Product Teams Focus on Empathy and Strategy as AI Automates Execution

Mike Krieger believes that even as AI capabilities rapidly advance, the most valuable product work remains deeply human. At Anthropic, where 90% of code is now AI-generated, the bottlenecks have shifted from execution to strategy, comprehension, and empathy.

The team at Anthropic has discovered that while AI excels at implementation, three critical areas still require human leadership: making products comprehensible to users, developing strategic focus, and opening people's eyes to new possibilities. As Mike explains, "The capabilities are there... but what are you building and how do you make it comprehensible? That still gets at this much deeper empathy and understanding of human needs and psychology."

This shift has profound implications for product teams. Rather than focusing on execution details, product leaders should invest more in understanding user psychology, market positioning, and strategic differentiation. The most successful teams at Anthropic embed product people directly with researchers rather than focusing solely on UI/UX, recognizing that the greatest leverage comes from shaping how the models themselves work.

For individual contributors, this means developing deeper domain expertise rather than just technical skills. As Mike notes about successful AI applications: "Differentiated industry knowledge... understanding of a particular market" creates durable value that AI alone can't replicate. The companies building successfully on Claude aren't just implementing APIs—they're pushing capabilities to their limits with deep knowledge of specific domains like legal, healthcare, or biotech.

The most valuable product skill becomes the ability to identify what problems are worth solving and for whom, rather than how to solve them. As Mike puts it: "Strategy... how we win, where we'll play, figuring out where exactly you're going to want to spend your time or your tokens or your computation... you can't do everything."