How Anthropic uses Claude in Product Management

1. LCLisa Crofoot0:00

   What excites me about being a product manager now, um, is that I can move and iterate much faster. I can use Claude to test my product ideas before I even get anyone else in the loop. I can operate much more independently, which is extremely empowering. [instrumental music] Getting data as a product manager is, like, a pain point. Usually, you have to ping a data science person to help you, um, or often product managers can write some kind of basic SQL themselves and will have to query a database that they don't know that much about. I started using Claude Code, pretty quickly figured out that we could use it for data analysis workflows. Our data science team set up a BigQuery MCP, which essentially connected all of our BigQuery product data tables to Claude Code. You don't need to know how to write SQL, you just need to be a human interpreter of that data and that result. So here I am in Claude Code, and I wanna show how you can use Claude to access product data. Before I started this demo, I used Claude to generate some synthetic product data that shows, um, light mode versus dark mode usage on a product. I've said I wanna explore the fraction of dark mode usage over the past three months. I'm gonna tell it the data table to look for. So it just popped open this graph. This is, like, pretty impressive. It's done a whole bunch of stuff I didn't ask for, like add a seven-day rolling average, add the overall average. The graph is nicer than what I would've put together if I had done this myself. Say I wanna iterate on this a little bit and take a look, maybe we wanna look at light mode and dark mode usage by plan type. Can you actually plot it by plan type? It's asking me for permission to make edits. Sure. And now we have a plot of the data by plan type. If I had to do this on my own, it would take me possibly hours, um, if not more. Another way that my team uses Claude is to help with generating evals. Evals [laughs] are a way that we, uh, evaluate AI systems and AI products. Claude is really great at this, actually. So you can kind of just give Claude the situation and the, and the product experience that you're trying to build, maybe a couple example test cases, and ask it to expand the option space of test cases. So really quickly you go from one or two examples to test to, like, 50 examples to test. And my hope is that with Claude, product managers are able to spend more of their time on product strategy, customer conversations, and decision-making, and less time on coordination and operations. I would say it's, like, more than automation for me. Like, it's things that I wouldn't have otherwise necessarily even been capable of doing independently. So it's actually, like, extending what I can accomplish on my own. [instrumental music]

Episode duration: 2:56