Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Anthropic’s first technical PM on token maxing, the jagged edge, and living in the future | Dianne Penn
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In 2023, when I started, nobody said anthropic and clawed and coding in the same sentence. I want to go back to the beginning of anthropic. I remember feeling, man, these guys have no chance. Opening eyes so far ahead. By the time I saw people were starting to use these models, not just for code, auto-complete, but actually writing long-form code and set an opportunity for us to train Opus 3 to be better at. That was the inflection. I always think about Opus 4.5 a year later during winter break when everyone was home able to code. What was magical about Opus 4.5 is we also now not just had a model, but a vehicle, a great product experience like clawed code. Opus 4.5 wouldn't have had that moment without a product like clawed code. And clawed code wouldn't have had that type of adoption accelerated without Opus 4.5. I want to talk about how the product role is changing. For my team, the way to drive user value is to figure out the right user feedback. The evals, we actually have a saying on the team, evals are the new PRDs. Something Gary Tan's been talking about. If you're willing to spend $100,000 a year right now in tokens, you're living the way somebody in 2028 is going to live. You have to sweat the tokens as much as you sweat the pixels. You have to be using the models to come up with good and great and better ideas. And there's no substitute for that. People need to be more ambitious with AI tools these days because they're just capable of so much. One thing I ask the team is, let's say clawed, eight comes around. What changes in what users do? What does that mean for how you're building today? Today, my guest is Diane Penn, petoproduct for the AI research and labs teams at Anthropic. She joined Anthropic as the first technical product manager over three years ago, which is a lifetime in AI time. When the product team was just five engineers, she's helped ship every model at Anthropic from clawed to through fable. She's also helped incubate and launch clawed code, MCP skills, clawed design, and also core capabilities like computer use, tool use, and reasoning. It is always such a treat and so mind-expanding to get to talk to someone who's at the very center of AI and product management. It's hard to imagine someone who has seen more of where things are going than the head of product for Anthropic's research and lab teams. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lenniesproductpass.com for a year free of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Diane Penn. Diane, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Lenny. It's so nice to see you again. I want to go back to the beginning of Anthropic. The early days. I remember when Anthropic first launched.
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