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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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)

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.