work in triads or quads or whatever that is, because of the people around you, you are, if you're lucky, thinking about all those things together, and you're like, "Is this worth solving?" as a PM. And the, the, the developer is like, "Oh, here's how we're gonna do it." And the product marketing is like, "Here's how we tell the story. I'm gonna go off and do research." What we're doing is compressing all that into one really smart orchestrator and builder can get started really fast. It doesn't mean you don't need specialists, by the way. Big companies always need specialization. That's a given. But in small startups, in smaller companies, and even as you scale up to big companies, the ability for people to-- one person holding a critical skill, say product, to really have agents that help them with the first draft of these things is incredibly powerful.

   7. AGAakash Gupta27:13

      Quick thought experiment for you. Is there anything in this video you should be trying on your own? If there is, try it, take a screenshot, post it on LinkedIn or X, and tag me. I'd love to see what you're learning. Now,

10. 27:25 – 31:18

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11. 31:18 – 37:02

    Applying PM judgment to the output

    1. AGAakash Gupta31:19

       So maybe you can point over to the other one that's ran, and you can show us, like, how you apply your PM judgment on top of what it's written.

    2. OUOji Udezue31:28

       Yeah, okay. So that's a good point. So, um, I'm back in the first one, and let me just make sure that it's, uh, done. So I'm gonna ask it to continue and share the final results in a table for me, for me, and so that we can know that it is done, done. And we're gonna get out of... So yeah, so here's the result. Okay, so it's done market research. It's decided what's viable, quad structure. So the way to think about this now, once you're here, is to go back into this and start to take a look. Uh, I've worked with developers in the past who I've had to insist that they actually do code review even if they're working with, um, even if they're working with, uh, AI. And so the place you start first is these two documents, right? The other ones are sort of boilerplate. So I'm gonna create some space here. So this is the market research document.

    3. AGAakash Gupta32:46

       And then I think if we double-click, if you, like, two-finger click on the market research-

    4. OUOji Udezue32:51

       Mm-hmm

    5. AGAakash Gupta32:51

       ... I think you can open as preview, so it looks a little better, right?

    6. OUOji Udezue32:57

       Okay, let's do that.

    7. AGAakash Gupta32:58

       There we go. Perfect.

    8. OUOji Udezue32:59

       Okay. Well, you know a VS Code trick that I don't, so that's, that's good on your cache. [laughs]

    9. AGAakash Gupta33:08

       Yeah.

    10. OUOji Udezue33:08

        All right. So, uh, market overview, it's just that intersection of AI code. So look, I don't want to read through all this. What-- The first thing is to take this for yourself and for PMs, PM leads in your space, and see if it covers all the ground that you need. Uh, the things to look out for is, does it mention the kinds of tools you expect it to mention? Well, these are a really good set for this kind of tool because these are your competitors. Uh, does it mention in each of these categories all the things that you want it to mention? Uh, you take a sense check of these things. Like, if it mentions tools that are old, tools that are not functional, tools that are sort of decrepit, you shouldn't, you shouldn't trust it. If it mentions tools that are current, uh, adjacent, things that you were thinking about as you were thinking about the problem, but they didn't actually solve the problem for you, then you are on the right track. Um, take a look at this differentiation map, for example. Does this seem right? No? Yes? Where does CodeMemo sit? Does it seem right for you? And so this is your first scan for credibility. Imagine that you are doing a, uh, PRD review in a room full of PMs. This is what essentially you should be doing with this one. And then it actually writes a PRD for you. And so this is the real PRD review. So is the stuff in the market consistent with what it's writing for you? So let's scan this very quickly. "Code is now produced faster for anyone f- than anyone can read it. AI codegen has split authorship from understanding. The person who wrote an app via prompts often cannot evaluate whether it's safe, correct, or production ready. This bites two groups hard. Solo founders ship AI-generated code they cannot audit. Corporate developers onto an unfamiliar code base." So it came up with all this by itself. And if you stare at this and say, "Shit, I would invest in that. I would spend time on that. It nailed exactly what I want." Or you should be asking yourself, "What did it miss? What persona did it miss?" For example, what I notice here is that it says the primary is a non-technical founder. Makes sense. Small company. Sure. Um, it's probably not a big company founder, though, right? They have more resources, more tools. So I'm glad that it said non-technical founder, but it didn't qualify it by the size of the company, for example. Um, it sort of doesn't think the corporate developer is the strongest thing, right? Anton and Harry, who needs evolving story? Well, it's explicitly out of scope to protect focus. That makes sense, I guess. What I, I read the output, and it was, it mentioned that it's much lower value proposition for the corporate developer because they have so many more tools to do these things. And so the vibe coder is a real target for this. Value proposition, paste a GitHub URL, upload a vibe coded folder, and in under a minute, get a plain English verdict on whether the code is production safe. So this starts to tell us that the value loop is really good, is really powerful. Okay? Right? And so I would scan this and see, is this the kind of high-level product brief I would write? What's missing? What's missing if I wanted to present it to other people? And that's how to evaluate this.

    11. AGAakash Gupta36:48

        Cool. Let's go take a look at the other agent and see if what it did, uh, with our other idea.

    12. OUOji Udezue36:54

        Okay, let's do that. So let's step back here.

12. 37:02 – 39:59

    Standup Zero fails the gate

    1. OUOji Udezue37:02

       It looks like it is still crunching through the viability gate. So let's go to that folder. And you can see it's called Standup Zero here, and it is crunched through the viability accept, accept, uh, viability assessment. And so scorecard. So it's weak, right?

    2. AGAakash Gupta37:34

       So this is the real sort of alpha from using a skill like this. It's gonna help you separate out which features, or in this case, we showed new products that you should be building and shouldn't be building.

    3. OUOji Udezue37:45

       Yeah. So here it says there were three moderate scores. So it's saying, "Mm, I'm not sure about this," basically, right? Um, you should proceed with eyes open, and then it goes into the details, right? Problem clarity and urgency is moderate. Um, it's just workflow convenience. It's not very deep. Uh, target user definition isn't, like, isn't very strong for what I pasted in. Uh, the competitive landscape is very strong, which is actually a bad thing. There's a lot of competition here. And so it's calling out all these things for you. Uh, differentiation isn't very strong. So all, all of this is basically pointing out to, like, it's gonna be very hard for you to enter this market. It's not defensible for you. Um, everyone can build exactly what you're building. So if you really want to continue this, you should maybe pause and think about it, basically. Now, I don't know about you, but I think that's worth a lot from start, right? This is you thinking hard about where you're going before you start thinking, "I can write code." 'Cause, you know, what we see today is people just build. People build, and then there's no customer for it. There's nobody for it. In fact, it's super puzzling right now because it feels like GitHub is the only place that people can express themselves when they have Claude Code. They just build anything, put it on GitHub, and just languish with zero stars, if that makes any sense. Now, if you are someone who wants to make an impact in the world, this kind of thing will help you conserve your time, attention, and focus on all the right things.

    4. AGAakash Gupta39:32

       So where do we go from here? We promised that we'd help people become a builder PM. What's the next step once you've figured out the right idea? In this case, we're knocking out Standup Zero, but we're in favor of Code Memo.

    5. OUOji Udezue39:45

       Yes. So let's go back to Code Memo, right? And I think we get to tell it to continue. All right, fantastic.

13. 39:59 – 51:59

    Prototypes and the customer discovery plan

    1. OUOji Udezue39:59

       So the next thing I would do is prototypes, right? And this is a fun one. What should the code memo look like, right? I want to establish the basic interaction model, um, that delivers value. Can you first ask questions about user interacting with Code Memo? And then we will generate a set of X prototypes to evaluate what direction to take this in. Now, this is very compressed, right? Like, you don't necessarily, um, start with prototypes, but you do start with interaction. Like, and by that I mean specifically, does this have user experience? Does this-- Is this just, is this just a chat interface talking to an agent? Like, what does it look like? How do you instantiate it? And so, uh, I'm gonna ask it to use its survey skill to help me make the choices. So now that it says go, what I'm trying to do next is really to, um, start to build a baseline of the code, start to build a baseline of a product. Um, if you look at these skills, there are a few directions you can take this in. For example- The interesting one that I would do right after this is a customer discovery week, okay? I'm gonna ask it to use this skill to tell me how to get to better confidence and to answer the unknowns, okay? So while it's doing that, [clears throat] I'll prep that question. So I need you to develop my customer discovery plan by running the customer discovery week skills. So on one hand, I'm trying to generate ideas of what the interaction is. On the other hand, I need to ask a bunch of questions. So let's tackle the questions about the interaction model first. So paste a GitHub URL. Um, so I don't like any of these, so what I'm gonna say is, "I think it's both one and two." So I need you to paste a GitHub URL, but I'm going to need to connect it to GitHub because I need to analyze the code that I'm writing because I'm a vibe coder. How is the verdict delivered on screen? This is a score. Single verdict card, narrative scroll, conversational chat. So I think that it needs to be a dashboard and drill down. Uh, once the verdict is on screen, what should the user be able to do? Depth of engagement. Uh, nope, I need it to, I need it to do two and three. So two and three, uh, and four. Okay. In the first sixty seconds, this is interesting, it's getting to the aha. What was the core value the user came for? Hmm. Two, understanding. Submit those answers. All right. Uh, I need to develop my customer discovery skill plan around the customer discovery week skills on the product brief and, uh, market research. Uh, do this in parallel while finishing up. It's gonna spin up a thread, finishing up the interaction model. Okay. So I'm basically doing two things now. I'm grounding my sense of what interaction is, and I'm gonna g- launch additional research to really figure out if I fully understand the problem. Now, I would ordinarily do the first one, the second one before the other, but I just wanted to demonstrate the two different ways. You can go straight to build, or you can start to talk to customers about it. Okay. So what we're seeing is, is summarizing the tension, and so it's gonna generate three self-contained HTML CSS prototypes. The skill itself tells it to do this, prototype before you react. So it's gonna go off now, and it is going to basically start to write prototypes.

    2. AGAakash Gupta45:11

       So the last set of skills in the diagram we started with was really the business layer. Like, is there some business viability? We talked about in terms of new product. For a feature, there might be some more nuance there. Then this next layer is really that product layer, right? We're figuring out the prototypes-

    3. OUOji Udezue45:26

       Yes

    4. AGAakash Gupta45:26

       ... what actually works, and we're gonna go through and find a prototype that might potentially actually demonstrate a viable solution so that we can test that. Is that right?

    5. OUOji Udezue45:36

       Yes. Can you still hear me?

    6. AGAakash Gupta45:38

       Yeah.

    7. OUOji Udezue45:46

       Yeah. So, um, that's exactly right. We start out with a business problem. Is there a lane for us? Are we thinking about the customer correctly? There are other business problems that you get to later: pricing, access to market, what's your marketing plan? But what we're doing now is a product. It's like, what's my customer discovery so I can dig deeper into the problem? What does this even look like? Uh, just for, you know, PMs, you know, we get this, like, as PMs we own usually, usually we own why is this a thing that we've spent time on as an organization? What is it? Which is, how does it instantiate? What does it look like? What does it feel like when it's solving the problem? How does it generate delight? And of course, we share this with designers. And so we're still early in that process. Is this prioritized by my CPO? Assuming you're a vibe coder, what want we know? Um, what does it feel like? What does it look like? Um, these are all the things that you take to developers. But what you have now is that because you're doing it all in one shot inside Claude Code, you can compress all of that within one Claude Code session. You notice that we are not in Claude Code desktop, in CoWork. You can do all this within one session. So what we have here is it's done some prototypes. What's that shortcut you, you liked again? So while this is running in the background, I am gonna show you some of the prototypes it's made. I really hope to God, 'cause we didn't install a blo- a lot of design skills. Can you see this?

    8. AGAakash Gupta47:29

       Mm-hmm.

    9. OUOji Udezue47:30

       Yeah. So it's made a few things for us to take a look at. The way you should think about this is prototypes. You should just get a feel. This isn't real design yet. This is definitely about where do you start? So here you see it, you paste in the GitHub thing here, and it tells you the story of the code very quickly. Um- Here, more of the same, but more data, uh, logic up front. And here's sort of a side panel where it does similar things. So what I usually do when I start to work on these things is I will have, in practice, I'll have ShadCN, I'll have UI, UX Pro Max skills. I'll have like, I have like five or six design skills, and I'll tell it to use one design skill to make a prototype. So if I have six design skills, it'll make six prototypes. And I'll ask it actually, because you can make hundreds and hundreds of prototypes, I'll ask it actually to combine two skills each. So it'll make like six more skills, but using two design skills at a time to do it, and so that I can see what this could look like, uh, for us. But all this is baked into the skill directly. I'm gonna go back to Claude Code, right, and share that screen again. And then we'll take a look at the other task that we asked it to do. Okay? So by the way, it is asking me about the interaction model I want. We're not gonna spend time figuring that out yet. Um, so we decline that. So we're going to instead say the discovery plan agent finished. So it's created a customer discovery plan for us. So we're gonna go to Docs, and we're gonna go to Customer Discovery Plan, and we're gonna take a look at it. Okay? And it says, "The plan itself is complete and executable. Every script, the survey, the synthesis template, and the weeks time budgeted below. What is missing is the one input the skill will not let a plan proceed. A confirmed list of recruitable people with real target cohorts, um, not adjacent contacts from the founder's network. The skill treats fewer than five real target contacts as its own validation signal. It means you may not have access to the market." Again, very important, uh, it says you can't just wing this. You need actual people to talk to, and if you tell me who they are, then I know that you're ready for this. And so what we can see here is the three-step interview process, uh, that it wants us to do. So let's see. It tells you how to recruit, what the gates are, where to go shop for, uh, targets, um, the hypothesis you wanna validate, step one, motivation. So it walks through... In the book, we talk about this three-step process where the first step is figure out what questions to ask. Open-ended questions, no motivation, no direction, no prototypes whatsoever. So it walks you through that. Tell me about. Walk me through the last time. So it's walking through people's workflows. And then step two is when you take those things and say, "Okay, I now think I have the questions I need to answer," and then it will codify, uh, those questions that you answer. So the first step, you learn what questions to ask. The next one, you use those questions to ask. And then the third, you expand it so it becomes data. So once you really solidify the questions you're asking, you can start getting sample of the answers. You turn it into a survey so you can quantify the responses that you get. So it builds all this for you ready to go. In this case, it's saying, "Listen, you, you, you sound like you're still winging it. You need very specific people. Go find them, and I will help you, uh, validate that you have a real customer discovery plan."

    10. AGAakash Gupta51:36

        All right. So what I'm really hearing from these skills is that they're forcing you to do the PM fundamentals, and what they're doing is they're giving you the first draft of those things. And-

    11. OUOji Udezue51:47

        Mm-hmm

    12. AGAakash Gupta51:47

        ... to be a true builder PM, you need to be able to do this at engineering speed, and that's why we're relying on these skills. We're not just doing it hand as we did step by step in the past.

14. 51:59 – 55:31

    The three speed problem

    1. OUOji Udezue51:59

       Correct. So what we-- There's something we call the three speed problem, which is for the past forty, fifty years, whatever you wanna call it, the longest pole has always been, uh, development. Uh, and it's long in many ways. It takes time to actually write quality code. It takes time to do quality. Um, it takes time if you're in a cloud to make it robust, not fail, to do, uh, DevOps, recover very quickly. All of that is being cut down maybe by 10X, maybe in five years by 20X. But really, the process of building is not just code. It's like, why should we build? Build it, get it to customers. So if this middle speeds up very quickly, you start to have almost an equation imbalance. And the reason it's imbalance is because the why should we build is customer bound. You have to talk to people, you have to talk to the market. And the other side, access to the market, getting it into people's hands, is also customer bound because, you know, Anthropic has shipped what? Maybe like sixty features in thirty days. They're becoming recursive, correct? Um, by the way, that's a whole other thing to talk about, which is how to build feedback into the skill. So some of these skills build feedback deeply into the product automatically for you. Uh, and we're trying to refine some of those things. We haven't shipped that one. But I don't use-- Like we were futzing with slash commands just now. [chuckles] I don't know all the slash commands, so I can't actually absorb all the features that they make, right? It's lim-- I'm limited by that. And so you see them, uh, I don't know if our c- our audience knows this, but Claude Cowork was just completely redesigned, right? They shipped it And it seemed amazing, but there was low adoption, and so they've just sort of blended it back into chat, right, a bit, versus having three tabs, code, co-work, and chat. Uh, because you just w- it didn't stand alone by itself. So people are having to not just ship very quickly, but make sure, um, they have the right thing. And by situating this in the same skill set that your developers use, that you can learn very trivially, um, you see a massive amount of speed up, right? Because this repo can be your developer's repo as well, right? It's not different, right? If your developer-- If your founder and your developer is working on this, they can see all the business skills themselves. They can run it themselves, or you can run them, right? So we are seeing people essentially collapse the separation of tasks of PM live in Notion, uh, designers live in Figma, and collapsing it into one GitHub repo with everything. And the coders will live here under source, tests, uh, all the security stuff, Playwright, uh, test, Vi test. You live up here, but it's joint context in one repo for every member of the team who needs to touch this stuff, and everything is always available to them at all times.

15. 55:31 – 1:04:31

    Where to grab the skills

    1. AGAakash Gupta55:31

       Amazing. If people wanna go grab these skills, can you show us where they can go grab them?

    2. OUOji Udezue55:37

       Yes, I can, Aakash. So I am going to share different screen. Um, so one of the fun things we've done at Product Mind as we started to build is start to collect these things. Some of them are private. They're not available yet. But if you go to the labs at productmind.com, don't-- Just ignore these things. This is not a monetizable site yet or at all. This is just to show the products that we can actually share from our engagements. But everything you've seen actually can be accessed more trivially through what we call skills.productmind.com. So you can chat with it without going into Claude Code. So that's the first thing. The second one, and we have a lot of people, you know, who do this now, and the second one is a skills library. Uh, the skills are open source, so you can come here, and you can browse through them, read them. Here you have the new project scaffolding, Vet a Feature, Vibe Memo. I'm very, very excited about this one. Vibe Memo is a simple system, we installed it, that captures your decisions as you build. So right now, when you write code that's captured, uh, but Vibe Memo says, "Capture the why. Why are we making these decisions in the code?" So it keeps the why with all the decisions in the log for you. I find this very exciting. So every time we have a big code base, and we wanna take a look at, "Why did we even make that decision? What were we thinking?" Vibe Memo captures it. Sharp problem test, reverse PM, there's so many. Uh, let me just point out a few more favorites. One is Roadmap from Strategy. So it'll construct a whole, like, strategy for you. Um, another one is a listening machine. It will turn all the surfaces in your product into feedback tools that constantly collect information. Uh, these are things that people spend years and years trying to figure out. We build it into a skill that gets you started immediately. Uh, Scope Cutter. We all do this. We gotta cut scope. And Scope Cutter gives you a very succinct way to reduce how much you do. There's even a simpler one, which is once you wanna build a first thing, are you gonna do an MVP, which is just for learning, or are you gonna do an SLC, which is actually to put in front of people for them to be amazed? And how do you even do that? And how do you cut, and so on and so forth. And of course, advanced things like pricing, like w- how, how should you design pricing, all built in. So again, business and product level skills that merge with code skills in one place for you to become hyper-productive. Um, we think this is the new frontier. Um, I think code skills alone are becoming passe. Uh, the other day, I saw someone remove superhuman skills from their repo because the models are so good, um, some of these skills are breaking. But these business skills, these product skills, these are still the things that give us the ability to build the right thing. So I'm super excited about that.

    3. AGAakash Gupta58:51

       And today, we showed the harness as Claude Code in Antigravity. Is there any particular reason you should be using Antigravity, or can you use any harness for Claude Code?

    4. OUOji Udezue59:00

       No, it's any harness. Um, I don't even particularly... So Antigravity is a fork of VS Code. Uh, so it looks a little bit like Cursor. It looks like VS Code. It does-- That's just what I have on my screen. I'm running through a terminal, and so I actually don't use any features of Antigravity. It's just, you know, it's a nice interface, but nothing special about it.

    5. AGAakash Gupta59:20

       So if you're a product leader, right, you go ahead and you download these skills, you make these skills your own, you distribute them to the team, the team is starting to use them. You are one of the few people who's actually helped teams do that. So you've gotten to see what are the mistakes that people make.

    6. OUOji Udezue59:38

       Mm-hmm.

    7. AGAakash Gupta59:38

       What are the problems or the pitfalls in rolling out this new way of working that people should know about so that they can avoid them?

    8. OUOji Udezue59:45

       I think that the most important thing is shared context. You know, I heard, um, Boris, um, from Quad, right, talk about the fact that his claude.md It's a very thin, it has only a few lines, maybe six lines. And what it's actually doing is that it's ref- referencing a shared CLAUDE.md. Now, you should think about CLAUDE.md as some, some kind of like base skill, basically. And so centrally, they author CLAUDE.md and optimize it like think about once a minute. Everything that everyone is learning is being put into that central CLAUDE.md. It's small, it's short, it contains essence, es- essence. It connects people to all the right tools within the organization. So I think that the biggest lesson for putting this into an enterprise is don't let people fork these things willy-nilly, right? For example, I was working with an enterprise that had a ways of working document, and then they had a very specific SDLC that was supposed to produce very specific artifacts, okay? What I would do in that, uh, situation is to take the relevant skills here, for example, the, uh, scaffolding skill or the vet a feature skill, and I would harmonize it with what they need to come out of it. Why would our product brief be different from what the organization wants? It shouldn't be, right? Uh, why would a market research document be different from what the product marketing team would produce or what they believe is right to produce? And so we would essentially centralize this, modify it so that it creates artifacts that our organization needs, and just prevent people necessarily from forking it themselves. Now, to be clear, I like organizations where it's sort of open source, and if people learn new things, because, you know, the CPO doesn't know everything, you give people the license to innovate. Or if they innovate, they should innovate into a central place so everyone gets the innovation, if that makes any sense. So I think that's the biggest thing, is when AI rollouts are completely ungoverned in a way that doesn't have shared context. Because look at... Listen, I think in science fiction, we're always sort of, uh, afraid of the hive mind, right? We're afraid of AIs collaborating because then they'll kill us. But it turns out that we are the original hive mind. The only reason that we've survived, you know, through the centuries as humans is because we learn from each other. And so this is very imperative. When you roll out AI, try to force it into a, a, a, a structure that one person learning means everyone has learned. That's one of the big powers of it.

    9. AGAakash Gupta1:02:52

       Oji, you've been gen- generously shared these skill files. You guys can find the link in the description to this GitHub repo. As he said, you can make these your own. That's really the key, adding it in to make it your own, and then deploying it as an open source repo for your team to use. This is the playbook. If you've been wondering, "How do I become a more AI native team? How do I get my PM team to work at an engineering speed?" We've just given all of that away for free. Thank you so much for being here.

    10. OUOji Udezue1:03:22

        Thank you, Akash, and, uh, I hope, uh, people become even more effective product builders and hyper creators with the stuff that we've made. Super happy to share.

    11. AGAakash Gupta1:03:34

        I hope you learned as much from today's episode as I did. If you can do one thing that's totally free that would help the show, it would be to check that you're following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. Check that you've left ratings and reviews on those platforms. Check that you're subscribed on YouTube. Leave a like and a comment on this video, and then share it with your friends. We're trying to make better and better podcasts. After two years, we think we've gotten something pretty good going. So let us know what we can do to make it even better, who else we should interview, and we will put on the best shows we possibly can. Finally, don't forget my offer for the bundle. You get an entire year of my paid newsletter, plus my favorite AI tools, Bolt.new, Airtable, Speechify, Descript, Magic Patterns, Linear, Dovetail, Arise, and Mobbin'. That's $27,000 worth of value for just $150. So check that out at bundle.aakashg.com if it interests you, and I can't wait to share our next episode soon.

Episode duration: 1:04:41