Claude Code for product managers: research, writing, context libraries, custom to-do system, and more | Teresa Torres

0:00Teresa Torres:Why has Claude Code become your buddy? I was writing my notes in my task management tool and that was Trello. As time went on, I just started to get really worried about how am I ever going to get my data out of Trello? And so I was like, I wonder if Claude can help. And that was like one thing. Maybe I could just do this better with Claude. And by moving my task management to Claude, now Claude sees my tasks and I can literally start my day and be like, Claude, what's on my to do list that you can just do for me? I can say, hey, Claude, what's my sales pipeline right now? And because Quad is tagging my tasks, it literally can generate a list of all my sales tasks and where they're at.

0:34Teresa Torres:This has given me a lot of inspiration because I forget a lot of things. There's a lot going on.

0:42Teresa Torres:Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have a very practical episode with Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits, which we all know and love. an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach. Teresa's gonna show us how she uses Claude Code for basically everything, but especially to manage her huge to-do list, all the information she needs to do a great job, and builds a giant context library so she can be, as she says, lazy with her prompting. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Brex.

1:23Teresa Torres:If you're listening to this show, you already know AI is changing how we work in real practical ways. Brex is bringing that same power to finance. Brex is the intelligent finance platform built for founders with autonomous agents running in the background. Your finance stack basically runs itself. Cards are issues. Expenses are filed and fraud is stopped in real time without you having to think about it. Add Brex's banking solution with a high yield treasury account. And you've got a system that helps you spend smarter, move faster and scale with confidence. One in three startups in the US already runs on Brex.

2:04Teresa Torres:You can too at brex.com slash how I AI. Teresa, welcome to how I AI. I am so thrilled with today's episode because we get to see what I love, which is good old Claude Code in a non-coding environment. And we were laughing before the show, you were just in every directory on your computer, straight in the terminal. Like this is how we're living right now. So I have to ask you before we get into any of it, why Claude Code? Why has Claude Code then become your buddy? Yeah, this has been a really gradual evolution. I started like everybody else like literally in chat gpt in the web and then i wanted to have an lm help me with writing and i gradually moved to claude because claude's a little bit better writer although that might be changing and then you know i do code and i mostly code in the aws environment and this is going to be really embarrassing i do most of my coding in the aws management console and my husband for like four years has been like, Teresa, you just need to use IDE.

3:15And I was kind of afraid of IDE. I literally had no version control. But I recently had a project where one of the things that I built is being integrated into a real production quality product. And I was like, oh, I got to level up my engineering game. And that got me into VS Code. And then because I needed to use like Git and be like a real engineer, if I was going to have something I built go in a real product. And so I had to level up my pretend engineering game. And my husband was like, and look, you can just have Claude in the terminal right here inside VS Code. And then that was a game changer.

3:49And I think the reason why coding with Claude helped me with all the things we're going to talk about today is I feel like engineers pair program with Claude when they use Claude code. And I think this idea of pair programming, I pair program now with everything I do, even if it's not programming. So like I pair task manage and I pair write and I pair everything.

4:14Teresa Torres:Great. And so let's get into it because you are going to show us task management. And I mean, the running joke is like every third startup is going to be a to-do list. Like if you haven't tried to start a to-do list startup. Are you really like an early stage founder? But you have coded yourself a task management platform that works for you. And I'd love for you to walk us through it. Yeah. And I'll explain why I did this. I actually think the reason why there's so many task management apps is that how we manage our tasks is so idiosyncratic that this is exactly the type of thing that you should build for yourself because it can work exactly the way you want it to work, which is part of the magic.

4:54But what got me here was I'm a huge note taker. Like instead of thinking out loud, I think by outlining and writing notes. And I was writing my notes in my task management tool. And that was Trello. And this is kind of nightmarish because now my notes are locked into a third party tool. They weren't very searchable. And like as time went on, I just started to get really worried about how am I ever going to get my data out of Trello? And so I was like, I wonder if Claude can help. And that was like one thing, like maybe I could just do this better with Claude. And then the second thing that got me into this was as I started to get more involved in AI, I forced myself every time I did a task to ask, how can AI help with this?

5:39Can it automate it? Can it augment it? Do I like doing it? Do I want AI to do it for me? And by moving my task management to Claude, now Claude sees my tasks and I can literally start my day and be like, Claude, what's on my to-do list that you can just do for me? Or what's on my to-do list where I should be thinking about how you can help? And then it's not on me to figure out how to use AI. Claude's kind of my pair AI buddy. So what I built is I have a slash command, slash today. Are people familiar with slash commands? Should I describe that? You should definitely describe them. Okay. So a slash command is just a Claude code shortcut that we get to define.

6:18So I decided it was called slash today. I wrote a really detailed prompt which we can look at that tells Claude exactly what to do every time I type slash today. So every single morning of my life, even on Saturdays and Sundays with my cup of coffee, I sit down and I literally just type in slash today. And if I run this, it's going to overwrite what I'm going to show you, but we'll run it real live in a minute. But what it does, you can see the summary from this morning's output. It checks my Trello board. so I still use Trello to coordinate with my team. It says there were no new cards, nothing new to add to my list.

6:55It generates a today file, which is what we're looking at here in Obsidian. This is, it's gone through all of my tasks that are just markdown files and told me what's due today. We're late in the day, so I've done a lot of my to-do list. I am like every other human. I have a long list of overdue tasks that I have not done, and they always end up at the top of my to-do list. And tasks are things that have due dates, right? Like there are things I have to do by a certain time. I also have a whole folder full of ideas, just things that I want to get to someday. And you can see I have four ideas that are currently in progress.

7:28These get added to my to-do list every day. So that when I make it to the end of my list, I can be like, okay, what should I be working on that's more long-term? And then we're going to talk about this, I think next, but I do have this kind of plugin that I created that does research queries for me every day. and then every day on my to-do list I get my research digest to review and save papers that I want to summarize and learn from. And that's it's it's such a simple workflow but what's behind the scenes if I go over here on the left I just have different folders these are literally markdown files we're in obsidian when I have a bugs folder I have an ideas folder I have a tasks folder and And then if we look at a task, a task has some front matter.

8:13So front matter is an obsidian concept. It's just like field type and then value. It's YAML behind the scenes for people familiar with that. And so I have type tasks, a task has a due date, and then there's tags. And every single one of my tasks has this. And so what's happening when I run my today command is Claude is just searching my tasks folder for anything that has a due date of today.

8:37Teresa Torres:And I have to ask, just behind the scenes, is the Trello data being pulled via the Atlassian MCP? Or how is it actually accessing all this data? Is Obsidian stored locally? Like, how does this all stitch together? Yeah, so I actually don't use Trello anymore at all. I'll tell you why I have a Trello MCP server. But I don't, like now when I want to create a task, I don't go create it on my Trello board. I literally, we can demo this. new task. Send, thank you to Claire. Very sweet. I hope that was a blast. And then Claude has like has all the context for how my task management system works because Claude is open in my tasks folder and you can see here it's creating a file in my tasks.

9:27It set the due date to the day. It hasn't added tags which is kind of a problem. We'll see if it figures it out. Oh, it's being very smart. So because it added something to my today list, it knows it needs to update my today, this file that we're looking at. I actually don't want it to do it this way because it's going to remove all my checklists, and I like feeling like I did my stuff. I'm going to just tell it to just manually add it.

9:53Teresa Torres:So that's the script that it just tried to run, is kind of telling you the behind the scenes of how this today slash command works. There is a Python script behind this that does that, that does that like search all the tasks for anything that is due today, search for anything that's past due. You can see here that like now it just shows up on my to-do list. This sounds so silly, but I didn't have to open a web browser. I didn't have to click through 14 different buttons in a GUI that is constantly changing. I didn't have to click on a date picker and then click a label, and then move it to the right list.

10:30Like I literally just typed like off the cuff notes to Claude. And because I work in Claude all day, every day, this task window is always open. And then I usually have a second session open for whatever project I'm working on. And so I can always just bounce over and be like, hey, new task or hey, new idea. And it's just, it's the speed of it is what I really love about it. So I don't have to think about anything.

10:55Teresa Torres:And then why put Obsidian in the loop? It's something you already had. It has a lot of context. It's structured the way you want it. You know, these could be just raw Markdown files, and you could just X them off the way they're shown above. What do you think that extra layer is for you? I was not an Obsidian user before this. And I'll say I wasn't even comfortable with Markdown at the beginning. Like, let's go back six, eight months. Like, I was not a comfortable Markdown user. There's a few things I like. I like the really tactile, like it's silly, but I like checking the box. I know I was going to ask.

11:29Yeah, I know I can put an X in a box and Markdown, it's not quite the same. Really what I like is the file browser on the left. If you'll notice, my vault is not set at tasks, it's set higher than that. I have, and we'll talk about my LLM context, but I have my LLM context, all my notes across everything, some podcast files that I use to work with my podcast. This is the research stuff we're going to get into, all my tasks, some skills that I've been trying to experiment with, my writing. And so I kind of think about Obsidian as my file browser. And because it's all in Markdown, it makes everything I do super accessible to Claude.

12:09And then I can do things like I can say, hey, Claude, what's my sales pipeline right now? And because Claude is tagging my tasks, it literally can generate a list of all my sales tasks and where they're at on the fly. So like for most task management, you're limited to what views they create or you can use tags. But who manually tags things? I'm optimistic I'll do that, but I never do it. Whereas in this system, Claude does all the tagging. Anytime it generates a task, it'll think about what tags to add. And then in my Claude MD for this project, not for my global one, for this project, we keep a taxonomy of what tags we're using and we kind of manage that.

12:47When I see things I don't like, I update that Claude MD so that like I'm co-creating it with Claude, but Claude's doing all the heavy lifting.

12:55Teresa Torres:So I want to recap this before we go to the next workflow, which is you've created a slash command in Cloud Code to look at your tasks and assemble, basically assemble your tasks from today. You have a structured task document format in Obsidian that every task goes into with like a title, a due date, some tags that automatically get populated and some context. And then you have a couple like known commands you can use in Claude that allow you to add, remove, update, whatever those tasks on the fly. And this just gives you the personalized experience you want for your to-do list connected across all your sources.

13:38Teresa Torres:And then in case it slipped by people, I do want to call out. You noted that Claude can have sort of like project level instructions and global level instructions. And I think this is something that people don't take enough advantage of is context scoping their quad MD files to the right area so that you could have one for your task management list that's really focused. You have a global one for all your properties, et cetera, et cetera. So I think I have your flow. This has given me a lot of inspiration because I just forget a lot of things. There's a lot going on. Okay, I'm going to show you like here's the real value.

14:15like let's say I'm doing this task. This is a too simple of a task. Let's do I'm working on launching a course, right? And if as I get onto this, like let's say I'm like right before this, I was like half done updating the sales page. And then let's say I find a bug in my course platform and I need to document this bug. I take all my notes literally while I'm doing the task and it's all embedded. And again, it's all text. So if later, like tomorrow, I come back and be like, where in the world did I log that bug? Because I did it lazily in my notes and I didn't actually create a bug. I can be like, Claude, help me find this thing that I don't know where it's at.

14:55And like, I don't know about you. I don't know if you've used Trello, but I think any task management tool that I could say this about, the search is not that good. And it's not that good at searching all the context in the task. And that's what I really love from this is that like, I can't figure it out. but Claude will try every permutation of searches till it finds it. Even if I'm remembering the words wrong, I'll be like, hey, I have a thing called new blog post tomorrow. And it'll be like, I can't find anything called new blog post tomorrow, but I have this thing that says article Wednesday.

15:25Is that what you're looking for? And I'll be like, whoa, Claude, that is what I'm looking for. Yeah.

15:29Teresa Torres:I don't think we say it enough that these are really great local search engines for content. I mean, we use it so much in code all the time. I'm like, hey, can you remind me how XYZ worked? Or I think I shipped this feature. Can you remind me exactly how it was implemented or who did it? But you can apply that same framework, that same like search framework to kind of any text-based tool. And these tools are really good at grabbing that context. Well, speaking of finding useful context, you have a second workflow around research I would love for you to walk us through. So how do you assemble all this research that helps you do your job?

16:06Okay, so I aspire to be an academic, which is weird, but I do. And I really want to keep up on academic research on a lot of topics. In fact, we can go over here and look at my topics. So like I do a lot about, I'm really interested in this research around like synthetic users and should we be letting AI do interview synthesis for us? I'm interested in team collaboration, creativity, discovery skills, whatever, a lot education because I teach, personas because it's a super hot topic. And I really want to know, like, what are we learning from academic research? I happen to have access to a university library, which is great, but I never have the discipline to like go search for things.

16:46There's never a moment in my day where I'm like, oh, I'm bored. I should go do this. But I wish that I did. Right. And so what I did, and this is also one of the nice things about using Claude as my task manager, is I can integrate it right into my task manager. So I'm going to start by showing you the output of this, and then I'll talk about how I built it. So every day on my to-do list, I get a little research digest. It's giving me the search results from a daily archive search. So archive is a preprint server. It's where most papers now, thanks to COVID and post-COVID, get published before they're published for real.

17:20What's nice is they're free and they're fast. They're real time. What's not nice is it's before they're edited. Edited, so you have to be your own filter. It does a search and then I get a markdown file with all the results. So this is literally today's file. I have not gone through it yet. But then when I go through it, if I open a PDF and I download it, I save it to these topic folders. And in each of these topic folders, there's a source directory and a notes directory. So my PDF goes in sources and this is going to matter in a second. And then what happens the next day after I've saved a PDF is on this Research Today Digest, I get summaries of every paper I saved the day before.

18:06And I get really detailed summaries of like not kind of the half-baked, here's a paragraph of what the paper is about. But I wrote this skill to like very, to focus on like the methods of the paper and the effect size. Things that like are going to, because I have to be the editor. There's no editor for these papers yet. things that can help me decide, is this worth reading? Does it look like it had a big enough effect size? Did it look like it was a good study? And I have a funny story about this. The day I built this, I was reviewing my daily digest and I saw this paper on purchase intent. And I read this and I had it summarized and I read the summary.

18:47And because it was like in this nice summary format, I realized this flaw. I was like, oh, they use this purchase intent survey that's not very reliable. Like it's not an accurate measure of purchase intent. And the next day on LinkedIn, I saw Ethan Mollick shared the paper. And I was like, oh, this is kind of a crummy paper, Ethan. And I reshared it. And I basically said, here's why we don't have to care about this paper. And I outlined like a very critical review of the study. And the only reason why I could do that is because I had this system and I'd already looked at the paper that had just come out.

19:20I had already like analyzed it and critiqued it. And like, is there something we can learn from this? And then I wrote a really detailed LinkedIn post about it. And it's honestly one of my most best performing posts on LinkedIn ever.

19:33Teresa Torres:Well, there you go. And what I have to ask is how does this get triggered? Is this automatically, is this triggered off that today command? How does that work? So I did integrate it into my today command. But the way it works, I built this as a plugin. It is available as a public repo. I will say it's still being tested. It has one user. My husband is going to be the second user. And if you want to be the third user, we can make it available. It is a public repo, but use it your own caution. It's still in development. What's funny about this is the only part of this that really requires AI is the paper summaries, but the part, I would not have been able to build this without AI.

20:19So I basically just explained to Claude, like, here's what I want. I want to run a daily search. I want to digest on my to-do list. Like, how are we going to make this happen? And what's happening under the hood is I have two Python scripts. One of them every morning searches archive. And then every Sunday it searches Google Scholar. And it's keeping track of what papers we've already seen, what papers are new. and it's searching based on a config file of my personally defined keywords and then every night I have a second script and these are cron jobs they just run on my computer like on a schedule and then at night it's that second script is looking through my source directories in my research directory for any new pdfs and it's creating a to-do list for my today command um that to take all the papers in that list trigger clod code agents to generate the summaries and then the summaries get added to this research today file and do you still have to download those pdfs manually i am downloading those pdfs manually and i i could like there is enough information in the um the search results that i probably could download them automatically but i don't it's even my hand selecting what papers I want to summarize it's like already a fire hose so I want a filter like I don't if we look at my digest like I don't need to read it I don't need to read all of these papers like I there's some of them that are going to pop out is like oh that's really relevant to what I do I'm going to grab that pdf so I spend like five to ten minutes a day just looking at this and downloading papers and then I forget about it And then the very next day I get those summaries.

22:00Teresa Torres:That's awesome. And are there any other, you know, you've spoken about sort of archives and these academic sources. Have you thought about creating this for other sources of market information that are maybe useful? Yeah. So I wrote a blog post, like I wrote a blog post called Claude Code. What is it, how it's different and why non-technical people should use it? Yep. And in that blog post, I gave this scenario. I was trying to go from like total beginner to magical moment. And so the magical moment I created was in that one blog post. You learn about the terminal, you learn about Claude Code.

22:37And by the end, Claude Code has generated a very detailed competitive analysis for whatever competitors you tell it. With like a detailed price comparison table, a detailed feature comparison table. Because I think like this is the type of stuff Claude is really good at. it can go query things it can aggregate things it can create reports and so i've been starting to think about like what i would love is this same research report for like linkedin posts that are relevant to my because like i want to go be part of the conversation and comment on things but when i log into linkedin i kind of want to stab my eyes out and so like i need a filter right um LinkedIn's API makes that really hard.

23:22Teresa Torres:So I know I was going to say this is a call for a LinkedIn MCP here so we can just access LinkedIn through the dark mode terminal. We'll have to figure out how to like push their ads through MCP before they do that. But I do think there are a lot of applications for this that like people that are interested in the academic research side. I mean, Claude, I'm using Claude to Google for me. I don't really go to Google anymore. This episode is brought to you by Graphite, the AI-powered code review platform helping engineering teams ship higher quality software faster. As developers adopt AI tools, code generation is accelerating, but code review hasn't caught up.

24:03Teresa Torres:PRs are getting larger, noisier, and teams are spending more time blocked on review than building. Graphite fixes this. Graphite brings all your code review essentials into one streamlined workflow. Stacked diffs, a cleaner, more intuitive PR page, AI-powered reviews, and an automated merge queue, all designed to help you move through review cycles faster. Thousands of developers rely on Graphite to move through review faster, so you can focus on building, not waiting. Check it out at graphitedev.link slash howiai to get started. it. That's graphite dev.link slash how I AI. You've shown two things, which is your to do list is so overwhelming, you need a way to filter and aggregate and work through it.