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

Key takeaways

• The pace of AI product development has accelerated immensely at Anthropic, with deployment cycles reducing from months to days, enabled by streamlined processes and advanced models.
• Product managers in AI companies need a new set of skills, especially strong product taste, technical fluency, and the ability to rapidly iterate and evaluate.
• Building incomplete or early-stage products is essential in AI to stay ahead of model improvements; flexibility and preparedness to update are critical.
• The personality of AI products, such as Claude’s friendly and confident tone, significantly influences their success and user engagement.
• A unifying mission—like bringing safe AGI to humanity—serves as a strategic guide that aligns teams, accelerates decision-making, and sustains focus.
• Internal tools like Cloud Code and Co-Work are instrumental in enabling rapid prototyping, customizing workflows, and automating tasks, boosting product velocity.
• Constantly reflect on and introspect model behavior, develop strong evals, and understand model limitations to improve AI performance and reliability.
• AI tools should be integrated into daily workflows—building apps and automations that get used repeatedly provides the greatest leverage.
• Future AI product infrastructure will scale to manage hundreds of parallel tasks, requiring seamless management, verification, and self-improvement.
• To succeed in AI product management, focus on building systems and workflows that adapt quickly, continuously learn, and capitalize on the rapid progress of AI models.

Summary

Sponsors

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• Vanta · I also love how they've made it super easy to customize it. So really, you should connect your communications tools and where you store your source of truth data for what your team cares about, what you care about and what you're working on. And then, what was the prompt roughly that you put in there? So I just wrote, make me a slide deck for the code with call conference. This is what our PMM suggested it should cover. This is the current draft that I made that I don't like. This is one that I made manually that I don't like, but I linked it. Can you start by creating a proposed outline with details? Also, make sure it doesn't overlap too much with a keynote talk, which is more important. And then, cowork just like went off for a few hours and built the whole slide deck. This is so awesome. What a what an awesome part of the job to not have to do anymore. And it feels like you're talking to essentially a deck designer that also has like actual knowledge about what you've worked on and can like make it actually the content, what you want it to be, not just make it look really nice. How did you, how did you, the design system piece? How does that work? How does it know the design system of Anthropic? So what I did for this is we actually already have like a standardized deck that we use across all of our external engagements. And so I just gave quad access to that. And so it's able to see like what colors we use, what fonts we use, the different kinds of, what's they called, like slide formats that are possible. And so it has like 20 of these example slides. So give an example, got it. See like upload, here's our template, work from this. Yeah, you can also connect like your Figma MCP if you have your slide format saved there. And it can pull that in. Along those lines, something I'm always curious about that is what's kind of in your stack of tools as a PM and Anthropic. Obviously, Cloud Code and Co-Work and all the Anthropic tools, what else are you using? What are the slack you mentioned? Is there anything else? So my stack is pretty heavily, Cloud Code, Co-Work, and Slack. Anthropic largely runs on Slack. I feel like it's like the core OS of our company. And day to day, like a lot of, I would say maybe 30% of my time is pushing the boundaries of what co-work and quad code can do so that I have a very strong sense of what we're not good at. And I spend a lot of time talking with the model to understand why it makes mistakes that it does. We actually have a lot of internal tools that we make. Like I think one of the things that quad code has really unlocked for our entire company is it really lowers the barrier to making any custom app that you want. And so we've seen this like surge in personalized work software that people are building for like custom use cases instead of using tools that don't perfectly fit the use case. I gotta hear more. What are what are some examples? What are things you built other people built that are really popular and useful. One of the sales folks on CodCode, he realized he was making these repetitive decks over and over and over again. And so he actually has this web app that he built with the examples of the core CodCode decks that we know work well, so like a 101, 201 and a master in CodCode. And then he has a way to input specific customer context that pulls from Salesforce, that pull us from Gong that pulls from other notes so that we can customize the decks for specific customers. And so we'll pull out things like, okay, this customer is using like bedrock or called for enterprise or console, which affects what features are available to them. It will pull out things like, okay, this customer is concerned about like the code review stage of the SLC. And so we'll add a slide about our code review features there. It will pull out things So like, okay, this customer needs to be like, HIVA compliant or needs XYZ security controls. And then, for example, if this is a customer that's on vertex or bedrock and doesn't want to use caught for enterprise, then we'll just take out some of the slides that are caught for enterprise only features. And so normally this is like manual work that could take 20, 30 minutes. or, and so people either like spend that time doing it, or they'll just decide not to do it and use the general deck with this. It takes like a few seconds and you get a tailored deck. What's interesting about it, it's like Slack is like the tool that nobody's, it's just like nobody's trying to create their own. Slack just continues to win, and it's just like the way you describe it is kind of the OS of so many companies. It's so interesting. Like people talk about Salesforce as just like SaaS, we don't need to have software anymore. We're gonna build our own. It's like Slack is a durable tool that nobody wants to try to compete with and build a better version. I think it's pretty important communications and per-sector, and I think they do the core task of helping everyone get real-time updates incredibly well. Yeah, like people hate on Slack, but it's really great at what it's trying to do, and like the most cutting-edge teams are hooked on it, so interesting. Yeah. And I also love how how easy they've made to customize it. And so it's we love making slack bots. And the this kind of like hackability means that we're able to integrate with slack the way that we want to. So really appreciate slack's work on that. Time to time to buy some CRM stock. I am so excited to tell you about this season's supporting sponsor Vanta. 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