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Use these skills to supercharge your claude code setup | Oji Udezue | 3x CPO

Aakash Gupta · 1h 4m · transcribed Aug 2026
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Section Insights

# 0:00

The Future of Product Building

What does the future of product building look like?

The era of monoskilled professionals is over, and the future of product builders involves multi-skilled individuals who can leverage AI tools like LLMs for initial drafts and problem-solving.

  • Product builders need to be multi-skilled.
  • AI tools can assist in generating initial ideas but require human oversight.
  • Trusting AI outputs completely is not advisable.
# 12:54

Challenges in Product Management and Development

What are the common challenges faced by product managers and developers?

Product managers often struggle with market research and handing off projects to developers, particularly in ensuring proper architecture and testing processes.

  • Effective market research is crucial for product success.
  • Clear communication and architecture are essential when transitioning to development.
  • Scaffolding can provide a solid foundation for product development.
# 25:49

Collaborating with LLMs

How can LLMs assist in product management?

LLMs can serve as thought partners for product managers, helping to validate whether a problem is worth solving and ensuring comprehensive consideration of business, product, and coding aspects.

  • LLMs can enhance the problem-solving process.
  • Collaboration across disciplines is vital for product development.
  • Using LLMs can streamline the initial stages of product management.
# 38:44

Importance of Pre-Build Planning

Why is planning important before starting to code?

Many developers jump into building without understanding customer needs, leading to wasted effort. Proper planning helps focus on valuable projects and conserve resources.

  • Understanding customer needs is critical before development.
  • Planning helps avoid building products without a market.
  • Effective use of time and resources is essential for impactful product development.
# 51:39

The Three-Speed Problem in Development

What is the three-speed problem in product development?

The three-speed problem refers to the imbalance in the development process, where coding speed is increasing rapidly while understanding customer needs and market access remain slower.

  • Development speed is accelerating due to new tools.
  • Understanding customer needs is still a slower process.
  • Balancing development speed with market feedback is crucial for success.

Transcript

0:00 The era of monoskilled professionals is dead. So I'm going to demonstrate the future of product builders. >> Meet Aji Udway, former CPO at Typform, Kalanley, and Parable as well as former head of product of creation and innovation at Twitter. How much of this thinking like viability gates and sharp problem tests should we really be outsourcing to LLM? Is LM basically the first draft just to get some thinking going and then we improve and react? You really do need to look through all the output. Make sure that it makes sense for you. We do this all the time because you know I think it's hard to fully trust 100% LLMs.

0:38 >> Can you open up that scaffolding skill and we can see what is inside it and how it looks. >> Yes. So it's it's multi-sklls here. You can see that it has a master skill.md and then it has a bunch of subsklls where it would do market research. I've been a product manager for 25 years and I've never really felt that coding was worth my time until now. >> Before we get into today's show, please take a second to check that you're subscribed on YouTube and following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. If you want access to all of my favorite AI tools, I've gotten them to give you an entire year of their paid plans. Check out bundle.acg.com akashg.com for an entire year of bolt new air table speechify descript magic patterns linear dovetail arise and mobin and now into today's show OG what are people going to learn today if they stay till the end >> well people are going to learn the most important thing they're going to learn is that we won't just focus on code skills the landscape of product right now or coding or engineering or the shipyard whatever you want to call it is full of repos in GitHub with skills to token max or token minimize or to change costs all on the coding layer. But we know that a tech company a successful tech company is really three layers. It's the software and the hardware. It's the product which is about customers and about the business model. And it's about the business. They're thinking about allocating resources to the rest of the chain. What you're going to learn is how to take the raw harness like cloud code and apply not only coding skills but product skills, product judgment on tap and business skills that will help you make the very best decisions about how to build a successful product.

2:38 >> So I'm really excited about this. Where should we start? >> So Aash where I want to start is something I think is really important. So we see product mind consults with lots of big companies big and small. And the things that we get asked to do is first of all come in and reconceptualize a product as much more AI native. Well, very quickly what happens to us is that we get pulled into the shipyard like how people are organized, new skills for people in a AI era. How how do things work together? How do people work together? And what we're seeing immediately is the developers are speeding up very quickly, especially if they're early adopters. And then we see everyone else being a bottleneck.

3:24 And particularly we see PMs who are not speeding up their product judgment, speeding up their orchestration skills to match the new speed of the engineers. So what I'm about to show you is we made a set of product judgment skills not just code skills but product judgment and business skills that product managers can use to think at the business layer at the product layer while not sacrificing code fidelity and things like testing and quality and so on. The best instantiation of this is the pro new project scaffolding skill. There are all kinds of skills here. We have things like finding the aha moment for your new product, whether it's aic or not. We have things like figuring out whether it's a sharp problem. But the scaffolding skill is special because it starts with you describing a business problem and then it really makes decisions, helps you make decisions whether it does market research for you, tells you whether it's a viable problem and how to solve it if it's not a viable problem. makes architectural decisions for you based on asking you questions.

4:32 figures out how to test the the thing right based on those architectural decisions and even sets up you know continuous integration and continuous delivery for you. So we're going to work directly in cloud code not in cloud desktop or anything just in the same way that developers work. So what I'm going to tell this thing right now to scaffold a new project. One of the things I'm obsessed about is the fact that people won't read any code. So what I want to build is either a SAS or an agent that helps vibe coders, people who don't have a lot of software experience, helps them figure out if their code is any good. Security, robustness, complexity, simplicity, all of that tells them the story of their code because no one is looking at it even in a corporate environment. And so hopefully if we tell it to scaffold this, it will run all the processes of the scaffolding for us. I'm going to hit enter. If you pause and read it, you'll see that it's just a a first idea. And so what this is going to do is it's it will run a viability gate. It would take a look at some frameworks and try to figure out if this project is even viable at all.

5:41 And so that first gate is still sort of loading the skill. There you go. It's an 11step workflow. That makes sense because it's a very powerful skill and it will skip straight to the viability gate. Let's see. >> Can you open up that scaffolding skill and we can see what is inside it and how it looks. >> Oh yeah, let's do that. So if you look at the skills, you'll see a bunch of the product product skills sharp problem. So the first one is yes. So it's it's multi-sklls here. You can see that it has a master skill.md and then it has a bunch of subsklls where it will do market research. It will actually fetch skills for you, new skills for you if you need it for your project type. It will set up testing do you know and you know the core skill is to basically do viability gate. So let's go back to see what it's doing here. And so what it's trying to do is to do web search. So I'm going to tell it that it can absolutely do web search in order to find out what's going on. So it's conducting market research.

7:06 So I think I interrupted it. So I'm going to continue. And it's going to conduct market research on the idea. And the next thing it's going to do is to write a product brief. And once it's done with the product brief, it will start to get to the code level at all. claw takes its time a little bit, but what it's doing is that it's spinning up a web search session. Sometimes it would do that through Chrome if you have Chrome tools installed. Sometimes it'll do that itself with HTTP.

7:48 and of course, I didn't give Claude all my permission, so it's them. So, yeah. So, the viability gate, this is going to be interesting. It's going to tell me whether this thing is worth my time or worth your time very specifically. And you have to understand that what it's really doing is taking frameworks from product management from our book and it's trying to see is this thing worth spending time on.

8:20 Some of the dimensions include things like the frequency of the problem, whether we have a clear customer. and there we go. Let's run that. So what does it what does it tell us actually with the viability gate? Viability gate pass proceed zero weak three strong three moderate not a silent pass. Three moderates are flagged as d- risking agenda. Now step four market research. And if we go into the repo we will start to see this document show up.

8:58 So if we go away from skills and go to code memo one it'll start to actually write for us what it's finding out from doing a web search. So right now we know that the it's usually if there three weak things it will it will it will kill it. will recommend you stopping but according to it the viability gate is strong. So it has like six dimensions revenue technical feasibility differentiation competitive landscape target user definition and the problem clarity and urgency. So if we go back to its its work, it's literally going in and doing deeper market research for you now. It's scanning competitors, is scanning pricing, is scanning what people have done in the space.

9:59 And so right here, it's it's created it. It's done your market research package for you. I set it so that it's not narrating itself in full, but you can see it has a market overview. It has trends shaping the space. It has direct or near competitors and what they're charging for. It has key takeaways. It has adjacent products. This is really, really comprehensive, guys, about what it's doing for you.

10:35 And now is writing a product brief, right? we have tools that help you write a PRD. This is literally your new project brief where it codifies that into a problem into target customers val core value proposition success criteria that will help you know whether you succeed or fail and then starts to write goals for you that will help you sort of gauge where it's going. Okay, now it's done that. It's done some of the business level skills and what it's working on now is trying to find out how to scaffold the rest of the project in code for you.

11:17 So now to the code layer, you can see that code memos core is an LLM analyzing repos for claw with current correct current model ids. >> So the scaffolding skill is basically an orchestrator skill. So, it seems like it's calling some of these other skills, creating documents, walking through this 11step process. >> Yes, it it it's So, if you look at these skills here, they're all really dense. They have built-in product frameworks that some of them we've written from our book, Building Rocket Ships. Some of them are well-known product frameworks that we've included in part of this. building rocket ship is actually pretty comprehensive and it's a very good resource. But what it does is it combines some of these things. The most important one it combines actually the sharp problem test. So it's doing an internal sharp problem test and it's orchestrating a few more skills within that in terms of new product scaffolding. Well, the thing that's special about this one is that by the time it's done, you will have a full repo. So you can see that it's created a prototypes folder. It's created your package of thinking. It's also created your first milestone folder for you to get started. By the time it's done, architecture is settled.

12:45 Continuous integration is settled. And if you give it its GitHub repo, it can start the project and push the make the first push into GitHub for you. Why is this important? When you are a PM and when you are a vibe coder, the things that are difficult for you are all the things, right? It's doing the right kind of market research, figure out if it's the right thing to work on, but then immediately the where you hand off to developers is also a problem. is like what's the architecture? What's the you know I've seen a lot of vipers who don't have continuous integration. They don't know how to test the code because they don't know how to do that. So this sets it all for you so that you have the bones of a really solid product and a really solid code base to start to work on. I think that's the power of the scaffolding.

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14:36 That's bolt.new/ aos. Here's the problem with most AI tools. They just sit there waiting for you to prompt them. You do all the remembering. They do the typing. Bari from Ariso flipped that for me. It connects to my email, calendar, Slack, and it works the other way around. It comes to me. Monday morning, there's a briefing waiting before a call. It reminds me what we covered last time and what I promised to send. When a follow-up slips, it nudges me before the other person has to. Every commitment, every thread, every contact tracked and organized without lifting a finger. And because it has continuous memory, it actually gets smarter the longer I use it. It's not a chat window.

15:11 It's one AI partner that knows my whole working life and it keeps me prepared for all of it. If you're tired of being your own chief of staff, try Ario.ai/ aos. That's a r iO.ai/ a kh. Can we scroll through that file a little bit just to see how it's put together? >> So which particular file? >> The scaffolding skill. >> Oh yeah. So the skill. So yeah, if you go to new project scaffolding, you have the main skill here and then >> if we scroll through that, how is it?

15:46 okay. So it's got each step defined and if we keep going like for instance the sharp test is it going to go crawl call that skill? >> Yeah. So for example, the workflow is to gather context. It will ask you questions if you don't have it. It will find a project type. Is this an iOS app? Android. Because of my prompt, it was pretty clear what it was. it will look for reference projects around the internet, some of the best practices and it will try to understand how to build this. it will run a viability gate.

16:24 This is a compressed version of the SH problem state where it will go through run clarity, target user, competitive landscape, differentiation. the the the SH problem test is even more specific. The thing that differentiates that is that it tries really hard to focus on three times value that you create. That's not in here. This sort of looks at the market space and see is there a lane for you to be in this in this lane and the sharp problem test will do something even deeper than that.

16:56 whether you will make money that's really what sharp problem space is. This is about is there a lane for you? And if there are three dimensions that are weak, it will just recommend that you don't do this at all. This is very important. LLMs very rarely tell you no. And this skill will tell you absolutely no. Don't do this. and I'll demonstrate that in a second. I'll show you. I'll tell it to scaffold a new thing that I think if we look at it, it might look on a boundary, but it will say it will probably say we can't do this. And then market research is huge.

17:28 you know, we tell people like, you know, market research is weird. Like, you probably shouldn't do market research with only LLMs. but you can do a lot 60% 70% with LM before you go find real sources. And, you know, I want to step back and also tell people, you know, the danger in in this kind of workflow is that you take it as gospel, right? You really do need to look through all the output, make sure that it makes sense for you. we do this all the time because you know I think it's hard to fully trust 100% LLMs. So if you go here for okay we're still in skills so let's finish that and we can see so it will generate a perfect claude MD for you for this project. So if you look you'll see people spend a lot of time thinking okay how do I author my claude MD what's the thing in the front matter in the rest of it. This says for this project here is a claude MD that works best for you. it'll create a cloud MD that does the project well, hunts bugs, follows the patterns of the folders, follows the patterns of the prototypes, and it's perfect for this project.

18:39 and then it will create a folder structure. So, it will say here's where you need to put the documents, here's where all the milestone things. And by the way, all this is in the cloud MD. So, this is basically a self-organizing repo already. if you're going to use it here where the prototypes go and for each folder it just tells you it tells cloud and it tells you exactly what goes into it. It creates a test folder for you and then crucially it sets up your continuous integration your quality system. So every time you check in all your code is tested and it sets up security. It starts to find things that you shouldn't your secrets are particularly get ignored. So it knows how to do that so you don't have leakage when you push things to GitHub and it starts quality right it starts keep all your documents you know how to cat you know do bug classification how to learn it starts to catalog over time bugs that are made and how to learn from those bugs so there's a lot that goes into this and then some of the harder things that it offloads are the CI templates So it's claude MD pattern. So it gets the perfect claw MD. So these are all called within that skill. And so if you go back here, what you have is essentially we started out with a very clean empty folder, but this is all you have now, right? And so it gets ready for you to commit your first is commit your first checkin on this project. Okay. So, why don't we try this? Why don't we try another project? Okay. that may or may not, we won't say anything. May or may not pass the viability gate. Should we do that?

20:29 >> Let's do it. >> Okay. Okay. So, let's do this. Run the scaffolding. scaffolding run the scaffolding skill on a new problem. Use a new folder for it in this one in this ripple.

21:00 Okay, let's do that. And so I am going to try to solve a standout problem. I'm going to try to ask it build something for a project called Standup Zero that sort of uses Slack comments and creates a daily standup digest and ask it to run a viability gate first. Let's see what happens. >> So while this is running, how much of this thinking like viability gates and SH problem tests should we really be outsourcing to LLM? Is LM basically the first draft just to get some thinking going and then we improve and react?

21:43 >> Yeah. I I I the the very specific thing that we are trying to solve is that if you start in chat and start with hey I have an idea you know unless you prompt really well and unless you sort of sold on adversarial prompting or even some people go as far as they will check with multiple different kinds of LLMs. What you're gonna see is it will tell you that you have a good idea. The thing about this is that it's built in. It has an you know it has a built-in sort of responsibility to tell you whether you're smoking crack or not. And I don't I mean that jokingly tell you whether your idea makes any sense. And it doesn't just ground it in the model sense. it grounds it in a really clear framework that has evals that goes through very systematically.

22:46 so I think that's the main difference. Now should you trust it completely? I've already said you shouldn't. it produces real artifacts that you should go check. So it'll create a viability gate document. You should look at that viability gate document and see if you agree with it. See if you can do extended research with it. But it's your first draft. It's your first thing out of the gate that has the ability to say yes or no and here's where you need to go.

23:16 Okay. So it doesn't have enough information. So it's asking me questions. What should standard be zero be built as? Let's call it slack typescript and slack. How far should this scaffold go? Let's go to the gate first and then pause because if the gate says no, then what what are we doing? Submit our answers. All right, let's see what it says.

23:50 So, it's gone off and done some crawling, some competit competitive research as we saw, and it's trying to figure out if this is worth it. I've read some of the the I've read some of the stuff it comes up with for the market research and it's really good. It will do a real basically as high quality as perplexity will do to go look for whether there's a space for you.

24:21 Okay. >> And does this apply only to new products or what about like features for existing products? That's a really really good question. So because we realize you know a lot of vibe coders will say I could never build before I need to build. So this is perfect for that. when I started the first demo of code memo I used these skills to do it but really most PMs don't start brand new projects.

24:53 So we have features for them. So for example, this is called the vet a feature. I have a feature idea. Should I even bother building it? I have opportunity cost of other feature ideas. And so this particular skill will take a feature idea and tear it apart. Look for anti- patterns, confidence. So it's like a scaffolding skill, but very specific for a feature within a product. and I think this one is actually even more interesting because this one actually focuses very hard, not just on the lane, but whether it's worth building at all amongst other features you have. So the sharp problem test is baked in really hard into this.

25:42 >> So the key lesson here for any PM is like create a skill like veta feature. You can grab OG's which we're going to link down below in the description. But fundamentally, you need to work with LLMs to actually figure out is this a problem worth solving? Is this the right problem space? And before we used to do that all by ourselves or skip that step entirely. And this is really helping us have a thought partner make sure we actually do it every single time.

26:09 >> That is correct. That is correct. We we want you to think about the full stack of the problem. again business product and code together. you know when you work in triads or quads or whatever that is because of the people around you you are if you're lucky thinking about all those things together and you're like is this worth solving as a PM and the the the developer is like oh here's how we're going to do it and the product marketing is like here's how we tell the story I'm going to go off and do research. What we're doing is compressing all that into one really smart orchestrator and builder can get started really fast. It doesn't mean you don't need specialists, by the way. Big companies always need specialization. That's a given. But in small startups, in smaller companies, and even as you scale up to big companies, the ability for people to one person holding a critical skill, say product, to really have agents that help them with the first draft of these things is incredibly powerful.

27:13 >> Quick thought experiment for you. Is there anything in this video you should be trying on your own? If there is, try it. Take a screenshot, post it on LinkedIn X, and tag me. I'd love to see what you're learning. Now, a quick word from our sponsors before we get into the back half of the pod. I used to think I had a retention problem. Turns out I had a messaging problem. I was sending the same onboarding emails to every new user, whether they activated on day one or never logged in again. I had no idea who was slipping or why.

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28:59 You're going to get personalized feedback and one-on-one mentorship sessions with my co-teers, Ankit Fermani, who is an AIPM at Atlassian and was a group product manager at Meta, Prasad Ready, who is a CPO and has been in product for over 26 years, as well as my other live instructor, Bar Jorski, who's going to run another 90-minute session per week where we really help you deliver on all of the deliverables in an actionable way and get you custom resume feedback, custom LinkedIn feedback. This program worked extremely well in cohort number one, which is just finishing up. 40% of the cohort got a job before the cohort even ended. We got jobs at places like OpenAI and Enthropic. So, if you want to get a higherp paying PM job, be sure to check out my landp.com cohort. The next cohort starts in February, runs through the end of April. The next time I'm opening up a cohort is in May. So, if you want coaching from me to land a PM job, this cohort is a no-brainer. It is a premiumbumppriced product. It is more expensive than the average product out there, but the return is huge. Most people who join the cohort see a salary raise anywhere from $10 to $100,000 in the first year. And so the ROI will be there within a year. And we guarantee two plus interviews. So if you don't get two interviews after completing the 12-week program and following all the steps, we will refund the money to you.

30:20 So it's a no-brainer. Check it out at landpob.com. And now back into today's episode. Do you know how to take an AI product from idea to development to evaluation to deployment and eventually to scale? That's exactly what product faculty's AIPM certification helps you do. I even took the course myself. You'll learn directly from Rohan Varma, the product lead working on codecs at OpenAI. You'll go deep into AI prototyping, evaluations, agents, AI native workflows, cloud code, open claw, latency, cost, guardrails, rag, routing, fine-tuning, and production systems.

30:56 You'll even build your own AI product as your capstone with unlimited one-on-one support. So, if you want to stop just learning AI and actually build AI products that work, join product faculty's AIPM certification on Maven. 5,000 plus students have graduated and they have 1,000 plus reviews. Use code AKOS550 to get $550 off your enrollment. >> So maybe we can turn over to the other one that's ran and you can show us like how you apply your PM judgment on top of what it's written.

31:28 >> Yeah. Okay. So that's a good point. So, I'm back in the first one and let me just make sure that it's done. So, I'm going to ask it to continue and share the final results in a table for me for me and so that we can know that it is done. Done.

31:59 And we're going to get out of So yeah, so here's the result. Okay, so it's done market research. It's decided what's viable quad structure. So the way to think about this now once you're here is to go back into this and start to take a look. I've worked with developers in the past who I had to insist that they actually do code review even if they're working with even if they're working with AI. And so the place you start first is these two documents, right? The other ones are sort of boilerplate. So I'm going to create some space here. So this is the market research document.

32:46 >> And then I think if we doubleclick, if you like two-finger click on the market research, >> Mhm. I think you can open as preview so it looks a little better, right? >> Okay, let's do that. >> There we go. Perfect. >> Okay. Well, you know a VS code trick that I don't. So that's that's good on you cache. All right. So, market overview. It sits at intersection of AI code. So look, I don't want to read through all this. What the first thing is to take this for yourself and for PMs, PM leads in your space and see if it covers all the ground that you need. the things to look out for is does it mention the kinds of tools you expect it to mention?

33:30 Well, these are a really good set for this kind of tool because these are your competitors. does it mention in each of these categories all the things that you wanted to mention? you take a sense check of these things like if it mentions tools that are old, tools that are not functional, tools that are sort of decrepit, you shouldn't you shouldn't trust it. If it mentions tools that are current adjacent things that you were thinking about as you were thinking about the problem but they didn't actually solve the problem for you then you are on the right track.

34:10 take a look at this differentiation map for example. Does it seem right? No. Yes. Where does code memor sit? Does it seem right for you? And so this is your first scan for credibility. Imagine that you are doing a a PRD review in a room full of PMs. This is what you essentially should be doing with this one. And then it actually writes a PRD for you. And so this is the real PRD review. So is the stuff in the market consistent with what it's writing for you. So let's scan this very quickly.

34:47 Code is now produced faster for anyone than anyone can read it. AI cogen has split authorship from understanding. The person who wrote an app via prompts often cannot evaluate whether it's safe, correct, or production ready. This bites two groups hard. Solo founders ship AI jerk. They cannot audit. Corporate developers onto an unfamiliar codebase. So it came up with all this by itself. And if you stare at this and say, "Shit, I would invest in that. I would spend time on that. It nailed exactly what I want." Or you should be asking yourself what did it miss? What persona did it miss? For example, what I notice here is that it says the primary is a nontechnical founder. Makes sense. Small company.

35:35 Sure. it's probably not a big company founder though, right? They have more resources, more tools. So I'm glad that it said nontechnical founder but it didn't qualify it by the size of the company for example it sort of doesn't think the corporate developer is the strongest thing right Antony who needs evolving story but it's simply out of scope to protect focus that's makes sense I guess but I I read the output and it was it mentioned that it's much lower value proposition for the corporate developers because they have so many more tools to do these things. And so the vibe coder is a real target for this value proposition. Paste a GitHub URL, upload a vioded folder, and in under a minute get a plain English verdict on whether the code is production safe. So this starts to tell us that the value loop is really good, is really powerful. Okay? Right. And so I would scan this and see is this the kind of highle product brief I would write? What's missing? what's missing if I wanted to present it to other people.

36:44 And that's how to evaluate this. >> Cool. Let's go take a look at the other agent and see if what it did with our other idea. >> Okay, let's do that. So, let's step back here. It looks like it is still crunching through the viability gate. So, let's go to that folder. And you can see it's called standup zero here and it is crunched through the viability accept accept viability assessment and so scorecard. So it's weak, right?

37:34 >> So this is the real sort of alpha from using a skill like this. It's going to help you separate out which features or in this case we showed new products that you should be building and shouldn't be building. >> Yeah. So here it says there were three moderate scores. So it's saying I'm not sure about this basically right. you should proceed with eyes open and then it goes into the details right clarity and urgency is moderate.

38:04 it's just workflow convenience. It's not very deep. target user definition isn't like isn't very strong for what I pasted in. the competitive landscape is very strong. This is actually a bad thing. There's a lot of competition here. And so it's calling out all these things for you. differentiation isn't very strong. So all all of this is basically pointing out to like it's going to be very hard for you to enter this market. It's not defensible for you.

38:34 everyone can build exactly what you're building. So if you really want to continue this, you should maybe pause and think about it. Basically, now I don't know about you, but I think that's worth a lot from start, right? This is you thinking hard about where you're going before you start thinking, I can write code. Because you know what we see today is people just build. People build and then there's no customer for it. There's nobody for it. In fact, it's super puzzling right now because it feels like GitHub is the only place that people can express themselves when they have claw code. They just build anything, put it on GitHub, and just languish with zero stars. If that makes any sense. Now, if you are someone who wants to make an impact in the world, this kind of thing will help you conserve your time, attention, and focus on all the right things.

39:32 >> So, where do we go from here? We promised that we'd help people become a builder PM. What's the next step once you've figured out the right idea? In this case, we're knocking out standup zero, but we're in favor of code memo. >> Yes. So, let's go back to code memo, right? And I think we get to tell it to continue. All right. Fantastic. So the next thing I would do is prototypes, right? And this is a fun one.

40:09 What should the code memo look like? Right. I want to establish the basic interaction model that delivers value. Can you first ask questions about user interacting with code memo and then we will generate a set of X prototypes to evaluate what direction to take this in.

41:01 Now, this is very compressed, right? Like you don't necessarily start with prototypes, but you do start with interaction like and by that I mean specifically does this have user experience? Does this is just is this just a chat interface talking to an agent? Like what does it look like? How do you instantiate it? And so, I'm going to ask it to use its survey skill to help me make the choices.

41:32 So, now that it says go, what I'm trying to do next is really to start to build a baseline of the code. start to build a baseline of a product. if you look at these skills, there a few directions you can take this in. For example, the interesting one that I would do right after this is the customer discovery week. Okay, I'm going to ask it to use this skill to tell me how to get to better confidence and to answer the unknowns. Okay. So, while it's doing that, I'll prep that question. So, I need you to develop my customer discovery plan by running the customer discovery week skills. So, on one hand, I'm trying to generate ideas of what the interaction is. On the other hand, I need to ask a bunch of questions. So, let's tackle the questions about the interaction model first. So, paste a GitHub URL.

42:46 so I don't like any of these. So, what I'm going to say is I think it's both one and two. So, I needed to paste the GitHub URL, but I'm going to connect it to GitHub because I need to analyze the code that I'm writing because I'm a VI coder. How's the verdict delivered on screen? This is a score. Single verdict card, narrative scroll, conversational chat. So, I think that it needs to be a dashboard and drill down. once the verdict is on screen, what should the user be able to do? Depth of engagement.

43:24 nope. I needed to I needed to do two and three. So, two and three. and four. Okay. In the first 60 seconds, this is interesting. It's getting to the aha. What was the core value the user came for? Two understanding. Submit those answers. All right.

43:54 I need to develop my customer discovery skill plan or in customer discovery skills on the product brief. and market research do this in parallel while finishing up. It's going to spin up a thread finishing up the interaction model. Okay, so I'm basically doing two things now. I'm grounding my sense of what interaction is and I'm going to launch additional research to really figure out if I fully understand the problem.

44:34 Now, I would ordinarily do the first one, the second one before the other, but I just wanted to demonstrate the two different ways. You can go straight to build or you can start to talk to customers about it. Okay. So what we're seeing is is summarizing the tension and so it's going to generate three self-contained HTML CSS prototypes. The skill itself tells it to do this prototype before you react. So it's going to go off now and it is going to basically start to write prototypes. So the last set of skills in the diagram we started with was really the business layer like is there a business viability we talked about in terms of new product for a feature there might be some more nuance there. Then this next layer is really that product layer right we're figuring out the prototypes what actually works and we're going to go through and find a prototype that might potentially actually demonstrate a viable solution so that we can test that. Is that right?

45:36 >> Yes. Can you still hear me? >> Yeah. Yeah. So, that's exactly right. We start out with the business problem. Is there a lane for us? Are we thinking about the customer correctly? There other business problems that you get to later. Pricing, access to market, what's your marketing plan? But what we're doing now is a product. is like what's my customer discovery so I can dig deeper into the problem. What does this even look like?

46:11 just for you know PMs you know we get this like as PMs we own usually usually we own why is this a thing that we spend time on as an organization what is it which is how does it instantiate what does it look like what does it feel like when it's solving the problem how does it generate delight and of course we share this with designers and so we're still early in that process is this prioritized by my CPO Assuming you're a VI coder, what won't we know?

46:45 what does it feel like? What does it look like? these are all the things that you take to developers. But what you have now is that because you're doing it all in one shot inside cloud code, you can compress all of that within one cloud code session. And you notice that we are not in cloud code desktop and co-work. You can do all this within one session. So what we have here is it's done some prototypes. What's that shortcut you you liked again? So while this is running in the background, I am going to show you some of the prototypes it's made. I really hope to God because we didn't install a lot a lot of design skills.

47:27 Can you see this? >> Mhm. >> Yeah. So it's made a few things for us to take a look at. The way you should think about this is prototypes. You should just get a feel. This isn't real design yet. This is definitely about where do you start? So here you see it. You paste in the GitHub thing here and it tells you the story of the code very quickly. here more of the same but more data logic up front. And here sort of a side panel where it does similar things.

48:04 So what I usually do when I start to work on these things is I will have in practice I'll have shad CN I'll have UI UX promax skills I'll have like I have like five or six design skills and I'll tell it to use one design skill to make a prototype. So if I have six design skills it will make six prototypes and I'll ask it actually because you can make hundreds and hundreds of prototypes. I'll ask it actually to combine two skills each. So it will make like six more skills but using two design skills at a time to do it and so I can see what this could look for us but all this is baked into the skill directly. I'm going to go back to cloud code right and share that screen again and then we'll take a look at the other task that we ask it to do. Okay so by the way it it's asking me about the interaction model I want. We're not going to spend time figuring that out yet.

49:06 so we decline that. So we're going to instead say the discovery plan agent finished. So it created a customer discovery plan for us. So we're going to go to docs and we're going to go to customer discovery plan and we're going to take a look at it. Okay. And it says the plan itself is complete and executable. script, the survey, the synthesis template and the week's time budget are below. What is missing is a one input of skill will not let a plan proceed. A confirmed list of recruitable people with real target cohorts not adjacent contacts from the founders network. The skill treats fewer than five real target contact as own validation signal. It means you may not have access to the market. Again, very important. it says you can't just wing this. You need actual people to talk to. if you tell me who they are, then I know that you're ready for this.

50:02 And so, what we can see here is the three-step interview process that it wants us to do. So, let's see. It tells you how to recruit, what the gates are, where to go shop for targets, the hypothesis you want to validate, step one, motivation. So, it walks through In the book, we talk about this three-step process where the first step is figure out what questions to ask.

50:36 Open-ended questions, no motivation, no direction, no prototypes whatsoever. So, it walks you through that. Tell me about, walk me through the last time. So, it's walking through people's workflows. And then step two is when you take those things and say, "Okay, I now think I have the questions I need to answer." and then it will codify those questions that you answer. So the first step you learn what questions to ask. The next one you use those questions to ask and then the third you expand it so it becomes data. So once you really solidify the questions you're asking you can start getting sample of the answers. You turn it into a survey so you can quantify the responses that you get. So it builds all this for you ready to go. In this case, it's saying, "Listen, you you you sound like you're still winging it. You need very specific people. Go find them and I will help you validate that you have a real customer discovery plan."

51:36 >> All right. So, what I'm really hearing from these skills is that they're forcing you to do the PM fundamentals. And what they're doing is they're giving you the first draft of those things. And >> to be a true builder PM, you need to be able to do this at engineering speed. And that's why we're relying on these skills. We're not just doing it hand as we did step by step in the past. >> Correct. So what we there's something we call the three-speed problem, which is for the past 40, 50 years, whatever you want to call it, the longest poll has always been development. and it's long in many ways. is it takes time to actually write quality code. It takes time to do quality. it takes time if you're in a cloud to make it robust not fail to do DevOps recover very quickly.

52:30 All of that is being cut down maybe by 10x maybe in 5 years by 20x. But really the process of building is not just code. It's like why should we build build it get it to customers. So if this middle speeds up very quickly you start to have almost an equation imbalance and the reason it's in balance is because the why should we build is customer bound. You have to talk to people. You have to talk to the market.

53:01 And the other side, access to the market, getting it into people's hands is also customerbound because you know, Antropic has shipped what maybe like 60 features in 30 days. They're becoming recursive. Correct. by the way, that's a whole other thing to talk about, which is how to build feedback into the skill. So, some of these skills build feedback deeply into the product automatically for you. and we're trying to refine some of those things. We haven't shipped that one, but I don't use like we were fussing with slash commands just now. I don't know all their slash commands. So, I can't actually absorb all the features that they make, right? It's li I'm limited by that. And so, you see them I don't know if our our audience knows this, but Claude cowork was just completely redesigned, right? They shipped it and it seemed amazing but there was low adoption and so they've just sort of blended it back into chat right a bit versus having three tabs code and chat because you just it didn't stand alone by itself. So people are having to not just ship very quickly but make sure they have the right thing. And by situating this in the same skill set that your developers use that you can learn very trivially.

54:28 you see a massive amount of speed up, right? Because this repo can be your developer's repo as well, right? It's not different right if your developer if your founder and your developer is working on this they can see all the business skills themselves they can run it themselves or you can run them right so we are seeing people essentially collapse the separation of tasks of PM live in notion designers live in Figma and collapsing it into one GitHub repo with everything and the coders will live here under source test all the security stuff playright test vi test you live up here but it's joint context in one repo for every member of the team who needs to touch this stuff and everything is always available to them at all times >> amazing if people want to go grab these skills can you show us where they can go grab Yes, I can at cache. So I am going to share different screen.

55:48 so one of the fun things we've done at product mind as we start to build is start to collect these things. Some of them are private. They're not available yet. But if you go to the labs of product mind.com, don't just ignore these things. This is not a monetizable site yet or at all. This is just to show the products that we can actually share from our engagements. But everything you've seen actually can be accessed more trivially through what we call skills.

56:24 So you can chat with it without going into cloud code. So that's the first thing. The second one and we have a lot of people you know who do this now. And the second one is a skills library. the skills are open source. So you can come here and you can browse through them, read them. Here you have the new project scaffolding, vet a feature, vibe memo. I'm very very excited about this one. Vibe memo is a simple system. We installed it that captures your decisions as you build. So right now when you write code, that's captured. but Vibe memo says capture the why. Why are we making these decisions in the code? So it keeps the why with all the decisions in the log for you. I find this very exciting. So every time we have a big code base, we want to take a look at why did we even make that decision. What were we thinking? Vibe member captures it. Sharp problem test reverse fee.

57:19 There's so many. Let me just point out a few more favorites. One is road map from strategy. So to construct a whole like strategy for you. another one is a listing machine. It will turn all the surfaces in your product into feedback tools that constantly collect information. these are things that people spend years and years trying to figure out. We build it into a skill that gets you started immediately. scope cutter, we all do this. We got to cut scope. And scope cutter gives you a very succinct way to reduce how much you do. There's even a simpler one which is once you want to build the first thing are you going to do an MVP which is just for learning or are you going to do an SLC which is actually to put in front of people for them to be amazed and how do you even do that and how do you cut and so on and so forth and of course advanced things like pricing like how should you design pricing all built in.

58:18 So again, business and product level skills that merge with code skills in one place for you to become hyperproductive. we think this is the new frontier. I think code skills alone are becoming p. the other day I saw someone remove superhuman skills from their repo because the models are so good. some of these skills are breaking. But these business skills, these product skills, these are still the things that give us the ability to build the right thing. So, I'm super excited about that.

58:51 >> And today we showed the harness as claude code in anti-gravity. Is there any particular reason you should be using anti-gravity or can you use any harness for cloud code? >> No, it's any harness. I don't even particularly So, anti-gravity is a fork of VS Code. so it looks a little bit like cursor. It looks like VS Code. It does. That's just what I have on my screen. I'm running through a terminal and so I actually don't use any features of anti-gravity. It's just, you know, it's a nice interface, but nothing special about it.

59:20 >> So, if you're a product leader, right, you go ahead and you download these skills, you make these skills your own, you distribute them to the team, the team is starting to use them. >> You are one of the few people who has actually helped teams do that. So you've gotten to see what are the mistakes that people make? What are the problems or the pitfalls in rolling out this new way of working that people should know about so that they can avoid them?

59:45 >> I think that the most important thing is shared context. You know, I heard Boris from Quad, right, talk about the fact that his quad.mmd is a very thin, it has only a few lines, maybe six lines. And what it's actually doing is that it's referencing a shared claude MD. Now, you should think about claude MD as some some kind of like base skill basically. And so centrally they author claude MD and optimize it like think about once a minute everything that everyone is learning is being put into that central cloud MD it's small it's short it contains essence it connects people to all the right tools within the organization so I think that the biggest lesson for putting this into an enterprise is don't let people fork these things willy-nilly, right?

60:54 For example, I was working with an enterprise that had a ways of working document and then they had a very specific SDLC that was supposed to produce very specific artifacts. Okay. What I would do in that situation is to take the relevant skills here for example the scaffolding skill or the vet a feature skill and I would harmonize it with what they need to come out of it. Why would our product brief be different from what the organization wants? It shouldn't be right. why would a market research document be different from what the product marketing team would produce or what they believe is right to produce?

61:40 And so we would essentially centralize this, modify it so that it creates artifacts that our organization needs and just prevent people necessarily from forking it themselves. Now to be clear, I like organizations where it's sort of open source and if people learn new things because you know the CPO doesn't know everything, you give people the license to innovate or if they innovate, they should innovate into a central place so everyone gets the innovation if that makes any sense. So I think that's the biggest thing is when AI rollouts are completely ungoverned in a way that doesn't have shared context because look at listen I think in science fiction we always sort of afraid of the hive mind right we're afraid of AIs collaborating because then they'll kill us but it turns out that we are the original hive mind the only reason that we've survived you know through the centuries as humans is because we learn from each other. And so this is very imperative when you roll out AI, try to force it into a a structure that one person learning means everyone has learned. That's one of the big powers of it.

62:52 >> OG, you've been generously shared these skill files. You guys can find the link in the description to this GitHub repo. As he said, you can make these your own. That's really the key. adding it in to make it your own and then deploying it as an open source repo for your team to use. This is the playbook. If you've been wondering, how do I become a more AI native team? How do I get my PM team to work at an engineering speed? We've just given all of that away for free.

63:20 Thank you so much for being here. >> Thank you, Aash. And I I hope people become even more effective product builders and hyper creators with the stuff that we've made. Super happy to share. >> I hope you learned as much from today's episode as I did. If you can do one thing that's totally free that would help the show, it would be to check that you're following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. Check that you've left ratings and reviews on those platforms.

63:47 Check that you're subscribed on YouTube. Leave a like and a comment on this video. and then share it with your friends. We're trying to make better and better podcasts. After 2 years, we think we've gotten something pretty good going. So, let us know what we can do to make it even better, who else we should interview, and we will put on the best shows we possibly can. Finally, don't forget my offer for the bundle. You get an entire year of my paid newsletter, plus my favorite AI tools.

64:14 Bolt, new, air table, speechify, descript, magic patterns, linear, dovetail, arise, and mobin. That's $27,000 worth of value for just $150. So check that out at bundle.acushi.com if it interests you. And I can't wait to share our next episode soon.

Summary

The discussion centers around the evolution of product management in the AI era, emphasizing the need for multi-skilled professionals who can integrate product judgment, coding, and business skills. Aji Udway, a seasoned product manager, showcases how leveraging AI tools can enhance product development processes, particularly through a new project scaffolding skill that streamlines market research, viability assessments, and project setup.

- The era of monoskilled professionals is over; product managers must now possess a blend of coding, product judgment, and business skills.
- AI tools can serve as first drafts for product ideas, but human oversight is essential to ensure quality and relevance.
- The scaffolding skill automates market research, viability assessments, and project documentation, allowing for faster decision-making.
- Effective product management requires a deep understanding of customer needs and market dynamics, which can be enhanced through AI-driven insights.
- The importance of shared context and centralized documentation in teams is highlighted to prevent siloed knowledge and ensure collective learning.
- AI tools should not replace human judgment but rather augment it, enabling product managers to work at engineering speed.
- The conversation underscores the necessity of continuous iteration and validation in product development, leveraging AI to streamline these processes.
- A collection of open-source skills is available for teams to adopt and adapt, promoting a collaborative and innovative approach to product management.

Questions Answered

What does the future of product building look like?

The era of monoskilled professionals is over, and the future of product builders involves multi-skilled individuals who can leverage AI tools like LLMs for initial drafts and problem-solving.

What are the common challenges faced by product managers and developers?

Product managers often struggle with market research and handing off projects to developers, particularly in ensuring proper architecture and testing processes.

How can LLMs assist in product management?

LLMs can serve as thought partners for product managers, helping to validate whether a problem is worth solving and ensuring comprehensive consideration of business, product, and coding aspects.

Why is planning important before starting to code?

Many developers jump into building without understanding customer needs, leading to wasted effort. Proper planning helps focus on valuable projects and conserve resources.

What is the three-speed problem in product development?

The three-speed problem refers to the imbalance in the development process, where coding speed is increasing rapidly while understanding customer needs and market access remain slower.

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