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

26:11And 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 people tend to, people tend to rise to the occasion. And that connects very directly to your first piece of advice is not rely on the meeting cadence to determine your action cadence. 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. Yeah, I just think there's this anti -pattern app will make the decision in the next meeting or a follow -up on this in the next meeting.

26:47That 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 want to put us on real timelines. When can we make the decision? How much information we need? And that doesn't mean that every decision is made now today tomorrow. But it does mean we don't snap to artificial canenses to make our, our, our, our product move forward. Awesome. Let's talk about quality. What are some lessons there? 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.

27:27And 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, why are your leadership principles? If your leadership principle is bring the clock speed up, one iteration, be explicit that 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, takes in cross -functional stakeholder feedback.

28:11Like those are just not tractable specific things. And so I think, you know, put on, you know, PMs, put on your product definition or okay, or 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, their meaning is bar or measurably no, they're not meaning that bar. And so I think that's very important. The second thing I think is you have to normalize feedback and, you know, Brunei Brown, hella Texan, lover, the clear is kind. I think conflict avoidant, feedback avoidant cultures, degrade the talent bar.

28:56They 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, as I say, take the temperature out of the room when it comes to opening -handed 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.

29:28But I think feedback is quite important. And I think the third thing is, you know, unfortunately, when you're working to build a high talent bar and high talent density, then when folks aren't a fit and it's not working, moving against that quickly is part of the job. And 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, effective, performant way that makes everybody happier, including people that probably weren't a great fit for the org of the role at the time. Is there an example of you being surprisingly candid to someone or giving feedback, hard feedback to someone about quality, something that's just like, oh, wow, that's what I should be doing.

30:16There were two leaders in my organization. I won't say that they were having misalignments and priorities, strategy, they could not communicate, they were having conflicted from the team. And, you know, the managers that had managed them, were taking this very soft pedal approach of you need to work on your crossbow functional stakeholder, and like, here am I expecting to be all this kind of performance management stuff that happened. And I think that's a great example of how we're going to be able to do that. I called both of them individually and I said, the way you are operating is not meeting our leadership expectations.

31:02If you do not change, you cannot be part of this organization anymore. I believe you can operate differently. I do, and I did. I believe these are very, very talented people who could operate. I believe you can operate differently, but it's your responsibility to do so, and I need to see change starting tomorrow. I wanted them to succeed. And in fact, they did. It, snapped in, they got it. And one of the, you know, turned into one of the most influential, effective managers in our team, or the course, probably the next six to nine months. And I think just clearly saying, you are not meeting expectations.

31:41You 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 most instances. It's an amazing example. Clearest kind, as you said, it reminds me of Kim Scott, who's on the podcast. Share this story about Bob. I don't know if you remember that story at all. Just this guy, their company, who was just doing a bad job and everyone knew he was doing a bad job, but then they had to fire him. And then he's just, when they're firing, he's just like, why didn't you tell me?

32:13Anyone, anyone tell me that I was doing nobody thought I was doing a great job. Yeah. Yeah. And I honestly think saying you are not doing a good job is much kinder 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. Okay. Let's go in a different direction. Let's talk about being a woman in tech. Oh, yeah. 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.

32:48You've had a lot of experiences. Probably a lot of stories you haven't shared in other places. So I just want to give you a chance to share what you've been through, what you've seen and any advice you may have. Yeah, and I'm happy to talk about this. I know a lot of people don't want to be like defying or consistently asked about being a woman or a mom and a sea level leadership role. Like, let's not have women in tech panels anymore. But I've been reflecting a bit on this lately because I just came from a few years in healthcare, which from my experience, a lot more women in leadership roles.

33:16I was a little spoiled. Even in our technology organization. And now I'm back in startups in tech where the ratios are completely opposite, especially in roles like engineering, which is a team that I run. Look, this is just it's math. I think Karta said that 13 something percent of founders last year were women. It's declining year over year. FEMA led founded teams, Rayleigh's 2 % of venture capital. Women hold 30 % of senior leadership or our roles. Women are 30 % of software engineering teams. Like, this is just math. We're just facts. We're not in the room in the 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.

34:05And it's still not easy even even at my level. And when I want to be clear about because I'm, you know, gets talked about a lot in informs like this is this is not about imposter syndrome. Like how how could how could I how could I have any right to imposter syndrome? I prove of myself I've been a founder. I 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 red companies. I'm on boards. I get to be on this podcast. I'm a TikTok influencer. Like it says not about feeling like an imposter. It's really about like it is hard and it is different.

34:42And 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 she did associate it 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 in naturally. I grew up in teeny tiny startups in the early arts. Like I saw some nonsense. You know, I had VCs tell me joke. When I was like these things happened. And yet like here I am. And it's and it's fine.

35:23And I'm not from people also don't understand that stuff still happens. You know, I don't need to litigate who it happens with where it happens. It still happens. I've 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? What is external? Like what has happened to me or happens around me?

36:03What 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 empowered space. I know, you know, my value and I have no time for imposter syndrome. It's not a constructive thing for me.

36:41But 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 recommendation and what I'd love to say to the industry generally to women in particular is like curiosity and empowerment have been my path to joy. And this sometimes complicated industry. And I you know, I think there's a lot better we can do, but there's there's a little bit ways to go. There's 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.

37:21I've been trying to wrap my head around this one, which is I can sisterly get asked if I'm technical enough or if I'm not not even technical enough, let's put enough aside if I'm technical. And it's fascinating to me because it's a technical foe co -founder of my startup. I wrote code for the first 12th, I first 12 months solo. It was the kind of like led the engineering team there. My code is still in production in very, very large environments. I have run multi -hundred people engineering teams for many years. And I spend my Saturdays and Sundays shipping code like 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 product person.

38:11And 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, is 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 had some proven success, I know it's happening to other people. And I'm hoping that I can do something from my position to turn that a little bit.

38:49And this connects to what you shared, the advice you had of just like try to get curious about why it's happening, 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 why is this happening again? One, 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 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 cultural. It's what you see and what you don't see.

39:26Not just in the workplace. It's what you see and don't see in media. It's in my reading my seven -year -old and my four -year -old books of my grandma's a software engineer. You know, books are called the Montess, 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 in 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.

39:59So the reason I'm curious about it is because 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 think we're missing a lot of innovation and a lot of economic growth by not having incredible technical, capable women start companies in lead organizations. And so I think we're all missing out for that. And I'd love to see more of it. And is there an answer to how do we do this better? Anything you think, how you've seen work to help get us past this? I think normalize seeing it. So thanks for bringing me on this podcast, but I do think normalize seeing it is one of the simplest ways.

40:45You know, if you close your eyes and imagine a software engineer, my dream is like you imagine a diverse set of folks. You don't imagine a very specific art type. 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 industry can imagine different types of leaders and different types of roles. And so, you know, I just want to see it more. I want to invest more and raise the voices of female founders.

41:23I want to call out their 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 is and is not a technology leader who is and is not technical. Awesome. I love that advice. It's something I try really hard to do with this podcast. Yeah. 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.

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42:47This is like the universe's bendable to your will and lean into your power, which is I had been running experiment engine, which was a platform for enterprises to run high -scale experimentation programs. Not necessarily the underlying A -B testing technology, but all the stuff around hypothesis gathering, insights, aggregation, operations, keeping things on track. I really know, as you do, that high -scale experimentation programs can be very impactful to businesses. That being said, it was like a niche inside an industry as opposed to a large -tam problem. I think we just fundamentally hit a team ceiling here.

43:28We had a great product for a great market that was very narrow. Three years, four years into running the company. I knew that to be true. I knew that we would be better served by being part of a larger organization. One of those organizations could be a large testing company. I remember that was like noodling on my mind, but we were also really trying to sell to enterprises. I heard that Microsoft, who was one of our biggest customers, was doing an experimentation day with optimizely. I knew optimizely was a natural survivor. I knew I had to get into that room. I called Microsoft and I said, hey, friend of Microsoft, I could be up in Seattle seeing our other customer, very large Seattle company.

44:18This week, week of experimentation day, could we stop by? They were like, oh yeah, sure. Then I went to other big Seattle companies and said, hey, other big Seattle company. I would be up visiting Microsoft at their experimentation day. I got these two meetings to manifest against each other. Then I walked into that experimentation day and I balled the CFO of optimizely and I sat in front of him and started pulling up the product and coding at the same time. I was like, I'm going to sit in front of him and I'm going to do this. I'm going to 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.

45:01But I will say very quickly after that, we became very close partners and ultimately they acquired me. I give this advice to founders because one of the things that it founders in 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 come hell or high water, figure out a way to get there. This was a very fun example of working my way into the right room, setting myself up for the success that I wanted having the backing, the good job, the great product, the outcomes to earn it, but you also have to get yourself in the room.

45:38How many months pregnant were you? I was extremely pregnant. Ticking time bomb of a belly is a really good negotiation tactic. I think I remember we were negotiating the final term sheet. I was 34 weeks pregnant, something like that and they said, can you fly out to San Francisco? It was an awesome time. I said literally, you can fly me out today and back tomorrow and then I'm not allowed on planes. It was very fun. It was fun. What a happy acquisition. I can talk all day about how that was great, great experience. I love it's another example of the phrase you've been coming back to, bending. I don't know if it's bending the world to your will.

46:16You're the first towards your will. The universe, even bigger, I love it. It feels like a recurring theme here is to take agency and control where your career and life is going. The such a good example of just finding a way into this room that would be very hard for someone to get into. You've touched on the CTPO role that I haven't heard much about and I know that this is a big topic for you and I feel like there might be a trend happening here of combining engineering and product. You can just talk about this role and why you think it might be emerging. Yeah, I get asked about it a lot because it's not so rare but it's not super common either and I think it could potentially be right to be rising.

47:00I believe that the CTPO, and I'm using CPTO for short code of running product and engineering design functionally together, it's very different. I've done both. It's very different than a pure product or a VP product role. First, I talked a little bit about how I got into this role. I do think you have to be technical to do a role like this. I think a lot of people look at my professional background and think that I use my broad leadership skills in the leverage of a great SVP 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.

47:46I spent 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 end team is operating a way that drives the velocity. I still think you can do that job if you don't understand how software gets built on a technical level. I'm the kind of person that when we're doing a product review, I have the PRD up and GitHub up and comparing both because I think both sides matter. I think the other thing that's different about this role is it's quite operational. You really have to know about operations and organization design.

48:20Endg teams are by nature much larger than product organizations. You just think about the classic ratios. There are more people in engineering than there are in product. The talent challenges are significantly different in engineering, whether it's the high volume of recruiting, culture challenges are different. You have to think about org design. You have to have a different level of mindset around organization design and operations when you're in a CPT role. You're in page or duty. You're getting paced at one in the morning if the service, if there's a set of zero and it goes down, that is not what it's like to be a product leader.

49:00You've got to know what you're getting into and you have to be technical. I think I would be remiss to say about this role is the P and the T get a lot of airtime, product and engineering get a lot of airtime design data. These are such functional, very important organizations and why these roles get. That's what the role is and how you could add it or whether it would be a fit for your skills. Question of why have this role? I think there's two reasons. There's the obvious strategic reason of like, they're all the same thing. They're all building capital P product. They're all builders. They're the same types of folks.

49:43They're all builders. Bringing them under one house allows you to optimize for the whole as opposed to optimize for the function. If you can find a leader that is effective at that, I think you can get a lot of value out of it. 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 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 lot there. I think it's those two things.

50:23These are one team. There should be no debates over what's best for product or what's best for engineering, what's best for design and should be. What is best for the organization at whole? What do our customers need? What do our businesses need? Then it's the accountability candidly of this quite meaningful investment against business objectives and having a single, singularly responsible individual to care for that investment. Sounds wonderful. Having one person to deal with across all these functions. Isn't it? I'll just say I've done both. I've been a CEO next to an SDP Venge. I've run both together.

51:00A founders can play this role. Again, this is why I have to optimize around talent in your organization. If your CEO can ask the skills bandwidth, etc. to do this, they can do this. You can keep the organization separate. They can hold that. If they have a different area of expertise, if they have never done that before, if it's just not working operationally, they have broader areas of focus, then bring it together under someone. 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. Yeah. Along the same lines designing an organ around the person.

51:37I imagine there's not many very engineering background experience people that 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 the store because it feels really rare. You know, start a company, and then you have to do it in some ways. I mean, I think this is, you know, I've worked for both and they 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 going to bring your founder mindset. And so I think as a founder, especially early stage, you do all this.

52:14You 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 in 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 down the line. So I do think early stage startup experience is one of those, one of the 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 am a product manager.

52:56And so I 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, we have a leadership principle inside RT and it's like, there are no lanes. So like, there are, like, our lanes are dotted. They're not solid. And that you can shift over and pencil out of design and engineer can write a spet 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 going to breed the type of leaders that could do this, this type of role.

53:29Awesome. Reminds me of GitLab. I just interviewed their head of product or CPO and they have a core value of short toes. Don't worry about stepping in people's toes. Have short toes. Don't worry about people getting into your stuff. It's all good. Okay, you mentioned AI, amazing segue to my next topic that I want to spend some time on. You built a tool called chat PRD. My guess is it's the single most popular AI PM specific tool out there other than like some big companies tool. I don't know, Sprayger, Big Mersh. I'm like that. Okay, so first of all, just what is chat PRD? And then why did you, why did you build it?

54:06Yeah, so chat PRD comes out of, again, pace setting. And I'll actually tell you the real genesis of chat PRD, which is at previous company, we had a quite technical 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. We needed to get it done. 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, I'll 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 chat GPT and a prompt to like come up with a very serviceable PRD spec for this very technical product.

54:54And I took that prompt and that long running chat GPT thread and crafted the clear version of a product leader or product person that could with really solid consistently consistency, output products facts, give good feedback, build up plans, build out tracking 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 running PRDs with chat PRD or chat GPT, I created as a GPT and just gave it to my team. I was like, here, you can use this if you want it.

55:40And 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 fun coding again. And so I thought, this is easy. We're just going to stand up a stand alone app. And wrap, come on, wrap some of these capabilities and just publish it and put a fairly reasonable price tag on it to what happens. And now I have thousands of people using chat PRD every day. People are creating dozens of specs and PRDs every month. It's everything from I'm an engineer on a team with two few PMs.

56:22And I get blocked. So I'm going to 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 stand alone app. So it is it is my personal product co -pilot that I've released for the world. Okay. So first of all, working people check this out as a chat PRD .com. That AI. That AI. Yeah, chat PRD. AI. It's also I'm excited about that. The country that has that AI is just making so much of bank rate.

57:01And that's all these domains. Okay. Then in terms of the stack, just to be clear, so it started as a chat GPT from custom prompt, you kind of evolved. Then it became a GPT, a customer GPT. And now it's your own app that is using the open AI APIs behind it. It is. Yeah. It's using the assistance APIs. And what's different about the stand alone app versus the GPT is every person that uses the stand alone 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, you're not getting that customization.

57:36When you use the stand alone 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 actual doc for you. And then working on some additional tools and integrations in the future. 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. Yeah, about 60 % of people use it to put in an idea and get a PRD out. So just like get the specs of, what are my objectives and user goals? What are user stories?

58:14What 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 product? Which I feel like is the 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 chat. If you do something different or want something different for a company. So about 60 % of people are using it for that. 30 % of people have to say are using it to put in a spec or a PRD or a strategy dog or a roadmap and improve it.

58:52And 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. Amazing. Okay. So I wrote a post recently of how sharing a bunch of examples of how people are using different GBT specifically at work. And I think it spurred a lot of people to experiment with this stuff. If there's one tip that you could share for someone that's trying to build a GBT or their own custom app using open API, API is any advice. Propd matters. Like, you know, we went through this this whole cycle of like, prompt engineering is a thing.

59:29It's not really a thing. Find tools like prompt really does matter and like a good like a good PM. I do competitive analysis. I use the same input and look at different. I look at like GBT or chat GBT. I look at the GBT store version. I look at other PM tools that do this and I look at my I think mine is actually better. And then, you know, I'm getting into a mode now where I may do some model experimentation and tuning behind the scenes. So it might not be open AI and maybe 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.

1:00:08I think the other thing is there is no solution right now for monetization. You know, knock on wood, open AI will figure it out. If I had more time, maybe I would create a platform out of what I've created for chat GBT to let other people sort of monetize their GBT's 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 it from here to there. And are you making like real money with this thing as the idea that this becomes the thing you do someday maybe long term? So my original goal and I like said this out on X some original goals.

1:00:42I just want to buy like a nice glass of wine a week. That was my goal. I got by 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. I have a goal around my kids education expenses. I would love for for this to cover a little bit. So I have an ambitious but not undacious goal for for chat. Chat purity. The other goal that I have, which is let's put monetization aside is this is my joy space like zone of genius joy space and my goal with chat purity is it has to be 100 % fun for me like this is my hobby.

1:01:30So I'm not doing anything that makes it not fun. It is a pure bliss space for me. I get to code off the weekends. I get to do customer support at night and I get to build things that I would use and to learn new technologies. I want to keep it in that space because it provides a lot of joy for me. So like put money aside. I just want it to be love that. Okay. So some people listening to this especially PM is maybe like Claire. What the hell are you doing? Replay your you get to replace product managers in the year or two. This connects to something I'm just generally been thinking about and this come up a bunch is just over time which skills and 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 which maybe are less important.

1:02:22So I guess just broadly do you have a sense of just here skills that are going to continue to be incredibly important and AI will not take these skills and jobs off your plate versus okay these are going to be the less important AI will do these. At the highest level I tend to be very short term pessimistic although I'll I'll for that 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 afloat like wealthier happier healthier like I am a big believer in technology and I am optimistic about its impact on the human race.

1:03:01There 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 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 in part of building chat parity 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 going to eliminate PMs next year?

1:03:43Probably not. Are the ratios between PMs and other teams going to shift over time? Yes are the skills required going to shift? Yes could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Probably. So I think there's a lot of change coming and I want to be prepared for it. Now what do I think this replaces and what does replace like it was really I was reflecting on this question and like communication lower KC I feel like is one of the places that's going to be replaced. You know there's and I call it lower KC 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 coordinate who that coordination goes communication goes to and get it out in many modalities of content.

1:04:41And so I'm really thinking about you know the PM as the keeper of cross -functional relationships and communication is really I think potentially going to change. Now but 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 it'd be much much harder to replace. And so I'm thinking about the edges of communication and we're a little changing. That's really interesting. I did a pull on Twitter and LinkedIn asking people of between 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.

1:05:30I have a contrarian perspective and strategy was the least, least voted. I feel like so strategy work is essentially here's everything we know about the world and competitors in the market and our advantages. Here's a plan to win in the market essentially. I feel like that's what AI is incredibly good at. I agree with you. I totally agree with you. I think and again this comes to like synthesis, good decision -making and communication. Like if you can synthesize distill it into a plan and communicate that plan, I found these tools exceptional. Use chat here to give it a try. Now I think it's it's sort of human aspect though of boldness seeing the future in a way that a thing trained on priors cannot.

1:06:22Those things I still think 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 chat parity. I'm not going to come up with the most genius way to do data export for snowflake for some like that is a solid area that we should just scaffold up. I should customize it to what we do and then we should shift it. That is not a place where my magic skills as a human are going to impact. But I don't think a lot of PMC at that way. I think there's this real identity shift that's going to happen where PMs think that their value is coming from their ideas that they manifest into the world and how they individually manifest them.

1:07:11I think we're going to shift to like are you are you building the right stuff are you building it quickly and is it delivering no matter what the tool JN is? Yeah, I think you're pointed by getting buy -in and getting everyone aligned. 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. They all just get a lot of work and we're in now. Let's first guys this a little higher. Yeah. I actually made this list. I feel like this can be the entire podcast. But I made it like our quick list of here's the jobs of a PM. And it's interesting and this is just I don't know if this is a really question but it's just interesting to think about which of these will some chat PRD maybe do in the future.

1:07:49So what is a job 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 unlocking people, getting buy -in from upon high, getting budget, resources for your team, giving feedback on product 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 the word. I think a lot of them AI can do. And so the question is which of them do you want to hand the keys to? An AI tool and which of them are going to be much more valuable as a tool that an individual or a team's intellect can use to do a better faster, a home -higher impact job.

1:08:36And 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 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 skill set daft by a purpose -built toolkit and make it three X better, four X better, 10 X better.

1:09:14I think that's the more, the more interesting question. 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 the spaceship that can take us to Mars now. Yeah. We don't need to talk about that. I mean, you know, we get the kids up and like streaming on YouTube. Oh, that's awesome. I think it's just, I, it's magic. Like we live in this magic time. I think it's so fascinating. But I agree, we're getting, we're getting spoiled by innovation. You said that there's this ratio that might shift with product managers engineers.

1:09:44I'm curious which ratio because engineers are also getting more efficient. And so it's interesting if the ratios will be consistent as engineers become more efficient, cams get more efficient. I wonder if whole roles get eliminated and replaced and then ratios aren't even the right way to think about about things. You know, there's the ratio of this PM role to this many, I am 1 p .m. to 7 to 10 engineers or 1 a .m. to set like there's those ratios. I also think there's going to be this interesting shift of as a manager as a leader, how you allocate budget against tools and people. I also think is going to shift.

1:10:22And one of the, and 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. And it's just this very interesting, you know, and in my mind, you know, people think that scare ants going to reduce jobs. Yes, and I do think there's also potentially other jobs that open up that can become very interesting. And so I don't know how it's going to pencil out. I really don't. What I do know is things are going to change. And I, as a leader and a person that cares for people's long -term careers, what to be much more forward thinking, then close my eyes to what the possible maybe dramatic changes are in our industry.

1:11:05So I'm thinking about it. I'm experimenting with things and I'm hoping that, you know, in our team and launch darkly, we're leading from the front here as opposed to on our back foot. I'm thinking many people listening are like, okay, I need to get on top of this. I need to stay ahead. I want to follow Claire's lead. Is your advice simply create GPs, play with chat GPs? Is there anything else there to help people? 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 built chat GPs is not just a stress test how is or chat purity is not just a stress test how these sorts of things are going to change the product function.

1:11:48It's literally like, these are 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, would mobile happen? If you're a PM that jumped on mobile, you had the pick of a 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 purity 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 firstly built on before.

1:12:37And so for someone that's a not super engineering oriented, I guess how do you reckon people in your team explore this sort of thing? Is it? Yeah, I do think studying products that are out there is quite interesting. You is this idea of doing outside in product here now. 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.

1:13:20So that's one thing I think you can do too. 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 write code, you can certainly stitch together things and try some no code tools. So that's another way to do it. The other thing is like find where it's fun. I think you know how fun is mid journey, 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 mechanism for learning. It doesn't always have to be commercially driven or it does 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.

1:14:00Awesome. One last question about chat PRD. So with co -pilot, there's only stats. It's making engineers 50 % more efficient, whatever percentage. You have any sense of efficiency gains so far with chat PRD. So I have qualitative feedback from product managers who've used chat tube chat PRD 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 going to have to hire another PM now. So like, you know, there's like, but the people, like, there's about the individual aspect and the hours aspect, which is it's helping individual fans get higher leverage or cost, you know, a broad engineer in your building team and that it's helping them spend their time more effectively.

1:14:53Many people don't want to hear this, that they don't need to hire PM. There's many people looking for jobs right now. 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 costs 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. They're 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.

1:15:41So 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, our teams and have these jobs and you know, startups can't afford it and they still have great things to do in the world. Great answer. To start to wrap up our conversation, I have these two segments, failure, corner and contrarian corner. And we can pick which corner you want to 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?

1:16:24I'll take contrarian corner. Let's go over there. Yeah, I need some sound effects for these corners. Do share? I'm I'm sharing this because you just released your podcast with Marty again. And I have 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 square 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.

1:17:17I 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. 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 podcast and I think you all were talking about you said, you know, you know, SAP is like this and who wants to be SAP like man alive. You're a lot of companies out there that would love to be SAP now with a better product with you know with better experience with more love from the industry maybe.

1:17:54But 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. Amazing. I'm going to not give deeper into this topic because I don't want to be speaking on behalf of Marty's perspective. But I love there's so much debate that came out of that episode. And I love that it trickles to more opinions being shared about ways product can work. So I guess just understand your takeaway here is sales led companies can be awesome. They can build amazing businesses and it can be great to be a pm at a company like that.

1:18:27Yeah. And they can build great products. Great. Claire, is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round? I will say because we've been talking a lot about AI and replacing pms. The you know, I love to sell. I love to help people get jobs. So if there are ways that I can help people find great fit companies, this one of the things that I get a lot of energy out of. So I just want to say that in the world is something that sparks a lot of joy. I get a lot of imbound. You know, can you help me get in here? Can you help me get there?

1:19:00But if there's a tractable way that I can help you get to a connected to a company or a role that you think is great for you, like that's fun for me. And I'm totally open to it. How would people reach out to you to try to get help you get them to do? Yeah. So I am, I'm of course on LinkedIn. I'm on X at ClareVo on one word. And then if you really want to go into the archives, I have a very fabulous TikTok where I'm chief product officer. It's all one word. Amazing. So we'll link to all these in the show notes. Okay. And we'll refresh these two facts at the end of the podcast anyway, because I always ask this.

1:19:35Anyway, before we do that, welcome to our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm so ready. Okay. First question. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? High growth handbook. I love. And I like scaling people. So these are two books that the reason why I recommend them to people is because they have solid playbook answers to like 80, 90 % of kind of everyday leadership scaling people questions. And so they're just like great reference books for what I think like great leadership and so I startups can look like and they solve some of the things that you don't need to solve novel novelly.

1:20:17And then one on the fiction side that I've been recommending is Cersei, which is a retelling of Cersei's stories from her perspective. And I it's like a great read. And everybody I've recommended it to really loves it from Game of Thrones. No, Cersei from the Odyssey. So just fence. She turns men into kids. It's great. My kids are very into Greek mythology. So this is me, maybe that's on my side. Amazing. The first two books are both Stry Press, shout out Stry Press. Yeah, Stry Press. And I have both books in the back there and I mean laptops actually sitting on scaling people. Next question. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

1:20:56I have kids so I don't get to go see movie. I mean movies are like that's an adventure. It's basically a vacation. So I haven't seen I saw poor things which if you like capital W weird capital A are highly recommend poor things. You know the show that I recommend to people into I love mythic quest. You know like everybody references Silicon Valley but mythic quest gets at some of I was in gaming once gets us some of my experiences in the technology organizations got a technical female lead and I think it's quite funny. So I like mythic quest. Do you have a favorite interview question they'd like to ask candidates?

1:21:31I'm it to ask candidates how they would improve our business model. I think so many pms come in with a point of view of like the product and the target market but like don't actually understand the underlying mechanisms of how we make money and what our unit economics are and how that could be improved and the candidates that do come in and have a strong point of view on business model often are pretty successful in my organization. And what do you look for in a good answer that's like oh wow this candidate's great. It's sort of thinking along the chain of value to from how do we identify people in the market?

1:22:03What is our pricing model look like? What could they hypothesize are underlying unit economics? Or cogs are and then where are their points of leverage along that that whole funnel? So it's really do they have a mental model for thinking about a business model? Have they thought it all about how we make money either top line or margin? And then can they identify places where they might improve it? They're actually understanding the business really well great. Give a favor product that you recently discovered that you really like? Okay I'm going to make you laugh because you've gotten all these cars right?

1:22:40I have such expensive cars. Oh you've got to expensive cars. I it's not new I love my minivan. I am a big fan of my minivan as my friend says it's like driving around your living room and when you have two kids you know what I want to do? I just want to drive around my living room like bluey included and so you know no Rivian no or Sadie's bands but I really love my Pacifica. Okay I was going to ask but but the actual car product that I really love I love Waymo you know we're in San Francisco we've got these autonomous vehicles it is top to bottom just a lovely product experience from the app to when it shows up the sound design is great the cars are comfortable the displays in the car great like it is now every time a tourist comes in a friend comes in to visit San Francisco I make them take a round trip ride in a robot car so and then even I've had a customer service experience with the Waymo team where my friend left an iPhone and it was very that in the customer experience was great 24 hour service like top to bottom great great product design great service design I just got into Waymo actually uh in the wait list and so I'm excited to actually try it I was actually treated as press early on to ride in a Waymo with like a person from the company just experience it and then I never got access to it after so now I finally can try it.

1:24:08Enjoy it's so nice it's my preferred mode of travel a future there's we've talked about a lot of ways the world is changing that's another great example two questions to go your favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends your family they find useful in work or in life fast speeds right like every time when debating between do I like noodle this for a thousand years and try to come to the perfect solution or do I make a decision and get executing a direction I have conviction on I always I like consistently see and believe that fast at the end of the game in the end of the day wins so fast speeds right final question you mentioned tiktok you put a bunch of awesome content out on tiktok any advice slash is there a tip you could share with someone that is trying to be successful on tiktok from your experience I've been to glad to make tiktok for a little bit with with new job and winter with sick kids this is my advice and I think you know this consistency drives audience growth which is when I was on tiktok posting every day you would get followers and engagement and the algorithm when you know bless you and when you don't you don't so I think consistency in almost all things wins the other thing that I I think is a really good advice for any quote -unquote creator of whatever scale of whatever ambition is I think thinking about content creation as documentation not creative generation is really helpful so I just like to talk about what I think about it work and I like to an interesting meeting or interesting interaction document why I thought that was interesting or what could be done better and that becomes the basis of a very natural flow of content for me so it's a tactic that's worked really well for me and helps me do do stuff in my free time amazing it might be time to start exploring Instagram also all this tiktok news I know yeah clear before we started this podcast asked you what your goal for this was and it was to be helpful to people I think we've 100 % done that in so many different ways thank you again so much for being here to find questions we already covered these but just to refresh people's memories working people find you online they want to reach out and then how can listeners be useful to you so linkedin um x I'm clear all one word and then on tiktok you know get me back into it give me a follow maybe I'll I'll start posting some of my excellent content but it's cheap product at cheap product officer awesome and then how can people be useful to you I help each other that's that's what I want the most which is I do I do really see it is a tough time in tech right now and there are a lot of people looking for jobs so one I think help each other and then the other thing that I really if I do have a job is typing into an internet box to create products out of nothing really acknowledge the like privilege and joy of that job and try to have some fun because a lot of people want to sit where you're sitting so have fun appreciate what you have enjoy it enjoy each other great and important advice to leave people with clear thank you so much for being here thank you bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast dot com see you in the next episode