How Anthropic’s product team moves faster than anyone else | Cat Wu (Head of Product, Claude Code)

I think it is very hard to be the right amount of AGI pilled. It's very easy to build a product for the super AGI strong model. The hard thing is figuring out, for the current model, how do you elicit the maximum capability?

I've never seen anything like the pace you folks at Anthropic are shipping at.

We wanna remove every single barrier to shipping things. The timelines for a lot of our product features have gone down from six months to one month and sometimes to even one day.

You're interviewing hundreds of PMs, and you just keep feeling like they're approaching it very incorrectly.

The PM role is changing a lot. It's changing really quickly. The thing that is extremely important for building AI-native products is iterating so quickly, figuring out a way for you to actually launch features every single week.

What do you think are the emerging skills PMs need to develop?

It comes back to product taste. As code becomes much cheaper to write, the thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write.

Today, my guest is Cat Wu, head of product for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic. Cat is at the center of everything that is changing in AI and product and building, and she and her team are building the product that is most changing the way that we all build our products. She is so full of insights and wisdom and lessons. This is an episode you cannot miss. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an insane set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Cat Wu. [gentle music] Cat, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

I have so many questions. I'm so excited to have you on this podcast. I wanna start with giving people an understanding of your role alongside Boris. Uh, everybody knows Boris. This... He's... His episode is the number one most popular episode on this podcast. No pressure. He, uh, created Claude Code. He leads the Eng team, ships, uh, a, a bazillion PRs a day from his phone, just, like, I don't even know what the number is anymore. I think people don't give you enough credit for the success that Claude Code has had and Cowork and all the things y'all are building. Help us understand your role on the team, how you work with Boris, how you split responsibilities, just, like, what does the PM role look like on, on the Claude Code team?

I feel very lucky to work with Boris. He's been an amazing thought partner. He's our tech lead. He's very much the product visionary, and he is great at setting, like, this is what the product needs to be in, like, three months, six months from now. This is, like, what the AGI-pilled version of the product is. And a lot of my role is figuring out, okay, what is the path from where we are today to, like, that vision three to six months from now? And I, I spend more of my time on the cross-functional, so making sure that our marketing team, sales team, finance, capacity, et cetera, are, like, bought in on the plan and that we're all rowing the same direction and that once the feature is ready, that there aren't any blockers to shipping it. I think in many ways it works well because we kind of, like, mind meld, but it is actually, like, remarkably blurry of a line. Like, I think we're, like, eighty percent mind meld, and then there's, like, this twenty percent of things that, like, maybe I care a lot more about than Boris, so, like, I'll drive those, and then, like, twenty percent where he cares a lot more than me, and he just, like, drives those.