How Anthropic’s product team moves faster than anyone else | Cat Wu (Head of Product, Claude Code)

**Cat Wu** (0:00)
I think it is very hard to be the right amount of AGI-pilled. It's very easy to build a product for the super AGI-strong model. The hard thing is figuring out for the current model, how do you elicit the maximum capability?

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:13)
I've never seen anything like the pace you folks at Anthropic are shipping at.

**Cat Wu** (0:17)
We want to remove every single barrier to shipping things. The timelines for a lot of our product features have gone down from six months to one month and sometimes to even one day.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
You're interviewing hundreds of PMs, and you just keep feeling like they're approaching it very incorrectly.

**Cat Wu** (0:32)
The PM role is changing a lot. It's changing really quickly. The thing that is extremely important for building AI-native products is iterating so quickly, figuring out a way for you to actually launch features every single week.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:44)
What do you think are the emerging skills PMs need to develop?

**Cat Wu** (0:47)
It comes back to product taste. As code becomes much cheaper to write, the thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:56)
Today, my guest is Cat Wu, Head of Product for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic. Cat is at the center of everything that is changing in AI and product and building, and she and her team are building the product that is most changing the way that we all build our products. She is so full of insights and wisdom and lessons, this is an episode you cannot miss. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an insane set of deals available exclusively to Lennys Newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Cat Wu.
Cat, welcome to the podcast.

**Cat Wu** (1:35)
Thanks for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:37)
I have so many questions, I'm so excited to have you on this podcast. I want to start with giving people an understanding of your role alongside Boris. Everybody knows Boris, his episode is the number one most popular episode on this podcast, no pressure. He created Claude Code, he leads the Ench team, he ships a bazillion PRs a day from his phone, just like, I don't even know what the number is anymore.
I think people don't give you enough credit for the success that Claude Code has had and Cowork and all the things you all are building. Help us understand your role on the team, how you work with Boris, how you split responsibilities, just like what does the PMR look like on the Claude Code team?

**Cat Wu** (2:16)
I feel very lucky to work with Boris, he's been an amazing thought partner, he's our tech lead, he's very much the product visionary, and he is great at setting like, this is what the product needs to be in like 3 months, 6 months from now. This is like what the AGI-pilled version of the product is.
And a lot of my role is figuring out, okay, what is the path from where we are today to like that vision 3 to 6 months from now? And I spend more of my time on the cross-functional, so making sure that our marketing team, sales team, finance capacity, etc.
are like bought in on the plan and that we're all rowing in the same direction. And that once the feature is ready, that there aren't any blockers to shipping it. I think in many ways it works well because we kind of like mind-meld, but it is actually like remarkably blurry of a line. Like I think we're like 80% mind-meld. And then there's like this 20% of things that like, maybe I care a lot more about them Boris, so like I'll drive those and like 20% work he cares a lot more than me, and he just like drives those.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:20)
This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor Work OS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Versel, Replet, Sierra, Clay and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by Work OS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs and other features required by large companies. Work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up-market ends up working with Work OS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, Work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. Work OS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise-ready today.