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

Claire Vo:People often think that I get hired into later stage companies because I'm supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company and in fact I say I'm hired to remind them they can operate like a startup.

Lenny Rachitsky:Everybody wants this. Everyone's like yes move fast amazing quality what's an example of that for you?

Claire Vo:I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in the clock speed one click faster. If you think something needs to be done this year it needs to be done this half.

Lenny Rachitsky:There may be a trend happening here of combining engineering product.

Claire Vo:I'm using CPTO for short code of running product and engineering design functionally together. There should be no debates over what's best for product or what's best for engineering. What's best for design should be what is best for the organization.

Lenny Rachitsky:You built a tool called Chat PRD. My guess is it's the single most popular AI PM specific tool out there.

Claire Vo:Is it gonna eliminate PMs next year? Probably not. Are the skills required gonna shift? Yes. Could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Probably.

Lenny Rachitsky:Today my guest is Claire Vaux. Claire is a longtime chief product officer at Color, Optimizely and currently chief product officer at LaunchDarkly. She's also been a two time founder, engineer, designer and a marketer. She's also the creator of Chat PRD which I suspect is the most used PM specific AI product out there which she builds on nights and weekends. In our conversation we dig into what PM skills AI will complement and potentially replace in the future, the story behind Chat PRD and Claire's advice for how to stay ahead of the curve on AI within the PM role, the importance of feeling agency over your career and how to bend the arc of the universe to achieve the things that you want to achieve, insights into what it takes to be a successful woman in tech especially as an exec, how she creates a fast pace within larger companies while also keeping the bar very high, the rise of the CPTO role combining product and engineering under one leader plus a ton of career advice both for early career people and senior leaders and so much more. This episode has something for anyone that's in product or interested in the role of product and I am very excited to bring it to you. If you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that I bring you Claire Vaux after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Orb. As a business you care about revenue but as a product team the last thing you wanna do is delay a product launch or a pricing change because your team has to rebuild billing from scratch. Orb is a flexible usage based billing engine that lets you evolve your pricing with ease. The fastest growing product teams at companies like Vercel and Replit trust Orb to power their pricing changes and launches. Use Orb to ship product faster, stop worrying about billing and evolve pricing with ease and control. Check it out at withorb.com/leni and skip the line for a demo or sandbox by using promo code Leni. That's withorb.com/leni. This episode is brought to you by Dovetail, the customer insights hub for product teams. Are you working in a feature factory building filler that nobody wants? Probably because the sad truth is that most SaaS features are rarely or never used costing the industry billions every year. Let's change that. Product managers, Dovetail is holding their first industry conference. It's called Insight Out and they want you to come over one day in San Francisco. The product community is coming together to learn how to better leverage customer insights and build products that people actually love to use. It's on April 11 and you can hear from product leaders from Uber, Twitch, Meta and Netflix as they share their strategies for driving innovation, thriving in uncertainty and balancing customer centered work with business needs. And here's the kicker, it's absolutely free for online tickets. Just go to dovetail.com/leni to register. This is thanks to Dovetail, the best way for product teams to get the most out of customer insights. Check it out at dovetail.com/leni.

Lenny Rachitsky:Claire thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Claire Vo:Oh thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm even more excited. You're someone that to me has always felt inevitable would be on this podcast and that we'd doing an episode together. Do you feel the same way or not? And it's okay if you don't.

Claire Vo:It's a privilege and a pleasure and I'm glad I'm here. You know I've been so impressed with your guests and your content. It's been so exciting to see just the wide range of product leaders and thinkers in this space and if I can be on a list of product leaders and thinkers in this space then I'm doing something good so thanks for having me.

Lenny Rachitsky:It's absolutely my pleasure. I wanna start by talking about career advice okay so I was perusing your LinkedIn and your career path is basically what most PMs probably dream of in their career so just to summarize you went from associate product manager to product manager to senior product manager to director to senior director to VP to SVP to chief product officer and now you've been chief product officer at three different companies and along the way you're a founder, you're a designer, you're an engineer. So here's my question if you had to boil down what you think your secret sauce has been to progressing so far and so quickly throughout your PM career what might that be?

Claire Vo:Yeah so you know when you list it all out you can probably guess underneath it all as like a relentlessly curious impatient eager to build person at their core. So I just like building stuff and I find a lot of fun and I think if you find a career or craft that's fun it's easy to accelerate your growth in that career. So one thing I just love what I do but you know when it comes to career growth and that progression from actually started as a copywriter of all things copywriter all the way up to CPO or CPTO that runs an engineering organization you know it boils down to something really simple which is know what you want out of your career be clear and ask for it and then make it easy for your boss or whoever can support or champion you to get you from here to there. And so I'll take a really specific example from earlier in my career where I'd been in management for design and product management sort of like a senior manager level over product and design at an e-commerce company and worked very closely with growth and marketing we were just two sides of the same coin and worked very closely and the head of marketing left and there was this big to do pretty quickly of like well what are we going do with marketing and do we need to hire somebody and I sat for about a half a day and I thought I think I can help here drew out an org chart put my name on the top walked into my boss's office and said this is one potential solve of your marketing organization question this will bring product and marketing growth together I can be in this position here's how I change the management structure underneath this not just where do you put me but where do you put everybody else and I think this could work for the company and this is how I'd suggest we roll it out and this would be my JD and I got that job and you know I think when people ask me about career advice they wanna hear you know what can I do really like what do you want and how do you make it as easy as possible to make the case to your boss to get you here to there. The other thing that I give people advice about is know what you want out of your current role and know exactly what you want your next role to be and I even know this and I even say this to my boss you know when I was VP of product at Optimizely I said to my boss I want to be a chief product officer here's how I'm going to get us here to there and I want you to partner with me on it. And even coming into this role when I was interviewing at LaunchDarkly you know my boss Dan the CEO of LaunchDarkly asked me what do you want out of this role and I said I want my next role to be a CEO role so I want I want this role to fill in my gaps learn help me elevate my you know my experience to get me to that next step and so I always know what that next role is gonna be and I'm always clear about it. Now I think there's a fine balance here there's one thing to be very clear about your goals it's another to suck the oxygen out of the air about only talking promoted so these are probably point 005% of my interactions with my boss or about my career growth and my path it's very small it's am I clear are we on the same page and am I am I communicating as I'm making progress against those goals. High slip people I think get promoted basically as fast as the org can support I've almost never wished I promoted somebody earlier I have wished I had you know I've seen managers or folks promote a little too early and so as somebody that's managing their own career you have to be a balance of ambitious and assertive and take care of yourself and advocate for yourself and the work needs to speak for itself at the end of the day and that's what's gonna drive for your career growth and so know what you want but do the work and and produce the results and you can have a career like mine.

Lenny Rachitsky:So maybe first to summarize some of the core advice you're sharing is know what you actually want because you're not gonna progress towards this amazing future career if you don't actually know where you're going otherwise you'll kinda be pushed in directions that you're not necessarily interested in going so have a sense of where you wanna go to tell people and ask for it here's here's what I want to be doing in the future help me get there and I love the other point you made of just like don't overfocus on that there's many people that spend a lot of their energy and like I need to get promoted how do I get to the next level I deserve the next level yep and I guess maybe along those lines is there any other advice you could share of just how to avoid being that person that's just like constantly obsessed with promotion any more advice or just like how to find that balance?

Claire Vo:Yeah I mean one you've got to lock to the the norms and the talent norms of your organization you should know how those things work and they can work very casually if you're a very small startup and they can work more formally if you're at a very large company and one understanding how promotions operationally happen inside an organization can help you have those conversations at the right time and the right moment with the right context so that's one thing I advise right we're a slightly larger organization we do promotion cycles we have times during which we promote people and so if you're talking to me four months before a promo cycle maybe it's top of mind maybe it's not can't do I I sometimes functionally cannot promote people inside larger organizations whenever I want so one is I think understanding how did the the talent calendar of of your team especially at a larger organization I think the second thing is really the conversation needs to be about what you being in a different position does for the company and why the company needs it often the conversation is I want to be promoted because I want to be a director of PM because I want to become a manager because I need direct reports instead of saying look you're span of control you have you have nine direct reports you need leverage here I have a lot of credibility with this side of the product organization I think we could be doing more if this position existed and I think I'm good for this position because of what I've proven A B and C that's solving a problem for the company that's not solving a career growth issue for an individual and I think you know people who want to be promoted need to think in that orientation versus the the other because honestly especially now like let's let's let's say poserp like there are not just these wrote every 12 months we're going to give comp increases and merit increases and you get to be promoted we really have to be thoughtful about the structure and size and organization of teams product teams are naturally pretty small so there aren't just management and director and senior director roles to go around and if you want to get into a management for example you have to prove that you're good at organization design so I think really focus on why a role is good for a company or necessary for a company and then why you are the best for that role rather than I wanna get promoted

Lenny Rachitsky:That is such good advice and such important advice that focus on how do you solve problems for your manager and the business not hey here's what I need for my career this sucks my career is stagnating I love that that's and I love so much of your message as empowerment it's not just here there's the place you're in and there's not a lot you can do about it look for opportunities to help your manager help your business here's what I can do to move things further and I think there's an element of timing that you touched on like propose this at the at a time when something could happen like you shared this example of there was a marketing gap

Claire Vo:Yeah yep exactly

Lenny Rachitsky:Is is there another example where you did the sort of thing where you kind of presented here's how I can help the org and that helped another promotion if not that's

Claire Vo:Good I I mean it's it's honestly how I expanded into leading engineering teams in in the technology organization I was at Color and there was a real need to uplevel our engineering organization and I knew exactly I knew exactly what to do I had I had high confidence I had the skills both technical and organizational to scale the engineering organization in a way that was really critical to the business both from an architecture perspective and from a from a team and talent perspective and so that was one where I knew there was a problem to solve I knew that problem was important I knew we had to solve it fast and I was confident I had this I knew I could do it I had confidence that I could help there so I'm still doing it today and at Color I came in as product I very quickly began leading the engineering organization which was fabulous and then actually took on some of our nonclinical operations as well where we had a pretty operational leader we had some high scale challenges to deal with and it it fit my talent set and I knew I could help the company pretty quickly so you know and and this is the other advice I might give particular to PMs PMs such a generalist role it's okay to go a little left and a little right to go up and you know I I took this marketing growth role that was actually my first director role it wasn't only for product it was for marketing and I had to learn marketing and I had to develop skills there but it was a foundation on which I could build a a broader sort of leadership career and so I do think also looking left and right outside of your scope of product can be a really effective way to find growth opportunities

Lenny Rachitsky:I love that advice and it yeah it leads to so many unexpected opportunities one of the I think big questions with PMs and coming back to your original advice of know where you wanna go there's so many directions a PM can go you can eventually become a founder become a GM become a CEO something else and it trying these sorts of things often helps you understand okay here's what I'm actually excited about maybe I wanna into design

Claire Vo:Yeah and one of the other things that I think people don't understand and maybe I experienced this as a founder and I really feel it inside companies is like the universe is bendable to your will and what I mean is in most at least in the stage I operate in and startups and growth stage companies and you know late stage startups organizations are very fluid and I like to organize around talented motivated individuals and so just because we're organized in a particular way now just because these organizations are separate or these are different you know together doesn't mean that's necessarily the way they have to be and so you should think about your career growth in the existing structure of the organization but as an org design thinker it's very important job that I have to do you also have to think of this system as a living breathing you know entity that can shift over time in particular around highly motivated highly talented people

Lenny Rachitsky:And think I along those same lines referencing this advice you've already shared of just thinking from the perspective of what is my manager and folks above what are they struggling with and how can I propose here's a solution that happens to also have me move into a more interesting role

Claire Vo:Yep exactly

Lenny Rachitsky:There's a direction I wasn't planning to go into but I think it's really important and interesting is people like you that are incredibly good and successful end up taking on a lot and that often ends up not being what they want sos exactly any advice on you know like the classic be careful what you're good at advice any advice on just how to not end up with everything

Claire Vo:I really believe operating in your zone of genius I really believe in leaning into strengths and you know if you are in a position in which you're good at things and you've giving a lot of responsibility but you have tremendous growth edges and you're spending more time on the things you need to level up than the things you are exceptional at I think that's not fair for the organization I think that's not fair for you so I truly believe defining and understanding your zone of genius where you are exceptional where no one else can step into the job and do just as good of a job as you can and where you derive tremendous intellectual emotional joy out of the work is what makes it sustainable over time and so I don't actually think it's about the volume or breadth of the work it's about sustainability of the work and you know can you show up every day energized and engaged and excited about what you do and I think being very aware if you are operating the space or or if you're not and this might go back to I think I have never regretted promoting somebody too slowly I have regretted promoting somebody too quickly in that you know high slope individuals in particular areas want to get more responsibility quote unquote want to have more scope and I've experienced managers or directors or even people at my level want to give opportunities that put people in a position where they're not they're they're neither effective nor happy and so I think being self aware of that is really important then I also think as a manager being cognizant of that is really important individually I do do a lot but I do feel like I'm in my zone of genius and I also know that part of staying in my personal zone of genius is having this breadth of responsibility but preserving builder time and what I mean from builder time is like I have to have time to produce real work that is come for me as an individual and that means that calendar management is is quite important time management

Lenny Rachitsky:We're going to talk about some of the things that you built in terms of finding your zone of genius any advice for someone that's trying to figure out what it is that is in that zone of genius know there's like a TED talk of here's how to think about zone of genius specifically

Claire Vo:Yeah yeah I'm not gonna I'm not gonna relay it in in precision but one of the tactics that I've seen out there is basically go through your calendar for the last month or quarter whatever it is write everything down and basically group them into I hated doing this I didn't love doing it but it was fine I love doing this and I'm like I love doing this and if I could spend all my time on this I would be the happiest person in the whole world and like literally categorize your your the way you're spending your time into those buckets and then the the the bottom buckets away just focus on that topic and go how can I be here more and often that is a true guide to where you're really your passion is where your special expertises and where you're going to add a lot of value because you're highly engaged I think the other thing is really asking yourself and this maybe goes back to the career advice perspective really asking yourself what do I do that no one else in this organization can do there are lots of you know there are lots of things that I do that other people in the organization can do but what are the things that I do that are you know you think about a differentiated product that are hard to replicate and and knowing what that is and leaning into that can make you can can drive a lot of exceptional career growth but also just make you quite happy

Lenny Rachitsky:What's an example of that for you

Claire Vo:I I think I'm actually quite good at traversing across across and up and down so what I mean is I I'm fluent across product engineering design data and operations and candidly revenue in a way that vertical or functional leaders maybe are less so so I feel like I have a high level of fluency broadly and can bring conversations between functions together against a business objective pretty easily it's just the way I'm wired I was a founder it's just it's it's second nature and the other thing that I think I can do pretty well that I find very joyous is traverse elevation and so yes I love to be up here and think about strategy and vision but I also like to drop into the details to move things forward and I think that operating you know horizontally and then being able to spend some time in the vertical up and down wherever that vertical up and down happens makes me quite happy and I think I'm pretty good

Lenny Rachitsky:At it amazing we're gonna touch on some of these things you just mentioned actually but real quick you mentioned this idea of essentially an energy audit there's actually a really good guide that I'll point to in the show notes by Matt Machari that walks you through how to do this and we talk about this a bunch on this podcast actually this whole idea of just find things that give you energy do more of that find things that's sappy of energy do less of that easier said than done when you have a job and you have to do stuff that people are paying you to do but it's still really helpful if nothing else to help you point you where you wanna be going in your career long term okay so you mentioned you're a founder and it feels like you're like a founder at heart but you've been working at larger companies for a while now and I hear that you're really good at setting a fast pace within larger companies and maintaining that startup focus while also having a very high bar for quality and product everybody wants this everyone's like yes move fast amazing quality that's what why why would we not want that I'm curious just what you actually put into practice concretely that allow for you to build teams that move really fast and maintain a high bar they're like processes you find helpful values ways of working

Claire Vo:Yeah it's really funny people often think that I get hired into the roles that I get hired into in later stage companies because I'm supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company and in fact I say I'm I'm hired to remind them they can operate like a startup and so I think about it completely differently and there are kind of two two things I think about in terms of pace and and high bar from a pace it's know what your internal pace is and essentially don't let it degrade to the pace of your recurring meetings I often find that pace of organization locks to pace of the calendar and so I am really thoughtful that reoccurring meetings do not drive next steps it's a very tactical thing but when somebody says oh well we'll we'll discuss this or we'll decide this in the next meeting it's no we should discuss this now we should decide this tomorrow the other thing that I think about is setting one click faster pace expectations inside an organization so I I tend to come in and love this hate it it's it's it's what I do which is if I look at an organization that is operating at a lower pace than I would expect I communicate to my leaders that my expectation is they bring in the clock speed one click faster which means if you think something needs to be done this year it needs to be done this half if you think it needs to be done this half it needs to be done this quarter this quarter this month this week today like end of day in this meeting and actually setting an expectation that your natural pace is gonna be slower than your ambition and being explicit about pulling things in I think can change the way expectations are set and honestly change the energy and momentum in organization the third thing on pace is personal SLA I never want to be the bottleneck for the organization this is one of the more challenging things about being in my role is you are often a point of decision making tie breaking next steps approvals socialization and if my personal SLA is slow then the rest of my organization cannot be as as fast as possible so I try to be fairly responsive I try to like say do both very high rate and also very quickly it's really hard sometimes it's not totally possible but it's it's a goal I have

Lenny Rachitsky:I love this clock speed concept of just let's move one iteration faster than we would normally move how do you actually do that is this just like you doing it and then everyone trickles down from the way you're approaching it is this like a principal on a team like this is there like a phrase you use

Claire Vo:Yeah it's it's kind of a phrase I use and something I asked our leadership teams to do so I started at one I'm going to do this and two my expectation is you look for opportunities to do this and the the reason I think this is effective it's it's very tangible and it's very tactical it just is one of those things that a moment when you're about to say a due date you check yourself and you go is this my you know is this right or do I need to pull it in by by by an iteration and 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

Lenny Rachitsky:And that connects very directly to your first piece of advice is not rely on the on the meeting cadence to determine your action cadence I imagine that's a similar situation where you you tell people here's how wanna operate and then you actually work that way and that starts to filter through

Claire Vo:Yeah I I just think there's this anti pattern of we'll make the decision in the next meeting or we'll follow-up on this in the next meeting that is an artificial timeline you know introduced by Google Calendar or whatever calendar you use like it's not a real it's not a real thing and so I wanna put us on real timelines when can we make the decision how much information do we need and that and that doesn't mean that every decision is made now today tomorrow but it does mean we don't snap to artificial cadences to make our our our product move forward

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome let's talk about quality what are some lessons there

Claire Vo: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 and 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 what are your leadership principles if 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 like those are just not tractable specific things and so I think you know put on you know PMs put on your product definition or OKR 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 they're meeting this bar measurably no they're they're not meeting that bar so I think that's very important the the second thing I think is you have to normalize feedback and you know Brene Brown fellow Texan lover clear is kind I think conflict avoidant feedback avoidant cultures degrade the talent bar they 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 the as I say take the temperature out of the room when it comes to open and candid 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 but I think feedback is is 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 it's not working moving against that quickly is part of the job and it's it's a hard part of the job 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 that probably weren't a great fit for the for the org of the role at the time

Lenny Rachitsky: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 that's what I should be doing

Claire Vo:There were two leaders in my organization I won't say which one but I won't say when but two two leaders in the organization partners across product and engineering and they could not get get it together they could not work together they were having miss you know they were having misalignments and priorities strategy they could not communicate they were having conflict in front of the team

Claire Vo:You know the the managers that manage them were taking this very soft pedal approach of you need to work on your cross functional stakeholder and like here am I expecting all this kind of performance management stuff to happen and I called both of them individually and I said the way you are operating is not meeting our leadership expectations if you do not change you cannot be part of this organization anymore I believe you can operate differently I do and I and I did I believe these are very very talented people who are 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 like snapped in they got it and one of the you know turned into one of the most influential effective managers in our team over the course of probably the next six to nine months and I think just clearly saying you are not meeting expectations you 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 in most instances

Lenny Rachitsky:That's an amazing example clear as kind as you said it reminds me of Kim Scott who's on the podcast shared this story about Bob I don't know if you remember that story at all of just this guy at their company who was just doing a bad job everyone knew he was doing a bad job and then they had to fire him and then he's just when they're firing him he's just like why didn't you tell me why didn't anyone tell me that I was doing nobody thought I was doing a great job

Claire Vo:Yeah yeah and I 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

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay let's go in a different direction let's talk about being a woman in tech

Claire Vo:Oh yeah

Lenny Rachitsky: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, you've had a lot of experiences, probably a lot of stories you haven't shared in other places.

Claire Vo:Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky:So just wanna give you a chance to share what you've been through, what you've seen and any advice you may have.

Claire Vo:Yeah and I'm happy to talk about this. I know a lot of people don't wanna be like defined or consistently asked about being a woman or a mom in a C-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 health care which from my experience it's a lot more women in leadership roles. I was a little spoiled even in our technology organization and now I'm back in startups and tech where the ratios are completely opposite especially in roles like engineering which is the team that I run. Look this is just it's math. I think Carta said that 13 something percent of founders last year were women. It's declining year over year. Female led founded teams rarely 2% of venture capital. Women hold 30% of senior leadership or roles. Women are 30% of software engineering teams. This is just math. We're just facts. We're not in the room in 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 like it hasn't been easy and it's still not easy even even at my level. And what I want to be clear about because I'm you know it gets talked about a lot in forms like this is this is not about impostor syndrome like how how could how could how could I have any right to impostor syndrome I've proven myself I've been a founder I've 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 rad companies I'm on boards I get to be on this podcast I'm I'm a TikTok influencer like this is not about feeling like an impostor it's really about like it is hard and it is different and 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 she did associate 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 it naturally. I grew up in teeny tiny startups in the early odds like I saw some nonsense you know had VCs tell me don't get when I was I like these things happened and yet like here I am and it's and it's fine and I'm not complaining. I just think you know I think what people also don't understand is that stuff still happens I 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 what is internal what do I bring into the room that doesn't serve me. And so I try to stay very curious and then 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 and empowered space I know you know my value and I have no time for imposter syndrome it's not a it's not a constructive thing for me but 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 my recommendation and what I'd love to say to the industry generally to women in particular is curiosity and empowerment have been my path to joy in this sometimes complicated industry and I think there's a lot better we can do but there's a little bit ways to go.

Lenny Rachitsky:Is there 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?

Claire Vo:I've been trying to wrap my head around this one which is I consistently get asked if I'm technical enough or if I'm not even technical enough let's put enough aside if I'm technical. And it's fascinating to me because it's a technical co-founder of my startup I wrote code for the first twelve I first twelve months solo I was the kind of like led the engineering team there that code is still in production in very very large environments I have run multi 100 people engineering teams for many years and I spend my Saturdays and Sundays shipping code like I 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 pro you're like you're a product person and I've 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 this 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 impostor 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 you know had some proven success I I know it's happening to other people and I'm hoping that I can do something from from from my position to you know turn that a little bit.

Lenny Rachitsky:And 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 mostly to help you not get upset and frustrated like let me just understand why is this happening again and again?

Claire Vo:One it's 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 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 it's cultural it's what you see and what you don't see not just in the workplace it's what you see and don't see in media it's am I reading my seven year old and my four year old books of my grandma's a software engineer you know books are called the mom test 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 an 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 so 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 I think we're missing a lot of innovation and a lot of economic growth by not having incredible technical capable women start companies and lead organizations and so I I I think we're all missing out for that and I'd love I'd love to see more of it.

Lenny Rachitsky:And is there is there an answer to how do we do this better anything you think hey you've seen work to help get us past this?

Claire Vo:I think normalizing it so thanks for bringing me on this podcast but I I do think normalize seeing it is one of the simplest ways you 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 in 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 I want to call out their amazing female CEOs 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 isn't is and is not a technology leader who is and is not technical.

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome I love that advice it's something I try really hard to do with this podcast. Yep 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 two ISO 27,001 HIPAA and more with a single platform Vanta Vanta's market leading trust management platform helps you continuously monitor compliance alongside reporting and tracking risks plus you can save hours by completing security questionnaires with Vanta AI join thousands of global companies that use Vanta to automate evidence collection unify risk management and streamline security reviews get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com/leni that's vanta.com/leni. I know you have a fun story about when you were very pregnant selling your startup yeah to Optimizely can you share that story I haven't actually.

Claire Vo:Yeah yeah this was this was a fun one again this is like the universe is 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 so not necessarily the underlying AB testing technology but all the stuff around hypothesis gathering insights aggregation operations like keeping things on on track because I really know as you do that high scale experimentation programs can be very impactful to to businesses that being said it was like a niche inside an industry as opposed to a large TAM problem and so I think we just fundamentally hit a a TAM ceiling here we had a great product for a great market that was very narrow and you know three years four years into running the company I knew that to be true and I knew that we would be better served by being part of a a larger organization and one of those organizations could be a large testing company and so 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 a experimentation day with Optimizely and I knew Optimizely was a natural acquirer mhmm and I knew I had to get into that room so I called Microsoft and I said hey friend of Microsoft I'm gonna be up in Seattle seeing our other customer very large Seattle company this week week of experimentation day could we stop by and they're like oh yeah sure well then I went to other you know other big Seattle companies and said hey other big Seattle company I'm gonna be up visiting Microsoft at their experimentation day would you be so like I got these two meetings to to manifest against each other and then I walked into that experimentation day and I eyeballed the CFO of Optimizely and I sat in front in front of him and started pulling up the product and coding at the same time I was like I'm going sit in front of him in the row and I'm going to do this we 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 but I will say very quickly after that we became very close partners and ultimately they they acquired me and I give this advice to founders because one of the things that founders and 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 you know come hell or high water figure out a way to get there and this was a very fun example of of working my way into the right room setting myself up for the success that I wanted and and and having the backing the good job the great product the the outcomes to to earn it but you also have to get yourself in the room.

Lenny Rachitsky:And how many months pregnant were you?

Claire Vo:I was extremely present pregnant a a ticking time bomb of a belly is a really good negotiation tactic in a deal I think I remember we were negotiating the final term sheet I was thirty four weeks pregnant something like that and they said can you fly out to San Francisco I was in Austin at the time and I said literally you can fly me out today and back tomorrow and then I'm not allowed on planes and that's how you know got it it was very fun it was it was it's fun and and what a happy acquisition I can talk all day about how that was great great experience.

Lenny Rachitsky:And I love it's another example of the phrase you've been coming back to of bending I don't know if it's bending the world

Claire Vo:To your the universe towards

Lenny Rachitsky:Your will bending the even bigger I love it it feels like a recurring theme here to take agency and control of where your career and life is going yep and that's such a good example of just like finding a way into this room that would be very hard for someone to get into yeah 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 kind of like combining engineering product can you just talk about this role and why you think it might be merging

Claire Vo:Yeah I get asked about it a lot because it's it's not super rare but it's not super common either and I think it it could potentially be be rising and so I believe that the c p and I'm using cpto for short credit code of like running product 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 and so first you know I talked a little bit about how I got into this role I do think you have to be technical to do do a role like this I think a lot of people look at my professional background and think that I use my like broad leadership skills and 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 performing engineering team that works on a scalable platform and so I I spend 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 engine team is operating in a way that drives velocity and I just don't think you can do that job if you don't understand how software gets built on a technical level so I'm the kind of person that when we're doing a product review I have like the prd up and get github up and I'm like comparing both because I think both sides matter I think the other thing that's different about this role is it's quite operational and so you really have to know about operations and organization design engine teams are by nature much larger than product organizations like you just think about the classic ratios there are more people in engineering than there are in product and the talent changes are significantly different in engineering whether it's the you know high volume of recruiting culture challenges are different you have to really think about org design and so you know you have to have a different level of mindset around organization design and operations when you're in a cpt role you have to you're you're in pager duty right you're like you're getting paged at one in the morning if a service you know if there's a set zero and it goes down that is not what it's like to be be a product leader so you gotta know what you're getting into and you have to be technical and then the the the thing I would be remiss to say about this role is the p and the t get a lot of airtime product and engineering a lot of airtime design data these are such functional very important organizations and why these roles so that's kind of like what the role is and how how you could be good at it or whether it would be a fit for your skills question of why have this kind of role and I think there's two there's two reasons there's the obvious strategic reason of like they're all the same thing right they're all building capital p product they're all builders they're the same types of folks they're all builders and bringing them one under one house allows you to optimize for the whole as opposed to optimize for the function and if you can find a leader that is effective at that I think you can get a lot of value out of it and 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 and d is a very expensive and complicated investment the company is making and having a single person responsible for r and d investment at the executive level is quite important especially when you're candidly spending a a lot there and so I think it's those two things it's these are one team there should be there should be no debates over what's best for product or what's best for engineering what's best for design should be what is best for the organization at whole what do our customers need and what do our business needs and then it's the accountability candidly of this quite meaningful investment against business objectives and having a single singularly responsible individual to to care for that investment

Lenny Rachitsky:Sounds wonderful having one person to deal with across all these functions

Claire Vo:Well that's what it isn't I'll just say like I've done both right I've I've been a cpo next to an svp of eng I've run both together founders can play this role and again this is why I sort of say you you have to optimize around talent in your organization if your ceo can has the skills bandwidth etcetera 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 never done that before if it's just not working operationally they have broader areas of focus then bring it together under someone I 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

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah and along the same lines designing an org around the person I 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 this role because it feels really rare

Claire Vo:You know start a company and then you have to do it I mean in some ways I mean I think this is you know I've worked for both and they've 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 a founder mindset and so I think as a founder especially early stage you do all this you 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 further down the line so I do think early stage startup experience is one of those one of those 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 am a product manager and so my job is this but it's not that and I can 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 our team that's like there are no lanes so like they're like our lanes are dotted they're not solid and that you can shift over and pencil out a design an engineer can write a spec 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 gonna breed the type of leaders that could do this this type of role

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome reminds me at gitlab I just interviewed their head of product or cpo and they have a core value of short toes don't worry about stepping on people's toes have short toes don't worry about people getting into your stuff all it's all good yep okay you mentioned ai amazing segue to my next topic that I wanna 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 like I don't know spray or figma or something like that okay so first of all just what is chat prd and then why did why did you build it

Claire Vo:Yeah so chat prd comes out of again pace setting and I'll actually tell you the real genesis of chat prd which is a 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 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 all all 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 and a prompt to like come up with a very serviceable prd spec for this very technical product and I took that prompt and that long running chat gpt thread and crafted the clear version of of a of a product leader or product person that could with really solid consistently consistency output product specs give good feedback build out 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 writing prds with chatpurity or chatgpt I created as gpt and just gave it to my team was like here you can use this if you want it and 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 gonna stand up as a standalone app and rap on right it's a wrapper wrap some of these started as wrapper wrap some of these capabilities and just publish it and put a fairly reasonable price tag on it and see 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 too few pms and I get blocked so I'm gonna 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 standalone app so it is it is my personal product copilot that I released for the world

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay so first of all where can people check this out is it chatprd.com

Claire Vo:Ai come on

Lenny Rachitsky:Ai of course

Claire Vo:And yeah chatprd.ai

Lenny Rachitsky:I saw some stat about that the country that has AI is just making so much bank right now.

Claire Vo:So much money.

Lenny Rachitsky:All these domains okay then in terms of the stack just to be clear so it started as a ChatGPT prompt custom prompt you kind of evolved then it became a GPT a custom GPT and now it's your own app that is using the OpenAI APIs behind.

Claire Vo:It is yeah it's using the assistance APIs and what's different about the standalone app versus the GPT is every person that uses the standalone 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 when you use the standalone 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.

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay great what are the most common use cases again just so people can get a sense of oh let me use this.

Claire Vo: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 what is out of scope walk through the UX I have in our standard template have what's called a narrative which is like how do you pitch this this product which I feel like is a thing product managers miss a lot which is 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 ChatPRDs so 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 I'd say are using it to put in spec or a PRD or a strategy doc or a roadmap and improve it and then the rest are using it to brainstorm ideas internal PM work like how do I come up with a good agenda for XYZ that kind of stuff.

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing okay so I wrote a post recently of how sharing a bunch of examples of how people are using different GPT specifically at work and I think it's 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 GPT or their own custom app using OpenAPIs any advice?

Claire Vo:Prompt matters like you know we went through this whole cycle of like prompt engineering is a thing it's not really a thing fine tunes 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 GPT or ChatGPT I look at the GPT 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 OpenAI 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 I think the other thing is there is no solution right now for monetization knock on wood open it and we'll figure it out if I had more time maybe I would create a platform out of what I've created for ChatGPT to let other people sort of monetize their GPTs and add on capabilities but that is not it's not out of the box yet for folks and I think there's probably there's a lot of work that I had to do to get get it from here to there.

Lenny Rachitsky:And are you making like real money with this thing and is the idea that this becomes the thing you do someday maybe long term?

Claire Vo:So my original goal and I like said this out on X some original goals I just wanna buy like a nice glass of wine a week that was that was my goal I can buy 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 this to cover a little bit so I have an ambitious but not audacious goal for ChatPurity the other goal that I have which is is let's put monetization aside is this is my joy space like zone of genius joy space and my goal with ChatPRD is it has to be 100% fun for me like this is my hobby so I'm not doing anything that makes it not fun it is a pure bliss space for me I get to code on the weekends I get to do customer support at night and I get to build things that I would use I get to learn new technologies I wanna 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 fun.

Lenny Rachitsky:Love that okay so some people listening to this especially PMs maybe like Claire what the hell are you doing replay are you gonna replace product managers in a year or two this connects to something I'm just generally been thinking about and that's 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 and which maybe are less important so I guess just broadly do you have a sense of just your skills that are gonna continue to be incredibly important and AI will not take these skills and jobs off your plate versus okay these are gonna be less important AI will do these?

Claire Vo:At the highest level I tend to be very short term pessimistic although I'll I'll I'll frame 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 affluent like wealthier happier healthier like I am a big believer in technology and I am optimistic about its impact on the human race there 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 kid's future I'm not 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 ChatPRD 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 probably 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 it not replace like it was really I was reflecting on this question and like communication lowercase c I feel like is one of the places that's gonna be replaced you know there's and I call it lowercase c 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 can coordinate who that coordination goes communication goes to and get it out in in many modalities of content and so I'm really thinking about you know the PM as the keeper of cross functional relationships and communication is really I think potentially gonna 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 gonna be much much harder to replace and so I'm thinking about the edges of communication and where they'll change and what they want.

Lenny Rachitsky:That's really interesting I did a I did a poll 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 I 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 and 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.

Claire Vo:I agree with you I totally 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 into a plan and communicate that plan the I found these tools exceptional think use use ChatPRD and give it give it a try now I think it's sort of the human aspect though of boldness seeing the future in a way that a thing trained on priors cannot like those things I still think and then 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 ChatPurity right like I'm not gonna come up with the most genius way to do data export for Snowflake for some like like that is a solved area that we should just scaffold up I should customize it to what we do and then we should ship it like that is not a place where my magic skills as a human are gonna impact and but I don't think a lot of PMs see it that way I think there's this real identity shift that's gonna happen where PMs think that their value is coming from their ideas that they manifest into the world and how they individually manifest them and I think we're gonna shift to like are you are you building the right stuff are you building it quickly and is it is it delivering no matter what the tool tool tool chain is.

Lenny Rachitsky:Yeah I think your point about getting buy in and getting everyone aligned that's 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

Claire Vo:Other they're they all just get aligned

Lenny Rachitsky:We're in we're in now let's purchase this a little higher yeah I actually made this list we could I feel like this could be the entire podcast yeah but I made it like a quick list of here's the jobs of a PM yep 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 so what is a job PM you're writing PRDs you're setting goals proposing a roadmap aligning a team behind a roadmap developing a strategy developing a vision communicating timelines finding blockers and unblocking people getting buy in from high upon high getting budget resources for your team getting 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 I think

Claire Vo: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 gonna be much more valuable as a tool that an individual or a team's intellect can use to do a better faster higher impact impact job and 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 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 backed by a purpose built toolkit and make it three x better four x better 10 x better I think that's the more the more interesting question

Lenny Rachitsky:I think on the on the point of amazing things are happening every day like we had SpaceX launched the Starship and it was like barely mentioned anywhere it's like we have the spaceship that could take us to Mars now yeah I'm like meh we don't need to talk about that

Claire Vo:I mean you know we get the kids up and like stream it on YouTube oh

Claire Vo:I think it's just I it's it's magic like we live in this this magic time I think it's so fascinating

Lenny Rachitsky:That's awesome

Lenny Rachitsky:But yeah

Claire Vo:I agree we're getting we're getting spoiled by innovation

Lenny Rachitsky:You said that there's this ratio that might shift with product managers engineers I'm curious which ratio because engineers are also getting more and so it's interesting if the ratios will be consistent as engineers become more efficient PMs get more efficient

Claire Vo:I wonder if whole whole roles get eliminated and replaced and then ratios aren't even the right way to to think about about things you know there's the ratio of this PM role to this many you know one PM to seven to 10 engineers or one EM to 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 also think is going to shift in one of the end 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's scary and it's going to reduce jobs yes and I do think there's also potentially other jobs that open up that could 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 want to be much more forward thinking than close my eyes to to what the the possible maybe dramatic changes are in our industry so I'm thinking about it I'm ex I'm experimenting with things and I'm hoping that you know in our team at LaunchDarkly we're leading from the front here as opposed to on our back foot

Lenny Rachitsky:I'm thinking many people listening are like okay I need to get on top of this I need to stay ahead I wanna follow Claire's lead is your advice simply create GPTs play with chat GPTs is there anything else there to help people

Claire Vo:I also think PMs need to be thinking about building product skills particularly around these like nondeterministic products it's been quite into part of why I built chat GPT is not just to stress test how is or chat purity it's not just to stress test how these sorts of things are gonna change the product function it's literally like this is a 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 when mobile happened if you're a PM the job jumped on mobile you had the pick of the 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 position so those are both of my motivations on chatbird 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 personally built on before

Lenny Rachitsky:And so for someone that's say not super engineering oriented I guess do you recommend people on your team explore this sort of thing is it

Claire Vo:It's I I do think studying products that are out there is quite interesting you know I I love these this idea of doing outside in product teardowns 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 so that's that's one thing I think you can do two 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 and try some no code tools so that's 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 as a mechanism for learning it doesn't always have to be commercially driven it doesn't 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

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome one last question about chat chat PRD so with copilot there's all these stats it's making engineers 50% more efficient whatever percentage do you have any sense of efficiency gains so far with chat PRD

Claire Vo:So I have qualitative feedback from from product managers who have used chat 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 gonna have to hire another PM now so like you know there's like both the people like there's both the the individual aspect and the hours aspect which is it's it's helping individual PMs get higher leverage across you know a broad engineering or building team and that it's helping them spend their time more effectively

Lenny Rachitsky:Many people don't want to hear this that they don't need to hire PM there's many people looking for jobs right now

Claire Vo:It 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 cost 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 there are 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 so it's incredibly complicated but also on the flip side this is a very small start up 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 teams and and have these jobs and you know startups can't can't afford it and they still have great things to do in the world

Lenny Rachitsky: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 wanna 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

Claire Vo:I'll take contrarian corner

Lenny Rachitsky:Let's let's go for there I need some sound effects for these corners do share

Claire Vo:I'm I'm sharing this because you just released your podcast with Marty and I am 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 squirm a little bit and the reason why I believe this is I think there are tremendous businesses built on sales motions and I disagree with the fact that that means you do not care for the craft or the experience of users I 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 is 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 there are 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 but 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

Lenny Rachitsky:Mhmm amazing I'm gonna not get deeper into this topic because I don't wanna 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 to 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

Claire Vo:Yeah and they can build great products

Lenny Rachitsky:Great Claire is there anything else that you want to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round

Claire Vo:I will say because we've been talking a lot about AI and replacing PMs the 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 I it's one of the things that I get a lot of energy out of so I just wanna say that in the world it's something that sparks a lot of joy I get a lot of inbound you know can you help me get in here can you help me get there but if there is a tractable way that I can help you get to 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

Lenny Rachitsky:How would people reach out to you to try to help you get them gig

Claire Vo:Yeah so I am I'm of course on LinkedIn I'm on X at clairvaux all one word and then if you really wanna go into the archives I have a a very fabulous TikTok where I am chief product officer it's all one word

Lenny Rachitsky: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 anyway before we do that welcome to our very exciting lightning round are you ready

Claire Vo:I am so ready

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay first question what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people

Claire Vo:High Growth Handbook I 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 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 inside startups can look like and they solve some of the things that you don't need to solve novel novelly and then one on the fiction side that I've been recommending is Circe which is a retelling of Circe's story from her perspective and I I it's it's like a a great read and everybody I've recommended it she really loves it

Lenny Rachitsky:From Game of Thrones

Claire Vo:No Circe from the Odyssey oh so Odisha Spence

Lenny Rachitsky:Like it might

Claire Vo:She turns men into pits it's it's great okay my kids are very into Greek mythology so this is me amazing that one on my side

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing the first two books are both Stripe Press shout out to Stripe Press

Claire Vo:Yeah Stripe Press

Lenny Rachitsky:And I have both books in the back there and I my laptop's actually sitting on stealing people awesome next question what is a favorite recent movie or tv show you've really enjoyed

Claire Vo:I 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 I saw Poor Things which if you like capital W weird capital A art 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 at some of my experiences in the in the technology organizations got a technical female lead and think it's quite funny so I like Mythic Quest

Lenny Rachitsky:Do have you a favorite interview question they'd like to ask candidates

Claire Vo:I like 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

Lenny Rachitsky:And what do you look for in a good answer that's like oh wow this candidate is great

Claire Vo:It's sort of thinking along the chain of value to from how do we identify people in the market what does our pricing model look like what could they hypothesize our underlying unit economics 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 at all about how we make money either top line or margin and then can they identify places where they might improve it

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome basically understanding the business really well great do you have a favorite product that you recently discovered that you really like

Claire Vo:Okay I'm gonna make you laugh because you've gotten all these cars right

Lenny Rachitsky:I have such expensive cars

Claire Vo:Oh you got expensive cars I it's not new I love my minivan so 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 wanna do I just wanna drive around my living room like Bluey included and so you know no Rivian no Mercedes Benz but I really love my Pacifica

Lenny Rachitsky:Okay okay I was gonna ask

Claire Vo: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 are great like it is now every time a tourist comes in a friend comes in to visit San Francisco make them take a round trip ride in a robot car so and then even I've I've had a customer service experience with the Waymo team where my friend left an iPhone in a very and customer experience was great twenty four hour service like top to bottom great great product design great service design

Lenny Rachitsky:I just got into Waymo actually 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 yep with like a person from the company just to experience it and then I never got access to it after so now I finally can try it

Claire Vo:Enjoy it's so nice it's my preferred mode of travel

Lenny Rachitsky:Future there's we've talked about a lot of ways the world is changing that's another great example yep two questions to go do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends or family they find useful in work or in life

Claire Vo:Fast beats 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 at the end of the day wins so fast beats right

Lenny Rachitsky: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

Claire Vo:I've been neglecting my 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 algorithm would 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 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 at work 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

Lenny Rachitsky:Amazing it might be time to start exploring instagram also with all this tiktok news

Claire Vo:I know i know

Lenny Rachitsky:Yep claire before we started this podcast i 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 two final questions we already covered these but just to refresh people's memories where can people find you online they wanna reach out and then how can listeners be useful to you

Claire Vo:So linkedin x i'm clairvaux 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 chief product at chief product officer

Lenny Rachitsky:Awesome and then how can people be useful to you

Claire Vo: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 the other thing that i really if i could ask your audience anything is if you have a job where your job is typing into an internet box to create products out of nothing really acknowledge the like privilege and joy of that job and and try to have some fun because a lot of people wanna sit where you're sitting so have fun appreciate what you have enjoy it enjoy each other

Lenny Rachitsky:Great and important advice to leave people with claire thank you so much for being here

Claire Vo:Thank you

Lenny Rachitsky:Bye everyone

Lenny Rachitsky: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'spodcast.com see you in the next episode