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

1. 0:00 – 4:50

   Claire’s background

   1. CVClaire Vo0:00

      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.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:11

      Everybody wants this. Everyone's like, "Yes. Move fast. Amazing quality." What's an example of that for you?

   3. CVClaire Vo0:16

      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.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky0:24

      There may be a trend happening here of combining engineering and product.

   5. CVClaire Vo0:27

      I'm using CPTO, for short CODE, of running product 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. It should be what is best for the organization?

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky0:38

      You built a tool called ChatPRD. My guess is it's the single most popular AI PM-specific tool out there.

   7. CVClaire Vo0:44

      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. (instrumental music)

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky0:56

      Today my guest is Claire Vo. Claire is a longtime chief 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. 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, insights 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 podcast, don't forget to subscribe 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. This episode is brought to you by Orb. As a business, you care about revenue. But as a product team, the last thing you wanna do is delay a product launch or a 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. Use Orb to ship product faster, stop worrying about billing, and evolve pricing with ease and control. Check it out at withorb.com/lenny and skip the line for a demo or sandbox by using promo code LENNY. That's withorb.com/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 are rarely or never used, costing the industry 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 innovation, thriving in uncertainty, 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/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/lenny. (instrumental music) Claire, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

   9. CVClaire Vo4:20

      Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky4:22

       I'm even more excited. 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, uh, or not? And it's okay if you don't.

   11. CVClaire Vo4:32

       It's a privilege and a... and a pleasure, and I'm glad I... gl- I'm glad I'm here, you know. Um, I've been so impressed with your guests and your content. It's been so exciting to see just the wide range of product leaders and thinkers in this space. And if I can be on a list of product leaders and thinkers in this space, then I... I'm doing something good. So,

2. 4:50 – 10:11

   How to achieve career progression

   1. CVClaire Vo4:50

      thanks for having me.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky4:51

      It's absolutely my pleasure. I wanna start by talking about career advice. Okay, so I was perusing your LinkedIn and your career path is basically what m- most PMs pr- 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, to SVP, to chief product officer, and now you've been chief product officer at three different companies. And along the way you're a founder, you're a designer, you're an engineer. So here's my question. If you had to boil down what you think your secret sauce has been to progressing so far and so quickly throughout your PM career, what, what might that be?

   3. CVClaire Vo5:33

      Yeah. So, you know, when you list it all out, you can probably guess underneath it all is like a relentlessly curious, impatient, eager-to-build person at, at their core. So I just like building stuff, and I... I find it a lot of fun. And I think if you find a career or a 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... I actually started as a copywriter of all things. Copywriter all the way up to CPO or CPTO that runs an engineering organization.You know, it boils down to something really simple, which is know what you want out of your career, 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 where I had been in management for design and product management, sort of like a senior manager level over product and design at a, at an e-commerce company and worked very closely with growth and marketing. We were just two sides of the same coin and worked very closely. And the head of marketing left, and there was this big to-do, you know, pretty quickly of like, "Well, what are we gonna do with marketing and do we need to hire somebody?" And I sat for about a half a day and I thought, "I think I can help here." Drew out an org chart, put my name on the top, (laughs) walked into my boss's office and said, "This is one potential solve of your marketing organization question. This will bring product and marketing growth together. I can be in this position. Here's how I change the management structure underneath this. Not just where do 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." And I got that job. And, you know, I think when people ask me about career advice, they wanna 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 to there? The other thing that I give people advice about is know what you want out of your current role and know exactly what you want your next role to be. 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, "I wanna be a chief product officer. Here's how I'm gonna 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, you know, uh, 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 I want, (laughs) 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 gonna be and I'm always clear about it. Now, 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 0.005% of my interactions with my boss are about my career growth and my path. It's very small. It's am I clear? Are we on the same page? And am I, am I communicating as I'm making progress against those goals? High-slip people, I think get promoted basically as fast as the org can support. I've never, 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. And so as somebody that's managing their own career, you have to be a balance of ambitious and assertive and take care of yourself and advocate for yourself, and you sh- the work needs to speak for itself at the end of the day, and that's what's gonna drive for your career growth. And so know what you want, but do the work and, and produce the results and you can have a career like mine.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky9:24

      So maybe first to summarize some of the core advice you're sharing is know what you actually want, because you're not gonna 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 wanna go to tell people and ask for it, "Here's, here's what I want to be doing in the future. Help me get there." 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 d- I deserve the next level."

   5. CVClaire Vo9:55

      Yeah.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky9:55

      And I guess maybe along those lines, is there any other advice you could share of just how to avoid being that person that's just like constantly obsessed with promotion that... Any more advice or just like how to find that balance?

   7. CVClaire Vo10:06

      Yeah, I mean, one, you've got to lock to the,

3. 10:11 – 13:50

   Avoiding promotion obsession

   1. CVClaire Vo10:11

      the norms, 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. We do promotion cycles. We have times during which we promote people. And so if you're talking to me four months pro- before a promo cycle, maybe it's top of mind, maybe it's not. Um, I can't do... I, I sometimes functionally cannot promote people inside larger organizations whenever I want. So one is I think understanding kind of the ta- the talent calendar of, of, of your team, especially at a larger organization. I think the second thing is really the conversation needs to be about what you being in a different position does for the company and why the company needs it. Often the conversation is, "I want to be promoted because I want to be a director of PM because I wanna become a manager, because I need direct reports." Instead of saying, "Look, your span of control, you have, you have nine direct reports. You need leverage here. I have a lot of credibility with this side of the product organization. I think we could be doing more if 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. That's not solving a career growth issue for an individual. And I think, you know, people who wanna be promoted need to think in that orientation versus the, the other. Because honestly, especially now, like let's, let's, let's say post-ZIRP, 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.... product teams are naturally pretty small. So there aren't just management and dis- 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 really focus on why a, 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 wanna get promoted."

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky12:41

      That is such good advice and such important advice, that 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's stagnating." Uh, I love that. That's, uh, and I love so much of your message is empowerment. It's not just here, there's the place you're in and there's not a lot you can do about it. Look for opportunities to help your manager, help your business. Here's what I can do to move things further. And I think there's an element of timing that you touched on. Like propose this at the ti- at a time when something could happen. Like you shared this example of there was a marketing gap.

   3. CVClaire Vo13:15

      Yeah. Yep, exactly.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky13:16

      Is th- is there another example where you did this sort of thing, where you kind of presented here's how I can help the org and that helped another promotion? If not, that's okay.

   5. CVClaire Vo13:24

      I, I mean, it, it's, it's honestly, um, how I expanded into leading engineering teams in a, in a technology organization. I was at Color and there was a real need to uplevel our engineering organization and I knew exactly, I knew exactly what to do. I had, 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 a

4. 13:50 – 17:24

   How Claire stepped into leadership roles

   1. CVClaire Vo13:50

      architecture perspective and from a, 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 important. I knew we had to solve it fast. And I was confident I had the sk- I, I, I knew I could do it. I had, 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, I came in as product. I very quickly, um, began leading the engineering organization, which was fabulous. And then, um, actually took on some of our non-clinical operations as well, where we had, you know, a pretty operational leader. We had some high skill challenges to deal with, and it, it fit my talent set and I knew I could help the company pretty quickly. So, you know, and, and this is the other advice I might give particular to PMs. PM is such a generalist role, it's okay to go a little left and a little right to go up. And, 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, uh, a, 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.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky15:08

      I love that advice and it, yeah, it leads to so many unexpected opportunities. One of the, I think big questions with PMs, and coming back to your original advice of know where you wanna go, there's so many directions a PM can go. You can eventually become founder, become a GM, become a CEO, something else. And it, trying these sorts of things often helps you understand, okay, here's what I'm actually excited about. Maybe I wanna move into design.

   3. CVClaire Vo15:31

      Yeah, and one of the other things that I think people don't understand, and maybe I experienced this as a founder and I really feel it inside companies, is like the universe is bendable to your will. And what I mean is in most, at least in the stage I operate in, in startups and growth stage companies and, you know, late stage startups, 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 in the existing structure of the organization, but as an org design thinker, that's a very important job that I have to do. You also have to think of this system as a living, breathing, you know, entity that can shift over time, in particular around highly motivated, highly talented people.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky16:31

      And I think along those same lines, referencing this advice you've already shared of just thinking from the perspective of what does my manager and folks above, 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 world.

   5. CVClaire Vo16:46

      Yep. Exactly.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky16:48

      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.

   7. CVClaire Vo16:56

      (laughs)

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky16:56

      And that often ends up not being what they want.

   9. CVClaire Vo16:59

      SOS. (laughs)

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky17:00

       Exactly. Any advice on, you know, like the classic be careful what you're good at advice, any advice on just how to not end up with everything?

   11. CVClaire Vo17:08

       I really believe operating in your zone of genius. I really believe in leaning into strengths, and, you know, if you are in a position in which you're good at things and you've been given a lot of responsibility, but you have tremendous growth edges and you're spending more time

5. 17:24 – 23:03

   Operating in your zone of genius

   1. CVClaire Vo17:24

      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, I truly believe defining and understanding your zone of genius, 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 joy out of the work is what makes it 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.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky17:57

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CVClaire Vo17:58

      And, you know, can you show up every day energized and engaged and excited about what you do? And I think being very aware if you are operating in the space or, or if you're not. And this might go back to I think, um, I have never regretted promoting somebody too slowly. I have regretted promoting somebody too quickly. In that, you know, high slope individuals in particular areas...... 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, want to give opportunities that put people in a position where they're not, they're, 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. Individually, (laughs) I do do a lot, but I do feel like I'm in my zone of genius and I also know that part of staying in my personal zone of genius is having this breadth of responsibility, but 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, time management.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky19:20

      Mm-hmm. We're gonna talk about some of the things that you built.

   5. CVClaire Vo19:23

      Yeah.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky19:23

      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 the zone of genius specifically. Any advice for figuring that out?

   7. CVClaire Vo19:32

      Yeah. Yeah. Um, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna relay it in, in precision, but one of the tactics that I've seen out there is basically go through your calendar for the last month or quarter, whatever it is, write everything down, and basically group them into, "I hated doing this." Um, "I didn't love doing it, but it was fine." "I love doing this." And then 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 put the, the bottom buckets away. Just focus on that top bucket and go, "How can I be here more?" And often, that is a true guide to where your really, your passion is, where your special e- expertise is, and where you're gonna 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, "What do I do that no one else in this organization can do?" 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 that are, you know, you think about a differentiated product (laughs) that are hard to replicate, um, and, and knowing what that is and leaning into that can make you, can, can drive a lot of exceptional career growth, but also just make you quite happy.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky20:58

      What's an example of that for you?

   9. CVClaire Vo21:00

      I, I think I'm actually quite good at traversing across, across and up and down. So, what I mean is, I ha- I'm fluent across product engineering, design, data and operations, and candidly, revenue, in a way that verti- or functional leaders maybe are less so. So, I feel like I have a high level of fluency broadly and can bring 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, it's 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 in the vertical up and down, wherever that vertical up and down happens makes me quite happy, and I think I'm pretty good at it.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky21:58

       Amazing. We're gonna touch on some of these things you just mentioned actually, but real quick, you mentioned this idea of essentially an energy audit. There's actually a really good guide that I'll point to in the show notes by Matt Michari that walks you through how to do this, 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 sap you of energy, do less of that. Easier said than done when you have a job and you have to do stuff (laughs) that people are paying you to do. But it's still, uh, really helpful, if nothing else, to help you po- point you where you want to be going in your career long term.

   11. CVClaire Vo22:29

       Yep.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky22:29

       Okay. So you mentioned you're a founder.

   13. CVClaire Vo22:31

       Yeah.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky22:31

       And it feels like you're like a founder at heart, but you've been working at larger companies for a while now, and I hear that you're really good at setting a fast pace within larger companies and maintaining that startup focus while also having a very high bar for quality and product. Everybody wants this. Everyone's like, "Yes, move fast, amazing quality." That's what... Uh, e- why, why would we not want that? I'm curious just to what you actually put into practice concretely that allow for you to build teams that move really fast and maintain a high bar. Are there

6. 23:03 – 27:46

   How to maintain a fast pace

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky23:03

      like processes you find helpful, values, ways of working?

   2. CVClaire Vo23:06

      Yeah. It's really funny. 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, I'm hired to remind them they can operate like a startup." (laughs) And so, I think about it completely differently, and there are kind of two, two things I think about in terms of pace and, and high bar. From a pace, it's know what your internal pace is and essentially don't let it degrade to the pace of your recurring meetings. I often find that pace of organization locks to pace of the calendar. And so, I am really thoughtful that 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 now. We should decide this tomorrow." The other thing that I think about is setting one click faster pace expectations inside an organization. So, I, I tend to come in and... Love this, hate it. It's (laughs) 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, I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in the clock speed one click 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, like, end of day in this meeting.And actually setting an expectation that your natural pace is gonna 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 of an organization. The third thing on pace is personal SLA. I never want to be the bottleneck for the organization. This is one of the more challenging things about being in my role is you are 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, 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. It's really hard. Sometimes it's not totally possible, but it's, it's a goal I have.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky25:26

      I love this clock speed concept-

   4. CVClaire Vo25:28

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky25:28

      ... of just let's move one, uh, uh, i- iteration faster than-

   6. CVClaire Vo25:32

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky25:32

      ... 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 principal on a team? Like, does- is there like a phrase you use?

   8. CVClaire Vo25:41

      Yeah. It's a, it's kind of a phrase I use and something I ask our leadership teams to do. So, I started at one, "I'm going to do this."

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky25:49

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CVClaire Vo25:49

       And two, "My expectation is you look for opportunities to do this." And the w- the reason I think this is effective, it's just very tangible and it's very tactical. It just is one of those things that at a moment when you're about to say a due date, 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, by, by an iteration. And so it's a very tactical piece of advice and expectation I give to my leadership team. If they can show up that way, then the expected pace of the organization goes up and then t- people tend to, kind of people tend to rise to the occasion.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky26:26

       And that connects very directly to your first piece of advice is not rely on the n- on the meeting cadence to determine your-

   12. CVClaire Vo26:33

       Yeah.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky26:33

       ... action cadence.

   14. CVClaire Vo26:34

       Yeah.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky26:34

       I imagine that's a similar situation where you, you tell people, "Here's how I want to operate." And then you actually work that way and that starts to filter through.

   16. CVClaire Vo26:41

       Yeah. I th- I just think there's this anti-pattern of, "We'll make the decision in the next meeting or we'll follow up on this in the next meeting." That is an artificial timeline can, you know, introduce by Google Calendar or whatever calendar you use. Like it's not a real, it's not a real thing. And so, I wanna put us on real timelines.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky26:58

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CVClaire Vo26:59

       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, our product move forward.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky27:13

       Awesome. Let's talk about quality. What are some lessons there?

   20. CVClaire Vo27:17

       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 and you have to be really specific. And that means you have to think about pretty deeply what are your leadership principles? If, if your leadership principle is bring the clock speed up one iteration, be explicit that

7. 27:46 – 29:54

   Setting a high bar for quality and talent

   1. CVClaire Vo27:46

      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 career ladder, especially at the senior levels. I often find that they're very soft. They're like hires and manages, you know, multiple departments or, you know, uh, takes in cross-functional stakeholder feedback. Like those are just not-

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky28:12

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CVClaire Vo28:12

      ... tractable, specific things. And so, I think, um, you know, put on, you know, PMs put on your product definition or OKR hat or whatever and define some real goals for 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." Or measurably, "No, they're, they're not meeting that bar." And so I think that's very important. The, the second thing I think is you have to normalize feedback and you know, Brene Brown, fellow Texan, love her-

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky28:47

      (laughs)

   5. CVClaire Vo28:47

      ... clear is kind. I think conflict avoidant, feedback avoidant cultures degrade 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, or as I say, take the temperature out of the room when it comes to opening 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 something that people need to hear to normalize feedback. But I think feedback is, is, is quite important. And I think the third thing is, you know, unfortunately when you're working, um, to build a high talent bar and high talent density, then when folks aren't a fit and it's, it's not working, moving against that quickly is part of the job and it's, it's a hard part of the job and 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,

8. 29:54 – 33:09

   Normalizing feedback

   1. CVClaire Vo29:54

      effective, performant way that makes everybody happier, including people that, that probably weren't a great fit for the, for the org or the role at the time.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky30:02

      Is there an example of you being, uh, surprisingly candid to someone or, uh, giving feedback, hard feedback to someone about quality? Something that's just like, "Oh wow, that's, uh, that's what I should be doing."

   3. CVClaire Vo30:16

      There were two leaders in my organization, um, I won't say which one and I won't say when, but two-

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky30:21

      Mm-hmm.

   5. CVClaire Vo30:21

      ... two leaders in the organization, partners across product and engineering, and they could not get, get it together. They could not work together. They were having mis- you know, they were having misalignments in priorities, strategy, they could not communicate, they were having conflict in front of the team. And-You know, the, the managers that had managed them were taking this very soft petal approach of you need to work on your cross ful- functional stakeholder, and like here are my expectations, all this kind of performance management stuff happened. And I called both of them individually, and I said, "The way you are operating is not meeting our leadership expectations. If you do not change, you cannot be part of this organization anymore. I believe 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 is your responsibility to do so, 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, and one of the... You know, turned into one of the most influential, effective 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. I believe you can get here, but it is your responsibility," that is the conversation that is clear and kind and honestly very effective in, in, in most instances.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky31:55

      That's an amazing example. Uh, clear is kind, as you said.

   7. CVClaire Vo31:59

      Yeah.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky31:59

      It reminds me of, um, Kim Scott, who's on the podcast-

   9. CVClaire Vo32:01

      Yep.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky32:01

       ... shared this story about Bob. 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... When they're firing him, he's just like, "Why didn't you tell me?"

   11. CVClaire Vo32:13

       Yeah.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky32:13

       "Why didn't anyone tell me that I was doing... Nobody thought I was doing a great job."

   13. CVClaire Vo32:16

       Yeah. Yeah, and I- I- I honestly think saying, "You are not doing a good job," is much kinder-

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky32:24

       Mm-hmm.

   15. CVClaire Vo32:24

       ... 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.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky32:36

       Okay, let's go in a different direction. Let's talk about being a woman in tech.

   17. CVClaire Vo32:40

       Oh, yeah.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky32:41

       This doesn't get talked about a ton on podcasts like this. I know you have a lot of thoughts. Obviously, you've been through a lot-

   19. CVClaire Vo32:47

       (laughs)

   20. LRLenny Rachitsky32:48

       ... of ex- you've had a lot of experiences, probably a lot of stories you haven't shared in other places.

   21. CVClaire Vo32:51

       Yeah.

   22. LRLenny Rachitsky32:52

       So, uh, I just wanted to give you a chance to share what you've been through, what you've seen, and any advice you may have.

   23. CVClaire Vo32:58

       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

9. 33:09 – 47:09

   Being a woman in tech

   1. CVClaire Vo33:09

      reflecting a bit on this lately because I just came from a few years in healthcare which, from my experience, there's a lot more women in leadership roles. I was a little spoiled-

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky33:18

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CVClaire Vo33:19

      ... um, as e- even, even in our, our technology organization, and now I'm back in, you know, startups and tech where the ratios are completely opposite, especially in roles like engineering, which is the 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. It's declining year over year. Female led founded teams were at least 2% of venture capital. Women hold 30% of senior leadership org- 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, "It hasn't been easy, and it's still not easy even, even at my level." And what I want to be clear about, because I'm, you know... It gets talked about a lot in, in forums like this, is this is not about imposter syndrome. Like, how, how could, how could (laughs) , how could 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, like a CPO across increasing large teams. Like, I get to invest in rad companies. I'm on boards. I get to be on this podcast. I'm, I'm a TikTok influencer. Like-

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky34:34

      (laughs)

   5. CVClaire Vo34:34

      ... this is not about, um, feeling like an imposter. It's really about, like, it is hard and it is different and the numbers pencil out in a way that is not favorable to, to women, and, you know, as you said, there's been a lot of stuff in, in the past that, you know, you look at me now and you say, "Oh, you know, she's, she's, 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. I 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 happened, and yet, like, here I am, and it's, and it's fine. And I'm not complaining. I just think, you know, I think what people also don't understand is that stuff still happens. I, you know, I don't need to litigate who it happens with, where it h- It still happens. I've ho- I have arrived, 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, what is structural about technology that creates these things happen? What is cultural? Um, 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? How can I influence 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, I try to stay in empowered, in an empowered space. I know, you know, my value and I have, 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 bendable to your will, there are things we can change. I don't think these numbers are not tractable. And so, my, my recommendation and what I'd love to say to the industry generally, to women in pers- particular is, like curio- 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 ways to go.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky37:10

      Is there a story that you could share if you're comfortable of just something you've gone through or been through that maybe people are like, "Oh, wow. I see, I see what stuff she's dealing with, or other women are dealing with that I had no sense of"?

   7. CVClaire Vo37:21

      I've been trying to wrap my head around this one, which is, I consistently get asked if I'm technical enough. Or if I'm tech- not, not even if I'm technical enough, let's put enough aside, if I'm technical. And it's fascinating to me because as a technical fo- co-founder of, of my startup, I wrote code for the first 12... Uh, first 12 months solo. It was the, kind of like led the engineering team there. That code is still in production in very, very large environments. I have run multi-hundred people engineering teams for many years. (laughs) And I spend my Saturdays and Sundays shipping code. Like I, this, this is what I do. And truly the first question most people ask me is, "Oh, well, you're not technical though. You're a pro- you're like, you're a product person." And I've, 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, that has a different gender getting that question with my background. And so, that's one of those things that has really been spinning my head. Again, it's not about imposter syndrome. I don't have anything to prove to people, but I am quite curious where that orientation comes from, and if it comes to somebody like me who has really, you know, had some proven success, I, I know it's happening to other people and, um, I'm hoping that I can do something from, from, from my position to, you know, turn that a little bit.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky38:49

      And this connects to what you shared, the advice you had of just, like, try to get curious about why it's happening and which is exactly what you just said. Is that just to, mostly to help you not get set and frustrated? Like, let me just understand-

   9. CVClaire Vo39:00

      (laughs)

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky39:00

       ... why is this happening again and again?

   11. CVClaire Vo39:02

       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, I think a lot of this is, 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 individuals experience an industry that's driving tremendous economic growth here. 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 'cause I do think it's complicated, and I do think you can be successful, but I don't think we're being successful at the rates I would love to see. And I, 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, I, I think we're all missing out for that, and I'd love, I'd love to see more of it.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky40:25

       And is there, is there an answer to how do we do this better? Uh, anything you think, hey, you've seen work to help get us past this?

   13. CVClaire Vo40:36

       I think normalize seeing it. So, thanks for bringing me on this podcast, but I, I do think normalize seeing it, uh, 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, a diverse set of folks. You don't imagine a very specific archetype. And so, I do think 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, the more the o- the, the industry can imagine different types of leaders and different types of roles. And so, you know, I just wanna see it more. I wanna invest more and raise the voices of female founders. I wanna call out there are amazing female CTOs out there, all those things. And I think if you can see it, you can start to unlock these very, very embedded concepts of who is and isn't, is and is not a, a technology leader, who is and is not technical.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky41:40

       Awesome. I love that advice. It's something I try really hard to do with this podcast.

   15. CVClaire Vo41:43

       Yeah.

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky41:44

       (upbeat music) This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated fast. Now, you can assess risk, secure the trust of your customers, and automate compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more with a single platform, Vanta. Vanta's market leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor 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/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny. I know you have a fun story about when you were very pregnant selling your startup.

   17. CVClaire Vo42:41

       Yeah.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky42:42

       ... uh, to Optimizely. Can you share-

   19. CVClaire Vo42:44

       I'm sure.

   20. LRLenny Rachitsky42:44

       ... that story? I haven't actually heard the story.

   21. CVClaire Vo42:45

       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.

   22. LRLenny Rachitsky42:50

       Mm-hmm.

   23. CVClaire Vo42:51

       Which is, I had been running Experiment Engine, which was a, um, platform for enterprises to run high scale experimentation, um, programs. So, not necessarily the underlying A/B testing technology, but all the stuff around hypothesis gathering, insights, aggregation, operations. Like, keeping things on, on track. Because I really know, as, as you do, that high scale experimentation programs can be very impactful to, 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, a TAM ceiling here. We had a great product for a great market 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 I heard that Microsoft, who was one of our biggest customers, was doing a experimentation day with Optimizely. And I knew Optimizely was a natural acquirer.

   24. LRLenny Rachitsky44:04

       Mm-hmm.

   25. CVClaire Vo44:05

       And I knew I had to get into that room. So, (laughs) so I called Microsoft and I said, "Hey, friend at Microsoft. I'm gonna be up in Seattle seeing our other customer, very large Seattle company, this week, week of experimentation day. Could we stop by?" And they're like, "Oh, yeah. Sure." Well, then I went to other, you know, other big Seattle company and said, "Hey, other big Seattle company. I'm gonna be up visiting Microsoft at their experimentation day. Would you be..." So like, I got these two meetings-

   26. LRLenny Rachitsky44:35

       Mm-hmm.

   27. CVClaire Vo44:35

       ... to, to manifest against each other. And then I walked into that experimentation day, and I, I called the CFO of Optimizely, and I sat in front of, (laughs) in front of him, and started pulling up the product and coding at the same time. (laughs) I was just like, "I'm gonna sit in front of him in the room and I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna have my screens." And then I went up and did a demo. And I'm not saying that's the thing that made it happen, but I will say very quickly after that, we became very close partners and ultimately they ac- they acquired me. And I give this advice to founders, because one of the things that, and founders and PMs, one of the things that I really hire for is scrappiness. I think you have to be able to do 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, of working my way into the right room, setting myself up for the success that I wanted, and, and, and having the backing, the good job, the great product, um, the, the outcomes t- to earn it. But you also have to get yourself in the room.

   28. LRLenny Rachitsky45:38

       And how many months pregnant were you?

   29. CVClaire Vo45:40

       Oh, I was extremely pre- pregnant. Um, a, a ticking time bomb of a belly is a really good negotiation tactic, (laughs) getting a deal.

   30. LRLenny Rachitsky45:49

       Mm-hmm.
10. 47:09 – 54:19

    The role of a CPTO

    1. CVClaire Vo47:09

       I've done both. It's very different than a pure product or a VP product role. And so first, um, 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, like, broad leadership skills and the leverage of a great SVP, um, to keep engineering team going. But no, actually I spent quite a bit of time on the engineering side, because as somebody who is responsible for the business outcomes of the product, one of the best ways to drive value is having a highly performant engineering team that works on a scalable platform. And so I, 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 eng 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 Git- GitHub up, (laughs) and I'm like comparing both, because I think both sides matter. I think the other thing that's different about this role is it's quite operational. And so you really have to know about operations and organization design. Eng teams are by nature much larger than product organizations. Like, if you just think about the classic ratios, there are more people in engineering than there are in product. And the talent change, uh, challenges are significantly different in engineering, whether it's the, you know, high volume of recruiting, culture cha- 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 CPTO ro- o- role. AndYou 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, if the, if there's a sub-zero and it goes down. That is not what it's like to be, be a product leader. So you gotta know what you're getting into and you have to be technical. And then the, the thing I would be remiss to say about this role is the P and the T get a lot of air time. Product and engineering get a lot of air time. Design, data, these are such functional, very important organizations, and why these roles get... So that's kind of like what the role is, and, and how, how you could be good at it or whether it would be a f- a fit for your skills. The question of why have this kind of role. And I think there's two, there's two reasons. There's the obvious strategic reason of, like, they're all the same thing, right? They're all building capital P, product. Um, they're all builders. They're the same types, um, of folks. They're all builders. And bringing them 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 is, it provides a tremendous amount of leverage to the CEO in many ways. 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 investment at the executive level is quite important, especially when you're candidly spending a, a lot there. And so, I think it's those two things. It's, these are one team. 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 whole, what do our customers need and what do our business needs? And then it's the accountability, candidly, of this quite meaningful investment against business objectives, and having a single- singularly responsible individual to, to care for that investment.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky50:46

       Hmm. Sounds wonderful, having one person-

    3. CVClaire Vo50:48

       (laughs)

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky50:48

       ... to deal with across all these functions.

    5. CVClaire Vo50:51

       It is and isn't. I'll just say, like, I've done both, right? Uh, I've, I've been a CPO next to an SVP of eng, I've run both together. Founders can play this role. And again, this is why I sort of say, you, you have to optimize around talent in your organization. If your CEO can- has the skills, bandwidth, et cetera, to do this, they can do this. So you can keep the organization separate, they can hold that. If they have a different area of expertise, if they've never done that before, if it's just not working operationally and they have broader areas of focus, then bring it together under someone. I, I don't think there's a perfect organization structure. This has just been one that's worked well in the shape of organizations that need someone like me.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky51:34

       Yeah. And along those same lines, designing an org around the person. I imagine there's not many very engineering background experienced people that ca- are also really good at product and can do design. I guess, how deep do you need to be in each of these functions to be successful in this role? 'Cause it feels really rare.

    7. CVClaire Vo51:50

       Um, you know, start a company and then you have to do it.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky51:53

       Mm-hmm.

    9. CVClaire Vo51:54

       I, I, in some ways. I mean, I think this is... 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 gonna bring a founder mindset." And so, I think as a founder, especially early stage, you do all this. You see how all of this is one person, because honestly, sometimes it is one person, and sometimes that person is you. And so, I do think working at a small, very small startup gives you the opportunity to experience a breadth of functional skills, and develop a breadth of functional skills that can set you up for this kind of role much further, further down the line. So, I do think early stage startup experience is one of those, one of those 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, 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 c- we have a leadership principle inside our team that's like, "There are no lanes." So like, there are... 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 gonna breed the type of leaders that can do this, this type of role.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky53:29

        Awesome. Uh, reminds me, at, uh, GitLab I just interviewed their head of product, or CPO, and they have a core value of short toes.

    11. CVClaire Vo53:37

        (laughs)

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky53:37

        Don't worry about stepping on people's toes. Have short toes. Don't worry about people getting into your stuff.

    13. CVClaire Vo53:41

        Yep.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky53:41

        It's all, it's all good.

    15. CVClaire Vo53:43

        Yep.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky53:43

        Okay. You mentioned AI. Amazing segue to my next topic that I wanna spend some time on. You built a tool called ChatPRD. My guess is it's the single most popular AI PM specific tool out there, other than like some big company's tool, like, I don't know, Sprig or Figma or something like that. Okay, so first of all, just what is ChatPRD, and then why did, why did you build it?

    17. CVClaire Vo54:06

        Yeah. So ChatPRD comes out of, again, pacesetting. And I'll, I'll, I'll actually tell you the real genesis of Cha- ChatPRD, which is, at a previous company, we had a quite technical

11. 54:19 – 59:39

    Building ChatPRD

    1. CVClaire Vo54:19

       product we needed to build. We're scrappy and resource constrained, and our platform PMs were working on something very important, but this was critical and 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, all I see this, I think I know what we need." And between the beginning of the meeting and the end of the meeting, I had used ChatGPT and a, and a prompt to like, come up with a very serviceable PRD spec for this very technical product. And-I took that prompt and that long-running ChatGPT thread and crafted the Claire version of, of a (laughs) of a product leader or a product person that could, with really solid consistently- consistency, output product specs, give good feedback, um, build out plans, build out tracking, um, mechanisms and goals. And so while I say, like, she may just be a prompt, but she is my prompt, this was lovingly crafted over several months. And so when the GPT store came out, for my team, I just said, "Hey, you all know I've been writing PRDs with ChatPRD or ChatGPT." I created it as GPT and re- and just gave it to my team. I was like, "Here, you can use this if you want it." And they really liked it, 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 pho- fun coding again, and so I thought, "This is easy. We're just gonna stand up a s- a standalone app, um, and wrap..." Come on. Wra- it's a wrapper. Um, wrap some of these capa- uh, it started as a wrapper. Wrap some of these capabilities and just publish it and put a fairly reasonable price tag on it and see what happens. And now I have thousands of people using ChatPRD. 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 gonna 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 a PM, and this has saved me truly hours of work to get the basics of my product requirements done so I can spend, spend time on the details." And then I've added on more, more functions and capabilities in the standalone app. So, uh, it is, it is my personal product copilot that I've released for the world.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky56:49

       Okay. So first of all, where can people check this out? As a ChatPRD.com?

    3. CVClaire Vo56:53

       .ai. Come on.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky56:54

       .ai. Oh, (laughs) of course. It works.

    5. CVClaire Vo56:55

       (laughs) Uh, yeah, ChatPRD.ai.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky56:57

       I h- I saw something said about that cou- the country that has .ai is just making-

    7. CVClaire Vo57:01

       Yeah.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky57:01

       ... so much bank right now.

    9. CVClaire Vo57:01

       So much money.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky57:02

        All these domains. Okay. Then in terms of the stack, just to be clear. So it started as a ChatGPT prompt, custom prompt. You kind of evolved-

    11. CVClaire Vo57:10

        Yeah.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky57:10

        Then it became a GPT, a custom-

    13. CVClaire Vo57:12

        Wow.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky57:12

        ... GPT, and now it's your own app that is using the OpenAI APIs behind this?

    15. CVClaire Vo57:17

        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, um, you're not getting that customization. When you use the standalone app, you are getting that customization. And then I've layered on a couple different capabilities. So in addition to having the chat format, it will actually create the document for you and iterate on the, the actual doc for you, and then working on some additional tools and integrations in the future.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky57:55

        Okay. Great. What are the most common use cases, again, just so people can get a sense of, "Oh, let me use this for these things"?

    17. CVClaire Vo58:00

        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, "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, I have what's called a narrative, which is like, how do you pitch this, this product, which I, I feel like is a thing product managers miss a lot, which, like, how to position and pitch it. 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 ChatPRD, so if you do something different or want something different for your company. So about 60% of people are using it for that. 30% of people, I would say, are using it to put in a, 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.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky59:02

        Amazing. Okay. So I wrote a post recently of how... sharing a bunch of examples of how people are using different GPTs specifically at work-

    19. CVClaire Vo59:10

        Yeah.

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky59:11

        ... and I think it's spurred a lot of people to experiment with this stuff.

    21. CVClaire Vo59:14

        Yeah.

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky59:14

        If there's one tip that you could share for someone that's trying to build a GPT or their own custom app using OpenAI APIs, any advice?

    23. CVClaire Vo59:24

        Prompt matters. Like, uh, you know, we went through this, this whole cycle of, like, prompt engineering is a thing, it's not really a thing, fine-tuning... Like, prompt really does matter, and like a good, (smacks lips) like a good PM, I do competitive analysis. I use the same input and look at

12. 59:39 – 1:02:27

    Tips for building a GPT

    1. CVClaire Vo59:39

       different, um... I look at, like, GPT or ChatGPT. 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, a mode now where I may do some model experimentation and tuning behind the scenes. So it might not be OpenAI. It may be other things. But it matters. The instructions matter. The context matters for the quality of the output, 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. You know, knock on wood, OpenAI will figure it out. If I had more time, maybe I would create a platform out of what I've created for, for ChatGPT to let other people sort of monetize their GPTs and add-on capabilities. But that is not... It's, it's not out of the box yet for, for folks, and I think there's probably... There's a lot of work that I had to do to get, get it from here to there.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:31

       And are you making, like, real money with this thing? And is the idea that this becomes the thing you do someday, maybe long term?

    3. CVClaire Vo1:00:38

       So my original goal, and I, like, said this out on X, so my original goal is I just want to buy, like, a nice glass of wine a week. That was, (laughs) that was my goal. I can buy, like, cases of wine now. This is very exciting, exciting for me. It's making...... what I would consider real money. Is it a venture scale thing? No. Does it need to be? No. Um, I have a goal around my kids' education expenses-

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:04

       Mm-hmm.

    5. CVClaire Vo1:01:04

       ... I would love for, for this to cover a little bit. So I have an, a ambitious but not audacious goal for, for ChatSh- ChatPRD. The other goal that I have, which is, is, let's put monetization aside, is this is my joy space. Like, j- zone of genius, joy space, and my goal with ChatPRD is it has to be 100% fun for me. Like, this is my hobby. So I'm not doing anything that makes it 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, I get to learn new technologies. I wanna keep it in that space because it, it provides a lot of joy for me. So like put money aside, I just want it to be fun.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:51

       Love that. Okay. So some people listening to this, especially PMs, may be like, "Claire, what the hell are you doing? Replace, are you gonna replace product managers in a year or two?" This connects to something I've just generally been thinking about, and that's come up a bunch, is just over time which skills and, uh, jobs of a product manager will be greatly enhanced by AI, and which will be completely replaced by AI, if any, so that people can understand which skills they should be investing in and which maybe are less important. So, I guess just broadly, do you have a sense of just, here's skills that are gonna continue to be incredibly

13. 1:02:27 – 1:08:08

    The impact of AI on product management

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:27

       important and AI will not take these skills and jobs off your plate, versus, okay, these are gonna be the less important, AI will do these?

    2. CVClaire Vo1:02:36

       At the highest level, I tend to be very short term pessimistic, although I'll, I'll, I'll frame that f- short term pessimistic and very long term optimistic. So, I am a big believer that technology has made society generally much more, much, much more afflu- like wealthier, happier, healthier. Like, 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, full, 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. Now, that being said, I am of the mind, excitedly, that this is going to change stuff in companies incredibly quickly. And, and part of building ChatPRD is, I hold myself to the bar as a technology leader. I need to be leading 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 gonna eliminate PMs next year? Probably not. Are the ratios between PMs and other teams going to shift over time? Yes. Are the skills required gonna shift? Yes. Could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Probably. So, I think there's a lot of change coming, and I, I want to be prepared for it. Now, what do I think this replaces, and what does it r- (laughs) replace? Like, it was really, I was reflecting on this question, and, like, communication lowercase c, I feel like is one of the places it's gonna be replaced. You know, there's ... And I call it lowercase c, is like the functional trading of information that allows other people to do jobs. Like, I think that these language models and these tools are really good synthesizing information, putting together communication, and can coordinate who that coordination goes, communication goes to and get it out, in, in many modalities of, of content. And so, I'm really thinking about, you know, the PM as the keeper of cross-functional relationships and communication is really, I, I think potentially gonna change. Now, the capital C communication of, are you influential? Are you convincing? Are you bold? Can you get this system of humans to follow you down a path? That's, I think, gonna be much, much harder, uh, to, to replace. And so, I'm thinking about the edges of, of communication, and, um, where it'll, where it'll change and what they won't.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:13

       That's really interesting. I did a, I did a poll on Twitter and LinkedIn a- a- asking people-

    4. CVClaire Vo1:05:18

       Yeah.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:18

       ... of, between, uh, communication, execution, strategy, and product sense, which skills are most likely to be basically taken over by AI? And communication was number one by far.

    6. CVClaire Vo1:05:30

       Yeah.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:30

       I have a contrarian perspective, and strategy was the least, least voted.

    8. CVClaire Vo1:05:35

       Yeah.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:35

       I feel like ... So strategy work is essentially, here's everything we know about the world and competitors in the market and our s- advantages. Here's a plan to win in the market, essentially.

    10. CVClaire Vo1:05:46

        Yeah.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:46

        I feel like that's what AI is incredibly good at.

    12. CVClaire Vo1:05:49

        I a- I agree with you.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:50

        Okay.

    14. CVClaire Vo1:05:50

        I totally, I totally agree with you. I think ... And again, this comes to, like, synthesis, good decision-making and communication.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:58

        Mm-hmm.

    16. CVClaire Vo1:05:58

        Like, if you can synthesize, distill into a plan, and communicate that plan, it ... I have, I found these tools exceptional at the ... Use, use ChatPRD and give it, give it a try. Now, I think it's, it's sort of the human aspect, though, of boldness, seeing the future in a way that a thing trained on priors (laughs) 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 are pretty hard to replicate, which is why I love using ChatPRD, right? Like, I'm not gonna come up with the most genius way to do data export for Snowflake for Sun Lake. Like, that is a solved area that we should just scaffold up. I should customize it to what we do, and then we should ship it. Like, that is not a place where my, you know, my magic skills as a human are gonna impact, and ... But I don't think a lot of PMs see it that way.I think there's this real identity shift that's gonna happen, where PMs think that their value is coming from their, you know, ideas that they manifest into the world, and how they individually manifest them. And I think we're gonna shift to, like, are you, are you building the right stuff? Are you building it quickly? And is it, is it delivering? No matter what the tool, tool, tool chain is.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:19

        Yeah. I think your point about getting buy-in and getting everyone aligned, that's ... I don't know how an AI bot does that, unless everybody's got their own little bot and they're all, like, talking to each other.

    18. CVClaire Vo1:07:29

        They all just get aligned. (laughs)

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:30

        We're in, we're in now. We'll prioritize this a little higher.

    20. CVClaire Vo1:07:33

        Yeah.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:33

        I actually made this list. We could ... I feel like this could be the entire podcast.

    22. CVClaire Vo1:07:37

        Yeah.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:37

        But I made it like a quick list of here's the jobs of a PM.

    24. CVClaire Vo1:07:40

        Yep.

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:07:40

        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 some chat PRD maybe do in the future. So what is the job of a PM? You're writing PRDs, you're setting goals, proposing a road map, aligning a team behind a road map, developing a strategy, developing a vision, communicating timelines, finding blockers and unblocking people, getting buy-in from h- uh, up on high, getting budget resources for your team, getting, giving feedback on product

14. 1:08:08 – 1:14:36

    How AI is changing the product management role

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:08

       and design. Those are just some of the day-to-day jobs. I'm so curious just which of these AI can actually just do and not have to worry about it.

    2. CVClaire Vo1:08:15

       I think a lot of them AI can do.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:18

       Mmm.

    4. CVClaire Vo1:08:18

       And so the question is which of them do you want to hand the keys to, um, an AI tool? And which of them are gonna be much more valuable as a tool that an individual or a team's intellect can use to do a better, faster, or 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 that I would not have in a million years thought was possible three years ago. Every week, something new comes out where it just changes my, my mind of what's possible. So I believe all of those are 80% good, functionally tractable. The question is, is 80% good, functionally tractable the best way to do that? Or can we take a certain type of person with a certain skillset backed by a purpose-built toolkit and make it 3X better, 4X better, 10X better? I think that's the more, the more interesting question.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:16

       I think on the, on the point of amazing things are happening every day, like we had a ... SpaceX launched the Starship and it was, like, barely mentioned anywhere. It's like we have this spaceship that can take us to Mars now.

    6. CVClaire Vo1:09:26

       Yeah.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:26

       And like, nah. We don't need to talk about that.

    8. CVClaire Vo1:09:29

       I mean, you know, we get the kids up and like stream it on YouTube.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:32

       Oh, that's awesome.

    10. CVClaire Vo1:09:32

        I think it's just ... I, it's m- it's magic. Like, we live in this, this magic time. I think it's so fascinating. But-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:38

        Yeah.

    12. CVClaire Vo1:09:39

        I agree. We're getting, we're getting spoiled by innovation.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:41

        You said that there's this ratio that might shift with product managers, engineers. I'm curious which ratio, 'cause engineers are also getting more efficient and so it's interesting if the ratios will be consistent as engineers become more efficient, PMs get more efficient.

    14. CVClaire Vo1:09:53

        I, I wonder if whole, whole roles get eliminated and replaced and then ratios aren't even the right way to, to think about, about things. You know, there's the ratio of this PM role to this many eng- you know, one PM to seven to 10 engineers, or one EM to se- Like, there's those ratios. I also think there's gonna be this interesting shift of, as a manager or as a leader, how you allocate budget against tools and people, I also think is going to shift. And one of the in- ... 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 before they were allowed to open the JD.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:32

        Hmm.

    16. CVClaire Vo1:10:32

        And it's just this very interest- You know, and in my mind, you know, people think that's scary and it's gonna reduce jobs. Yes, and I do think there's also potentially other jobs that open up, um, that could become very interesting. And so I don't know how it's gonna pencil out. I really don't. What I do know is things are gonna 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, um, close my eyes to, to what the po- the possible maybe dramatic changes are in our industry. So I'm thinking about it, I'm ex- I'm experimenting with things, and I'm hoping that, you know, in our team at LaunchDarkly, we're leading from the front here, um, as opposed to on our back foot.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:17

        I'm thinking many people listening are like, "Okay, I need to get on top of this. I need to stay ahead. I wanna follow Claire's lead." Is your advice simply create GPTs, play with ChatGPT? Is there anything else there to help people?

    18. CVClaire Vo1:11:30

        I also think 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 ChatGPT is not just to stress test how is ... Or chat PRD, is not just to stress test how these sorts of things are gonna change the product function. It's literally, like, 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 these kinds of products. If you can do that ... I just think back to, like, when mobile happened. If you were a PM that jum- jumped on mobile, you had the pick of the litter when it came to jobs in very interesting startups. And so I think we're in the same moment here where 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 I've personally built on before.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:37

        And so for someone, let's say, not super engineering oriented, I guess, how do you recommend people on your team explore this sort of thing? Is it Mmm.

    20. CVClaire Vo1:12:45

        Yeah, it's ... I, I do think studying products that are out there-

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:49

        Hmm.

    22. CVClaire Vo1:12:49

        ... is quite interesting. You know, I, I love these, uh, this idea of doing outside-in product tear-downs. 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 think about-... 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. Two, 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, and write code, you can certainly 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. I think, you know, how fun is Midjourney? How fun are some of these more creative tools? And so, find where there's something fun and build art out of it as a, as a mechanism for learning. It doesn't always have to be commercially driven, or 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.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:00

        Awesome. One last question about chat, ChatPRD. 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?

    24. CVClaire Vo1:14:14

        So I have, um, qualitative feedback from, from product managers who have used chat sh- ChatPRD, who have said, "This has saved me dozens of hours I would have spent on writing documents." And another person said, "I am a single PM on a team that's growing and I don't think we're gonna

15. 1:14:36 – 1:16:39

    Efficiency gains with ChatPRD

    1. CVClaire Vo1:14:36

       have to hire another PM now." So, like, you know, there's, like, both the people... (laughs) Like, there's both the, the individual aspect and the hours aspect, which is it's, it's helping individuals' PMs get higher leverage across, you know, a broad engineering or building team, and that it's helping them spend their time more effectively.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:53

       Many people don't want to hear this, that they don't need to hire a PM. There's many people looking for jobs right now.

    3. CVClaire Vo1:14:59

       It, it's true. Like, but we can't... I mean, I think we saw this in the last couple of years. Inefficiently hiring and building unsustainable cost into a company leads no one to success, and if that's a lesson that I can teach anybody, it's sustainability in organizations is the responsibility of a leader. So yes, I would love to give everybody positions. There are 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 are teams and have these jobs, and, you know, startups can't, can't afford it, and they still have great things to do in the world.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:04

       Great answer. To start to wrap up our conversation, I have these, uh, two segments, Failure Corner and Contrarian Corner, and we can pick which corner you wanna head to. 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?

    5. CVClaire Vo1:16:24

       I'll take Contrarian Corner.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:26

       Let's, let's go over there. Piyom piyom piyom piyo. I need some sound effects for these corners.

    7. CVClaire Vo1:16:29

       (laughs)

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:30

       Uh, do share.

    9. CVClaire Vo1:16:32

       Um, I'm, I'm sharing this because you just released your podcast with Marty Kagan.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:37

        Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

    11. CVClaire Vo1:16:38

        And

16. 1:16:39 – 1:20:11

    Contrarian corner: sales-led product organizations

    1. CVClaire Vo1:16:39

       I am a sales-led product apologist, unabashedly, which is... I think that it is okay to listen to the market and to be commercially oriented in products in ways that probably would make some folks in some types of product organizations squirm a little bit. And the reason why I believe this is, I think there are tremendous businesses built on saleless 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. Um, but I think product teams, this, like, opposition we have, sort of industry-wide with sales-led, I'm not convinced it's healthy in every organization. And I was listening to the podcast, and I think you all were talking about it. 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, with a better product, with, you know, and with better experience, with more love from the industry maybe, but, like, what a powerhouse company. And I think we as PMs turn our nose up to powerhouse companies too often because we want companies to be product led, not sales led.

Episode duration: 1:27:44