Tell Your Boss What Role You Want

Claire Vo believes in bending the universe to your will through clear career intentions and accelerated execution. She approaches leadership by deliberately increasing organizational pace while maintaining high quality standards.

When it comes to career progression, Claire advocates for extreme clarity about your goals. She communicates exactly what she wants in her next role to her manager and asks for partnership in getting there. However, she balances this ambition with restraint—these career conversations represent less than 1% of her interactions with leadership. The key is making your case about how your promotion solves a company problem rather than fulfilling personal ambition: "The conversation needs to be about what you being in a different position does for the company and why the company needs it."

Claire deliberately increases organizational velocity by setting "one click faster" expectations. If someone thinks something needs to be done this year, she challenges them to complete it this half. If this quarter, then this month. This pace-setting approach prevents teams from defaulting to the cadence of recurring meetings, which artificially slows progress. She refuses to let decisions wait for the next scheduled meeting, instead asking "When can we make this decision? How much information do we need?"

As a leader who spans product, engineering, and design (what she calls the CPTO role), Claire believes these functions should operate as one team without functional debates: "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." This unified approach provides leverage to the CEO by having a single person accountable for the company's R&D investment.

Claire maintains high standards through clear feedback, believing that "clear is kind." She directly tells underperforming leaders when they're not meeting expectations rather than softening the message. This directness creates accountability and helps people succeed. For product managers specifically, she tests candidates by asking how they would improve the business model, looking for those who understand not just product features but how the company makes money.

In the age of AI, Claire sees significant changes coming to product management. While she doesn't believe PMs will be eliminated next year, she expects the skills required will shift dramatically. She predicts AI will replace "lowercase c communication" (the functional trading of information) while "capital C Communication" (influence, conviction, boldness) will remain distinctly human.