This CPO Uses Claude Code to Run his Entire Work Life | Dave Killeen, Field CPO @ Pendo

Cloud code just used a $2.5 billion run rate and people are using it to build personal operating systems that run their life. So I run one command in morning and five minutes later I know what deals need attention. Who I'm meeting, what I owe them and what they owe me. And I didn't gather any of it, the system does it all for me. You've had a human executive assistance. You say this is better? Yeah, it never forgets anything. It never needs to be brought up to speed and operates at the speed of our conversation. Everything compounds, all the files get smarter and smarter. They're living files. The more you dance with them, the more you so they become for you and your AI. Dave Kooley. He has worked at BBC Mail Online and now he is the field chief product officer at the PM Giant Pendo.io. With the last couple of four weeks everything shifted so much with Anthropic and OpenAI now as of this week. That is just your up-minded always now racing with lots of other things you can be doing and building a barn and this was crazy time. The mobile app that I have was built in 37 minutes. I spent more time in Exko trying to get it published onto the phone but the whole guts of it was there. It is crazy, Akash. Wow. So we're hyping it up. I have to ask you what's overhyped, versed underhyped in AI tooling. Before we go any further, do me a favor and check that you are subscribed on YouTube and following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. And if you want to get access to amazing AI tools, check out my bundle. Where if you become an anal subscriber to my newsletter, you get a full year free of the paid plans of Robin, Arise, Relay App, Dovetail, Linear, Magic Patterns, Deep Sky, Reforge Build, Descript and Speechify. So be sure to check that out at bundle.akash.g.com and now into today's episode. Dave, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Akash. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm lucky for showing everyone how I'm using Cloud Code. Let's not waste any time. Dave, can you share your screen and show us what happens when you wake up in the morning and open Cloud Code? Hey there, can we do a daily plan for the day today please? Thank you. Love you. Always say love you because I do think it changes how we feel about our AI, particularly when we're using voice to text. Okay, so what's the night going to do? It's going to go through and pull everything together. So we have a daily plan command here that's baked in with a whole bunch of goodness, which I'll talk about in a second after it pulls everything together. And it's looking at a whole bunch of material. So we've got my calendar, which is connected. It's looking at my weekly goals. It's looking at my quarterly goals. And literally the kitchen sink and pulling everything together. It pulls in all sorts of data coming from say, "Clarer, your sales forecasting tool coming in from Grenola, all from Grenola, all meetings from Grenola come in 30 minutes after the meetings happened." And everything gets pumped in here. You can see down here the bottom, YouTube, Intel, LinkedIn, Intel, email, newsletters, a whole bunch of stuff now is coming through. I will have a daily plan page in a second. Wow. What are we looking at here? What happens this? I'm not familiar with that. This app here is cursor and where I'm doing my work at the moment. And to be honest with you, cursor is a great place to start for people because what you have here is it's a development environment for the engineers typically, but we're seeing a North-Floor people coming into cursor now at do non-engineering work. And particularly I'm kind of creating own personal operating systems because essentially it's just a bunch of text files, right? So if you look over here on the left-hand side, I'll just expand it. And there's a whole bunch of noise over here. But quite frankly, I don't even need to know where anything is. But over here, I'll have, let me just go up to the top here. You'll see whole power system here in a second, inbox projects, et cetera, et cetera. I never look at any of it. I just trust that the AI knows where to find things. But essentially I cash everything to text file and that's what's so good about it. Everything's a markdown file actually, which is even better for the AI to dance with. So everything comes in as markdown files, appended to existing files are new files are created and the AI is able to do its dance and its shenanigans with you. And you mentioned that it's connected to all these systems. How are they connected? I've used MCP connections, API connections. To do what I do, MCP is better for AI than the APIs. And so sometimes if I'm trying to get an integration as I was doing recently with Flare, our sales forecasting tool here, Pendo, I'll just go to the API documentation. I'll tell Claude True Voice, hey, can you have a look at the API documentation for this? I've got an API key for you, creating an MCP server. The reason an MCP server is great for this is because actually access better guardrails for the AI to do a more effective dance with the content and bring it in in any way you want. So you could just literally go in and point at API documentation, go, hey, look, we've got this pkm system here right now, like knowing what you know of having read the API documentation, how can we make it even better? Like, what could we do? How can we go to town with this? And literally it comes back to you and just to deny to you with lots of other use cases that you might not necessarily afford of because it's literally just ingested all the API documentation into your system for you so I can actually then guess some sense of how to build more value for you on top of what you already have. Awesome and we obviously see that you're not typing, you're talking. So what are you using for voice detects? Yeah, I've been a fan for super whisper for about three years now, but actually recently now whisperflow.ai, I've come on the market, they've got a whole ton of funding about 18 million and so it's concretely I'm going that way because I've got a whole team, a massive team behind it, rather than super whisper, it's just a one person company right now and I'm finding I'm getting a lot more out of whisper flow. Whisper flow is kind of just press a button, talk to it and then it just gives you back what you need and super whisper is really interesting because it has these different modes so you can have a mode for giving feedback on a Google doc, a mode for writing an email, a mode for a Slack message and essentially it knows what software it's in and it's able to invoke that mode. Each mode has its own prompt essentially saying hey take whatever I've said and turn it into a short Slack message and pull a suitable emoji into it so you can craft those modes at super whisper which is quite cool and but yeah it depends how much you want to lean into either of those two tools but whisper flow seems to be now the one that has the most adoption. Yeah, but I made the same switch just recently back over to whisper flow. So let's take a look how did this daily plan come in do? So here's our daily plan or the one I have and you can tell this however you want to but essentially it comes up in my three things that matter today I've just redacted some of the information here which is what's so nice about working with something like this it's like it's malleable software right you know I've got in here and said look how the hell do I show a pkm system to Akash and that's a lot of people without revealing anything sensitive for Pendo and I said look if there's any company names any people any projects are sensitive any dollar data just redacted for me and it's done it right this is how easy it is now to try and work with this software just tell it what you want tell it what you want improved and it just does it right so anyway back to the daily plan we have three things for the day it's looking at my quarterly goals that I have in here in hand pushing forward on all of that gives me weeks my weeks priorities which have set at the start of the week and then what my day should be and then it even offers up then to book that time out in my diary if I want to so that's pretty cool and then it's looking now at some of the accounts that we have here Pendo and where my help as field cp might be needed because it's listening to all of our conversations with customers and is pointing out for me at least where I need to be leaning in I can't be a course 45 enterprise deals every single week and what's happening at the nuance of all those deals but it can for me and then say hey look you might want to reach out to one of the team here it even writes me the slack message to send to the team so it really is quite powerful right youtube intelligence looks at all of that gives me a summary I don't want to be listening to a hundred youtube channels I can't quite frankly no one can and so all I do is I have it say hey look what's new novel in contrarian and then tell me what I should be looking at and cluster all that across not just youtube but newsletters as well so that's pretty cool LinkedIn I'm doing a lot about reach up as soon LinkedIn either any people that I should be connecting to that have reached out to me and that are maybe even connected to existing accounts here Pendo and so again just to clarify this is actually accessing your LinkedIn messages cross reference thing that against your CRM to understand who you should be responding to absolutely I use a tool called phantombuster for that and it's helpful for me to pull that through and yeah it's working really nicely now so it helps me keep on the front foot and make sure that I'm mindful of you know key people I might otherwise miss right and then down here then yeah market intel signal from just other newsletters right I've got like 120 newsletters and everything will comes in here in tazby here's why this matters here's what you should be thinking about and here's why it's different here's the contrarian novel angle it's just such a breath of fresh air wow we have karpathy said recently like it's just so hard right more than ever before to keep on top of what's going on out there and so having some system like this that you can just have a chat and craft and then have these cron jobs essentially automations that run for you is just bonkersly helpful here's my twitter pulse I mean there's more information hidden outside the daily page so if I want to go a deep dive into anything on twitter that's coming through that's really interesting that strong signal I can do that as well and then here's some messages then to send to some people where I'm behind on tasks and this craft of those messages for me as well wow and it looks like it's even pulled in your analytic status so you have it connected to every system basically that you have access to in pendo everything and anything that I can get my dirty grubby hands on that have an API I create an mcp server for and I bring it in the problem you know that everybody has right in particularly in larger organizations but typically just generally right we've got so many tools that are disposal and you're running around like a headless chicken losing your state of flow to kind of pull the content out and the best thing about you know mcp and why pendo is created the mcp for pendo is that we can let our customers bring that data in mashup with other data and create other assets with that data everything comes to you on your terms how you need it and when you need it and that's the power of mcp for me all right and you just did this as a slash command so I imagine you've created this as a daily plan skill is that right absolutely it's about a 60 I think skills in here at the moment that no one to kick in and all comes part of decks which is this open source tool that I put out there so one of the skills actually is called an x-ray skill which I'll show you now so let me show you that and the idea is that decks are something the house people get the work done more effectively and but also at the same time educates you as well about the underlying principles what's making decks possible so right now if I go in here going how the hell that daily command or daily plan come together I'll just go in here with voice and go hey can you just tell me how the daily plan command actually works give me an x-ray on that please thank you love you and then in that goes and it's now going to give me an x-ray if knows that there's an x-ray skill in here whose job essentially is to pull the curtains back out gosh and create mermaid diagrams show you how everything's coming together show you what aspects of Claude code hooks it's using and essentially teaching you so that you're then able to make decks your own And so the idea is that by dancing in here every day with your own personal work, you're able to not just get your work done faster, but learn AI fluency at a far quicker type. Today's episode is brought to you by Pendo. One of those product management softwares that I've been using for nearly a decade now, which started with things like analytics, but now is much more. It has agent analytics so you can measure how your agent deployments are doing internally. It has churn prediction so that you can proactively understand this user is about to leave. Let's go take some action. It has guides. It has pretty much everything a product management team might want. So if you want to take your product management team from the old way of working, to the new way that we're showcasing in this episode, be sure to book a demo for Pendo. Use the link in the description. If you're a big enterprise account in Amia, you might even get Dave on the call and now back into today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Jura product discovery. If you're like most product managers, you're probably in Jura tracking tickets and managing the backlog. But what about everything that happens before delivery? Jura product discovery helps you move your discovery, prioritization, and even road mapping work out of spreadsheets and into a purpose built tool designed for product teams. Capture insights, prioritize what matters, and create road maps you can easily tailor for any audience. But because it's built to work with Jura, everything stays connected from idea to delivery. Used by product teams at Canva, Deliveroo, and even the economist, check out why and try it for free today at Atlassian.com/Product-Discovery. That's atlassin.com/Product-Discovery. Jura product discovery. Build the right thing. New Year's Cloud from the cursor agent. So you're actually not using cloud in the terminal, which a lot of people are scared about. You're just using cursor's chat. For the purpose of this demo, because I can show other files, I'm actually using cursor. But actually, what I spend a lot more time in now is in the terminal itself, because one cloud has is a has these things called cloud code hooks, which we can come onto in a second, but get invoked at various different parts, different times in your conversation. So one that's really valuable for me and fundamentally shifts how I get value out of Dex is a session start hook. So every time you go into a new session, the session start hook is able to essentially pull in other context into another wise MT context and MT chat. So it can pull in my weekly priorities. It can pull in my projects. It can pull in learnings, mistakes that we've made together, and it injects that into make sure those learnings don't happen again. So therefore, the more you dance with something like Dex in terminal, it actually compounds its brilliance over time. So I spend more my time in terminal because on topic, make those features available with terminal rather than with encircers, probably because of some kind of strategic positioning out imagine. But yeah, you get far better use out of this when you are in terminal compared to a compared to cursor. Got it. So we were looking at this daily plan and it was going to tell us about what it actually works. What did it result in? What are you going to do instead? I got to issue the x-ray command itself. Okay. Yeah. The promise of skills is that they'll get invoked, but actually you generally need to use a slash command or say use x skill. Exactly that. Okay. So here is the x-ray command and action we've asked it to tell us how the daily plan is being pulled together. And the x-ray skill itself has been told to like do its storytelling through mermaid diagrams, right? So if I just pull this up here, you can get some sense of how that is working. Bit of a bug in terms of display here, but I type and then it will check yes, it is a review. It will read all of the intel digest, generate what's missing, pull structure dated together from the mcp and then from there will give you what you need. So there's a whole bunch of stuff in here where it's pulling in these files and so essentially what it's going to do is going to see before it does its daily plan what files have already been populated. So has it actually done its intel on LinkedIn, on Twitter and bought all that stuff in? If it hasn't, it will then execute it. So that means itself is really helpful to get everything pulled in every day. And then the next stage then it will then pull in all of my commitments, all my tasks, my weekly priorities and again, all that then gets injected into every fresh chat, which is fantastic. Awesome. What is the next command you might be running with cloud code in your day? So now we pull the daily plan together. We now have a plan for the day. What I'll then do is have a quick look to see if any of my counts have moved over the last 24 hours with the A.E. team here at Pendo. So I'll go in and do the following. Can you give me a health score please for the accounts? Thank you. And that will then invoke the next skill, which is a health score skill. And so you'll see that all come together in a second. So this is another skill that you've created health score. So part of the key to an operating system is having these compounding skills that Dave is talking about. Create a first draft with AI. You prompt it. You keep improving those skills. And now he has an account health score skill that you guys are going to see the output. I'll pull up the pre-count. Can you pull up the pre-count skill for the health score please? Okay. Okay. And my second skill for the day then is just having a quick check across all the deals that need my head tension, where the health of those accounts are at, what I need to be doing, what I need to be leading into and how I need to be helping the team really, really helpful having this. And it means then I can just focus on where I'm most needed. But I don't have to wait for people to come to me. I can proactively lean in and do that myself. So we've just looked at the account health scores. Now how do you bring in more external information to help us understand what to do? Yeah. So what I've done is I've created another skill which basically looks at runs a command, runs a search against a GitHub API every morning. And then we'll pull in any repos that it finds which connects to the DEX PKM system. And so what I got here now in front of you that can see here is it ranks everything right? It's ranking it based on its level of enthusiasm. It's telling us how it would be actually useful for something like DEX. So what I was calling out here is a screenpipe and GitHub repo which basically looks at your screen and is able to figure out like pick up other sentiment and other actions you might not have put into your system for you. Big controversial people want screenpipe running and something like DEX. So it haven't done anything with it just yet. But the idea here is you've got a whole bunch of repos that is pulling in and is telling this is why we might want to be using this for DEX and how we could use it, which is fantastic. Right. And then what I got separately then I got a DEX backlog. There's another command in here and what that will then do is collect my ideas that I'm coming up with and then rank it based on impact alignments token efficiency or that kind of gobbins and then it will then take ideas also from the AI as well and then have a scoring competition essentially between myself and the AI. And then any of these ideas that I want to flesh out on I can just basically pick this up throw it into a chat and then have the whole thing fleshed out into PRD, handed over to the AI and then have the whole thing then built. Wow. Can we see that? To from here to what we have raw to a PRD. Okay. So let's just pick up this idea here. It's idea number three and then I'm going to ask DEX to work on it. I have no idea what it's going to come up with, but let's give it a go. Okay. From the DEX backlog, can you work on idea number three please and come up with a PRD for me? I want you to think about how you can make us absolutely brilliant. 10X it. Don't settle for anything mediocre. Think about something that will make this brilliantly serendipitous massively delightful. And I always by the way, Akash feel like just keep pushing and pushing and pushing it on your prompt and make it really emotional and it really responds. I find particularly, it's 4.6. It gets quite excited with you when you really kind of push itself. Let's go with this and see what we have. It's going to take everything by the way. I have to sit to you. So I'll get rid of that. Okay. And it did it did it did it did it did it. Okay. Let's do this. This is my favorite part and I'm curious as a field CPO, are you writing PRDs? Are you getting that close to the ICPM work? No, no. I think with AI, it's all about the taste, right? I mean, you could go to town and go, okay, implement the entire backlog here. That's just Frankenstein territory, right? You have to have some sense that this is something that would be worthwhile. But also, it takes when it comes to the AI coming back to you and saying to you, here's what we think we could be doing and really spotting that element of brilliance from it. And so really for me, you're just judging at a very, very high level. And then of course, it comes into the UI side of things and you really need to lean in there. But there's a whole bunch of fantastic applications like magic patterns, AI that lets you then take that PRDs, throw that in there and it will come up with a fantastic UI for you. So very much and far less than I used to be doing over the last 25 years for sure being in the weeds, but it's fantastic. You're just orchestrating everything and orchestrating this sense of taste and delight, which is brilliant. One of the analogies I've been giving before is it's a bit like we're all Michelin, our HFs are restaurants, right? Our Michelin star restaurants and we're not in the kitchen doing all the gobbins, we're literally just, we design the menu and we have the AI chefs in the kitchen doing it for us. I think that's where we're all at right now. Brilliant. So three year of magic patterns pro if you sign up for Acres is bundle. All right, so with wait for us to come through and then we can just cut all those gobbins out. So it's fun to see actually what the AI is building because it's very thorough. People are used to, hey, the first time I prompted Chad GPD for a PRD in 2023, it was a garbage output. But when you're prompting it for a PRD inside your operating system that has all your contacts, that has all your MCP servers, you can see it's doing a very careful job of using all of that information. It's fantastic. I think the challenge you're in the pubbing, Acres is that you end up having so many PRDs that are kind of being cooked up and where we get to and you see this one next quite a lot being talked about is a sense of nearly overwhelmed in a way because you go back into it and you're juggling like, you know, many parallel agents at the same time, many PRDs are kind of in flight and it becomes, you know, just difficult to stay on top of everything. What was we were doing 10 minutes ago? It's a cognitive overhead becomes difficult, but I can show you in a second one thing I've been building essentially as a can-band board. So I know have all of my PRDs, I can see what I've shipped and when I go into each of the cards, it has the PRD in there and I just press play, right? The AI even ranks everything for me and says, this is what we should be doing next to move this forward. And so again, it comes back to this whole concept of malleable software that you can just go, I've got a pain point here like, how do I solve this? And straight away now it's built me a can-band board system that I can then manage everything with a kind of a calmer state of mind and a more focused state of mind as well. And people might be listening to this and saying, okay, it's automating our job away. We're one step away, but. I think the key point here is even if you have awesome cooks in the kitchen, you still need the head, Michelin chef, exercising taste. So while we're giving you guys a lot of tools to create infinite slop, it's your goal to then figure out how do I refine that slop, find the good stuff, finesse the good stuff and only present that out to your teammates. And not be shy to say, hey, team, here's a PRD. I created it with a hate so that they don't suddenly say, oh, he's putting a stamp on this slop. Agree. Agree. And I also have the AI come back to you and grill you, right? I did something of the day where I've been adding in all these other skills and people feeding back from, you know, early use of decks like, there's a lot of skills in here, Dave. Like, you know, and it becomes overwhelming to remember everything. And I had the AI kind of look at the entire code base and go, just grill me on this. And I said, Dave, like, you're building a system more for yourself than for others. It was brutal tonight, right? And I said, you're probably true. You know, I've never really software before really to do that like this. And so it came back as a, this is what we need to do, Dave. You know, we need to tidy all this up. We're going to do it. It's literally being this fantastic sparring partner for me, but holding me to account. And, um, and so yes, and now my Claude MD file has a bunch of these, but it calls harsh toos for Dave that is injected into my Claude MD file to say, there's a bit of a shit show going on here. We need to tidy this up. So every time again, I dance with the AI in a new chat, Claude MD file gets invoked. And it knows that we actually have to be conscious of this sprawl element that we've had. And the last week or two. So it's, um, yeah, you're right. We need taste, but also use the AI to kind of just hold us to account. Uh, and I think that's a hugely effective when you start leaning into it that way. So while the PRD is generating, can we take a look at that, Claude MD file? Yep. Let me pull it up. You know, and that trick guys that he's doing their open preview, make sure you do that because it's a pain to look at marketing files with all of those. It sounds dimples. Annoying cursor. It's actually on their forums. You'll see me on the forums, winging about it every month. Then why they can't fix it. But there used to be a setting that by default would open up in preview. Anyway, but yeah, yeah, don't and then D. So here is the Claude MD file. All right. So it's got the Dex product identity. It's got this really important better. How to spar with me, right? You know, stress test against the ICP Dex is for people who are not engineers. Check the bloat radar. Right? Is it replacing something or is it one more thing? You know, and it's just really, really, really good here. And then there's a whole bunch of the call it with Claude progressive disclosures. So you don't want your Claude MD file to be too big. You want to be nice and short, but then to act as a map to go off and springboard for the AI into other files where it might need it. And that keeps them performance quite tight and quite quite effective. There's a whole bunch of behaviors. There's a whole bunch of work in progress, a whole bunch of like how I just basically want to be dancing with the AI every time I have a new session with it. The Claude MD file is good. It's not always adhered to. And that's why I think you know, the Claude MD file is good guidance, but that's why having session start hooks with Claude code is super effective because it means that actually you start that session and it always adheres to whatever is in that session start hook and every single time. But this is a good principle to have always lean into your Claude MD file. Always when you're in Claude, like go back into Claude into the AI and say, look, can you just let's do an audit, right? You've got my whole system here. Do an audit on my Claude MD file, tidy it up, figure out how we can do progressive disclosure to make it more efficient. Tell me like, you know, what of it we can move into maybe a session start hook, for example, if we're in terminal for Claude code, just have the AI guide you on how to make everything optimal and they're off to the races. And one thing I will warn you guys because I've done hundreds of iterations on my Claude MD file push to GitHub so that you have a version controlled version of your Claude MD file because there have been many times that I've seen a regression in my Claude MD file performance and I want to revert back and you're only going to have that if you're pushing to GitHub. So it's completed the purity. Can we take a look at that and honestly judge it? So look at it. Okay. So it's, okay, got some dependencies. It's recognized that there's some other stuff. And by Toby, the founder of Shopify came out with something quite good, which is called QMD, which is a repo on GitHub that allows you to have a token efficient search within your, within your laptop, essentially. And so I've been playing around with that at the moment. So it recognizes that there might be some overlap with this particular capability that we've already worked with. Vision statements, good problem statements. Is the CPO, if some PM on your team gave you this BRD, what would you rate it? Right now there's nothing commercial on it, which is missing, but next is open source. So arguably that's why not. But I want to know strategically commercially, like what are we doing here, rather than kind of fixing a pain point for a user? What exists today? This is good, right? Because it's telling you that the last thing you'll only be doing is the CPO is kind of having your team increase more blow into the system. So saying there are other things that we can actually leverage, which is great. Other components QMD just mentioned. It's good starting point, but you might want to kind of use this as a way to kind of just get it tied to what those metrics actually are, how you're measuring it, what the baseline is, if it's improving on a feature, non-goals, that's good. So overall it feel like it's a strong first draft, but it needs editing. Let's pretend we've edited it. How do you talk to about this con-run board feature? Can you show us that? We just on that point about it being a strong first draft. To be honest, what I've been doing over the last few weeks is not even going into priorities. I'm just accepting it. Literally, I'm vibe CPO-ing or whatever, right? Because typically it just is on the money, and the AI is able to work out the edge cases and build things for you. So I want to even waste time going into PRAD to balance with you. I'm in a luxurious position. I'm building software, which doesn't connect to anything else commercially, but typically it is good. So I would just try and play build things yourself away from work and see how those PRADs that are given to you are actually good enough to start building with. Let me pull up this system. So let me show you what I've been doing. A lot of people are saying to me, I don't want to be in cursor, I don't want to be internal but I really like the idea of having files on my computer, like the AI can dance with. So I went in, I spent three hours last week, literally three hours, and I said, "Can you create me this experience where I can actually access these files in a web UI?" And it's built it, right? And so that's what this is. I'm currently working on it, and it's good. It's quite concierge-like. It's telling me what I need to be doing next, all like a kind of govins. And then the piece that I was getting crazy for me was all of these ideas, all the backloaf that you just saw recently earlier is too much, right? So now I've got all of these ideas here. Everything's in here. It's all ready to go. The parody that you saw will be in here, right? That's the one we just had here a second ago. It's even scored it in terms of points. Right? It's crazy. I mean, I'm just adding features in and it's being really, really helpful for me to get some sense of like, "What should I be working on next?" I'll just go down here, have a chat with me, go, "Go build." And then when it starts building, I then pick up something else. "Go build, go build." And so you have these things I'm working together in parallel, I should say, with the building separately. Again, this whole idea of malleable software is so effective because I was like, "This is my pain. This is what I need. Can you design it?" It doesn't look pretty. I can fix that with magic patterns and quite our magic path later on. But it's brilliant. It's really, really, really helpful. And what are we looking at here? What software is this? This is just like sitting on a local host, right? Oh, and it says all kind of react. And that's what it is. And I might build like maybe an electron, I might use it. You could do it that way. I'm thinking I might have maybe a mobile app, right? But the thing is all I need to do is go in and have a chat and the whole thing is built. I spent more time in Xcode trying to get it, you know, published onto the phone, but the whole guts of it was there. So it is crazy, I cash what you can do now. You just have the chat, have your taste, and then guide it along. Make sure you don't have too much in here on the left. I do have the moment. I need to kind of go through a heavy purge and all of this. But like I say, build the software for however you work and it's just brilliantly effective. Today I was like doing an article and I was kind of work with AI to kind of edit it for me. And it just turned the article into complete mess. And so that's all I second, let's build it up. And so now I actually something similar to one, I can show you here. So I can go in here. Imagine this is the article. I go into edit mode here and I go in, highlight this and I basically annotations say, I don't want this piece in here. I change it. For my annotations generally imagine this was like a YouTube summary of something or my Intel digest coming through from, you know, market movement. I can go in here and go, oh, this is really interesting here. Let me just go in and just annotate this and when I annotate this and give it a tag, I can then chat with my tags, show me like the key metrics I've seen externally, competitively that I've been tagging for the last. I mean, not might not be for everybody, but as how I like to work and then I can just chat with that subset of content, right? Create content based off of it, create a report based off of it, whatever I might want to do. But you have this way now of dancing with your thoughts as they come through as you form them. And that for me is like the art and this is idea of me being able to build the software for however I want to work and play with it and go out. But you know, actually it's too much. Taylor, please, you've got that freedom. It's just so, so sexy. Love it. So we've walked through you guys the daily plan, the PRD creation, the clawed MD, the con one board. This is the life cycle of a lot of the PM work we're going to do, but we promised you an operating system. An operating system is also going to help you with your career, with your goals. Can you show us how the operating system can help with that? So what I'm going to pull together now is just to show you how the career planning piece works. So what we do is we're very, very good at shipping features all of that. And but we don't really look after our own personal room up so much. And so what I wanted to pull in here was this ability to actually look at holistically longer term, your career goals, your annual reviews, any of the feedback you get gets collected through decks into a feedback system and gets matched up with where you want to be in the conversations you want to be having at the end of the year coming to review time. But the same time you want those longer term goals to kind of connect into your quarterly goals and your weekly planning. So there's a an MCP server in here which called a career MCP server, which I just went in Halle Chat, say, "Build me this server. I want to make sure it is a nice tight logic that as an MCP server it's making sure it happens." And then it's been quite magical what it's been doing. Let me quickly show you through X-Ray. Okay, so I've just done an X-Ray on the career MCP. And what it's now doing is it's showing me how the whole thing works. And so essentially what it will do is it will scan for evidence. So as I dance with the AI every week it's listening in for evidence to Hoover Inn, whether it might be granola transcripts or whatever, to bring that in so that evidence compounds over to time. And it's now looking at skills gap analysis. So based on what I've evidence I have, the gaps I need to close is coming up with again, guidance on all of that and then looking at a promotion readiness score at the end of all of that. So it's at a very, very high level. There's a lot more behind it. I won't go into now. Let me just pull in what I've got for myself. So I said, show me visually on a mermaid how my career goals are laddering into my quarterly goals, which ladders into my weekly goals to what extent am I off? Watch that be thinking about doing more of it is my quarterly planning for this quarter, the right things to be pushing on. So honest assessment, thought leadership really, really strong. What's broken? I have not done too much in terms of expanding my strategic influence over the last few weeks across the wider business. That's because I'm focused on other stuff. And so it's saying for your quarterly goals, though, you don't have any weekly activity at all. XYZ. So of course, these four quarterly goals. These are missing gaps right now, which is fantastic. Why? Because that means and I'm doing my weekly planning. It then tells me where there might be gaps that I need to be leading more into, which is just superb. Today's episode is brought to you by Amplitude. Replays of mobile user engagement are critical to building better products and experiences. But many session replay tools don't capture the full picture. Some tools take screenshots every second, leading to choppy replays and high storage costs from enormous capture sizes. Others use wireframes, but key moments go missing, creating gaps in your understanding. Neither approach gives you a truly mobile experience. Today's episode is brought to you by Nia1. In tech buying, speed is survival. How fast you can get a product in front of customers decides if you will win. If it takes you nine months to buy one piece of tech, you're dead in the water. Right now, financial services are under pressure to get AI live. But in a regulated industry, the roadblocks are real. Nia1 changes that. Their air gaped, cloud-agnostic sandbox lets you find, test, and validate new AI tools much faster from months to weeks, from stuck to shift. If you're ready to accelerate AI adoption, check out Nia1 at nyawone.com/akash. That's nawayan.com/aksh. I hope you're enjoying today's episode. Are you interested in becoming an AI product manager, making hundreds of thousands of dollars more, joining open AI and an entropic? Then you might want to do a course that I've taken myself. The AIPM certificate ran by OpenAI product leader, Mick Dad Jaffer. If you use my code and my link, you get a special discount on this course. It is a course that I highly recommend. We have done a lot of collaborations together on things like AI product strategy. Check out our newsletter articles if you want to see the quality of the type of thinking you'll get. One of my frequent collaborators, Pauvel Hurne, is the build labs leader. You're going to live build an AI product with Pauvel's feedback if you take this AIPM certificate. Be sure to check that out. Be sure to use my code and my link in order to get a special discount. Now back into today's episode. Wow. That resonated with you. You felt like that was on point feedback. Yeah, absolutely. I'm in a mindful of it. What's great there is when you go into your weekly plan, you do your forward slash weekly plan, it's able to say to you, this is what I think you should be doing. Based on what I've heard over the last few calls over the last week, based on what you've been doing within cursor with index. These are the gaps. You're leaning far too much in over here. You need to course correct, invest more in over here because these are goals you have up in the next eight, eight, nine weeks. If you need to pull your socks up on these areas, here's how I suggest you do it. It's just brilliant. It's bonkers. All right. So we've given everybody the high level. I want to make this super clear for people can make show people. What's the difference between a skill and MCP and how you're going to use those skills. As we saw earlier, sometimes they get invoked or not and it's a bit like the code MD file. It's a little bit. It just misbehaved sometimes. But a skill at this core is essentially a job description that you give to your AI. So it knows what those steps are to do once you can issue a skill. They're actually called in commands now, as an topic. Skills and commands have come together. But what you have is then on the left, you got that job description, plain English instructions on what to be doing. And then MCP is very different. MCP is those guardways I've folks about before where it tells you how to be interacting with other services. What steps to be following is just far tighter and making sure that things are a lot more deterministic and far less probabilistic in your system. So what I've done is I created a task MCP server because I want my tasks to be created in a consistent way all the time. I always want to make sure the AI is knowing to look for certain pillars to attach my tasks to to look for certain projects that are connected to those tasks and fare what projects they are. If you dip with the skill, it might not necessarily always follow those steps. MCP on the other hand, make sure that it always always happens. And so it's a far, far better way to make sure that your system is tighter than you'd otherwise have it. Awesome. And one of the cool things is that you can actually use a skill and MCP to reach outside your system. MCP we've seen how it's pulling data into your system. So we were talking about skills and MCP. If somebody wants to create a skill from themselves, how do they do that? Yeah. Good question. Let me go ahead and do one. Hey, I'd like you to create a skill for me that would look at and putting in all the GitHub trending repositories that you're collecting and that for repository MD file and would then take them and recommend the top 10 to me every week from the last week. And then I will then invoke the skill and then you'll give me everything and tell me exactly why you think these repositories with repositories are useful and without time looking at in the context of the Dex operating system. And I can just lift you that simple just have a chat with it and then it's now going to create them the skill file itself and know what we do then is we just wait for us to go through. It's just crazy. So funny. I can't say I normally sleep very, very well with the last kind of four weeks. Everything shifted so much for them. And openly I now as of this week that is just your mind is always now racing with lots of other things you can be doing and building a barn and it's just crazy time. Okay, here's a skill file. So it's now pulled everything together. It's worked out all the steps. It's telling me what information to be pulling in and it's now applying the filter. It's literally you can see it's gone to town on this right. I would never know how to create this. I just go in have a chat my voice and it gives everything is come up with a format for me. I mean I can edit this of a one to quite frankly can be bothered and I've got it like that's all it that's it's everything's here and my skill now is ready to go just like I've been taking out the other crazy crazy crazy. And then to invoke this guys as we talked about just slash repo dash radar. So one of the coolest things I see you doing that other people are is intelligent scanning. Can you walk us through it? So what I've got it doing is it's pulling in and I just went on to the AI and I said look on your download YouTube transcripts for like these you know 60 channels including yourself like I should bring the transcripts into my system create MD files for each the transcripts do the same for all the 50 or so whatever newsletters I follow and bring all that in and all the bookmarks I have on Twitter and it brings everything in and then the clusters everything so it's bringing things signal together from different sources so you can see makes newsletter here to math. And Lenny and it talks about this whole same thing but really pulling it together about what's novel what's contrarian about what you're seeing here which is really really good so I'm not having to go into like too much content but I'm really getting a good sense of what's interesting what's contrarian why it matters to me is feel CPO and I've got that coming to me now every single day which is giving me a lot more comfort that I'm keeping on top of things if I want to drill in I can drill into stuff there's other files in my system that let me do that but right now this for me is absolute gold that combined with also separate like I showed you earlier looking at all the trending. We pose on GitHub and telling what's going on there as well that I might want to be interested in is absolutely a huge comfort blanket and really really interesting in terms of being able to spar then with those ideas. So one of the biggest differences from using an operating system like this compared to chat GPT your chat GPT conversation just lives on the cloud maybe chat GPT encodes it into its memory but it's not a compounding system. What is the thing about this compounding that people need to know? I think very simply like having all this information come into your files if you have a project and then that project hears through the system that there's a new granola meeting with actions from it or there's a new angle from a stakeholder on that call that gets appended to the stakeholder's person page to the projects page to the company page if there's a company connected to it so every time the AI then later pulls on that information that particular entity it's going to have all that fresh context so you have these living files which then just get better and better and more useful for you the more you dance with the AI the more the AI dances with your MCP servers and that's the fundamental difference you're just chatting to chat GPT has not got that context it's not got that memory really that you understand quite what it knows of you. Here you can just ask it like what do you know of this particular project where are we at with it? It will know where to look the AI is fantastic as of 4.6 of the opposite in particular to really be that dependable partner to lean in and find the right information for you and show you your otherwise blind spots and you have this decks improve command in there can you walk us through how that works. So the decks improve command basically will look at all of the change log with Claude code it will do that once a week for you but if you trigger it like a trigger it here you will then do a search and see what's been released from the topic over the last X time and then it will also look at anything going on on hacker news in reddit communities it's quite frankly bunker is right and so with that then it scans all of that and says okay I've done all my homework now what you want to do have you got an idea Dave or do you want to just find out what's new or do you want me to have a full order of the entire system well how should we dance together here and I'll just say like tell me how we should go about adding extra capabilities in here anything released from unsurropic over the last month that we should be aware of it then does all this work and comes up with all of this here right so new capabilities have come out right I don't have to check anything it's all coming to me and it's not telling me why it matters 4 decks and how we can be leveraging it whole bunch of information really really useful and now it's going right this is what we should do in this order these are the items we should work on first would you like me to build it Dave thank you Dave I mean honest to god I couch it is madness So what we're doing at this point is we're deep diving on the critical topics people need to understand. We just walked in through the compounding system. The next one is hooks. I see a lot of people getting this wrong. What do people need to know about hooks? So first of all, make sure that you're using flow code in terminal or on flow code desktop because hooks that we're about to go through now are only available there. The not available in cursor, hooks are magical, and re-changes how you use flow code. Hux basically get invoked to different parts of your chat with, and with Claude, I use the session start hook because I want basically every time I go into a new chat, I want that chat to be primed with the right context. As you mentioned earlier, there is a Claude MD file, but it's not that dependable. Sessions start hooks are like the guarantor. Make sure that every single moment you're having that new chat, the right context comes in. So it will then have my strategic petters, it'll have my quarterly goals, it'll have my weekly priorities. So straight away, it knows what I'm doing and how I'm connecting up. Has all my tasks, has working preferences, so every time now I go back in to Claude and I'm having it back and forth with it, if ever I say, "Hey Claude, you bloody idiot, why did you do that?" It can pick that up, it can listen for that, and inject that into a working preferences file which compounds over time. Likewise, any time it makes a mistake, and it sees it makes a mistake itself, I've got a mistakes file which it writes to, and it's unbelievable, I'm sure it's you if you want to, but like all of the mistakes we've had together, and that also then gets injected, so it's mistakes don't happen again. So everything then just compounds and gets better and better. Bit like compound engineering for engineers, that's kind of using an awful lot of Claude code hooks. I just felt from a first principle's point of view, how can we use hooks for knowledge management to make sure that our personal knowledge management system gets smarter than what you've done with it, and that's what hooks are. So we've walked people through this system, at this point they want to know, how do I make this mine? How do I get started and onboard into it? So everything's up here in GitHub, has been out there for a few weeks now, and it's getting a ton of traction, and essentially it is for non-engineers, and it's fairly straightforward to set up. You go into this section here, it will take you through step-by-step written for non-engineers on what you need to do. This might look a little bit messy, downloading Node.js and all that cupboards, but ultimately just follow the steps, it's very straightforward, and then you're up and running. And then when you're in the system, whether it's in terminal or whether it's in cursor, I'll quickly now move over back into cursor and show you then how to get that set up there. So all I'll just do is just do quickly onboarding and then we're done. And I'll just quickly take it through, it takes about two or three minutes to go in, and you take that repo URL from GitHub. Show that in here once you've set up your cursor to be able to do this kind of thing, instructions on the repo, and then you download the whole thing. I'll create a folder, I'll call it whatever, and then it creates that. It pulls essentially all the source code down, so I'll then open all that up, and now you're in your version of DEX, right? So it's now all your own, you can see all the files over here, all pulled down, and simply then you just go through and type in forward slash setup, and then you're off to the races. Once you do that, then it will guide you through, and then ask you for your name, ask you for your role, the thing is about 30 roles or something in here, and depending on which role you have from CMO to CEO, down to whatever you might be doing, then it will unfurl the scaffolding around that, and then get you all set up. It will listen in for your iCal, for your calendar, it will listen in to see if you've got granola in here, and then you can also integrate then your Gmail and other sources of data as well. So yeah, let's go through, select my size company, and then it's going to say, "What are your goals? What are you doing?" And then I'll just go through and I'll say, "Yeah, look, all of them are my goals, thank you." And the answer is time, and it'll go through more and more steps, and within about five minutes, then your setup is going to know where your granola meetings are, if you have granola, and it will then know what your calendar is and so on. So all that gets pulled in, and then disguises you, then setting up your goals, setting up your weekly plan, and all of that then you're off to the races. So we've walked people through Cloud Code. When should people be using Cloud Code versus Cursor versus Cloud Code work? Depending on where you're at, right? I think starting, definitely starting cursor if you can, and don't be intimidated by it. Don't worry about that messy left hand rail of the files. Just trust the AI to file things the way it should be, and you're pretty much good to go. Then if you want to then take a veil of making sure that those hooks can be used, and the system improves and gets better and better over time, move yourself into terminal. On Mac, Goasty, G-H-O-S-T-T-Y, I think it's cold, is really, really good. It's a cleaner terminal. It feels nicer. There are other terminals out there outside the Mac terminal, but get into terminal and start talking there, right? What I hope to have had soon with Dex is that notion, like kind of UI that you saw earlier, where it kind of gives you that file system on the left, the chat in the middle and your files in the right to look at, and hope that'll come out in a few weeks time for those less technical that don't want to go in here. But yeah, just try to get comfortable with it, because it's a space I think we should all be playing in, and quite frankly, I think we should be spending probably more time in here than we do in the likes of Slack. You have been experimenting with this system that Toby Luka talked about, the CEO of Shopify Pi. Should people be using this? Pi's fascinating. I don't think people should be using it themselves, but I definitely think people building should be looking at things like Pi. What's interesting about Pi, so OpenClaw is built using Pi, and essentially it's a very lightweight agent harness. So Manus got recently purchased by Meta and for QuattroWack, and what Manus was letting people do talked to AI in a far more effective way, but leveraging OpenAI, leveraging Claude, leveraging Gemini. So it had other alums behind it, but because of the way it orchestrated and its agent harness, it was giving people a far better experience in Manus than if they were to talk directly to the LM in Gemini. Pi lets you build essentially a Manus. So for example, when you're going to Pi, if you want to change how it all gets booted up, if you want to change the UI of how it looks, you can do that. So you can essentially build on top of Pi, which is open source, and create essentially your own Manus. Direction is where I want to go, because I want people to be able to build on decks and through decks without having to use Claude specifically. But I could just go to Pi and say, "Hey, look, I love the idea of Sessionhux or Claude Codehux. Can you just build that logic in for me please?" And straight away, you've extended Pi, they call them extensions, to be able to essentially give you the capability by Claude would be giving you in Claude, but actually through Pi where you're a neutral like Switzerland in terms of elements. You can then let people plug into whatever element they want. What is the biggest mistake people make when they first start using Claude Codehux? What's the biggest mistake they make? I guess not knowing what they want from it. I mean, what's the matter with your use case says, right? I'll be going in and just jumping in if it's your first time and just saying, "Hey, look, this is my job. This is my friction. These are my pain points. What do you think we should be doing together to make them easier?" Just flip it around, reverse prompt it, right? And ask ape to come up with solutions for your pain. And start there, right? And I think you'll find it really, really interesting. And then like, I'd see you the day, it was like, "I want you to build a career, you know, a source to pull in all these YouTube transcripts for me. I didn't know how to do it, but I did it, figured it out. It's got access to search." So just tell it what you want. Have a chat, use your voice, do not type. And I think it'll be off to the races in no time. Be very, very clear what your goal is, right? When you're talking to AI, don't be vague about what you want it to do. The kind of thing you can do to the AI is give it a very, very clear goal. If you give it that, it'll work out how to get there. Don't tell it how to get to a place. Let it figure it out itself. And it will do it in the most elegant way possible, as long as you're clear and precise and sharp with your goal. And it's like the developer console, by the way, have a really cool thing called prompt-improver. Prompt-improver in speaking to decks. Is the way where you give it kind of a vague prompt. And then it turns into a really good precise one. And then the AI has a far better dance with it. So in decks, what you'll do is you'll go into here, do prompt-improver, and then give it the crappy prompt. And then it will turn into a good one and check that into the chat. And then you're off to the races. So you've been in product management for over 25 years. How have tools like Cloud Code changed the role? I mean, no disrespect to folk I've worked with over the last 25 years. But I kind of feel this way. But as a product geek, when you've got lots of ideas, you're literally half the baffle is trying to convince others of them. And get the investment, in particular, to get them built. Now that's gone. Now you just go in and talk to Cloud. And if you have the right Cloud MD file, we're saying, make my ideas 10x. Do not accept mediocre. Everything we just showed you where you're right. Then you're working with the best person you've ever worked with. No disrespect to others I've worked with in the past. It takes up to a whole new level of brilliance. And so that's what's changed, right? That's why it comes back to your point. That we have to have that taste. We have to have a good sense of where we want to steer. Our dances with Claude or with AI. But there has never been a better time to be a product geek. The hardest thing for us is storytelling. And now we can build these prototypes quickly. We're as lovable as in here, whatever. And take these out to customers, get what is to pay data back from them, validate our assumptions as fast as quickly as we can, and get the buy-in from our executive and build. And that is just hearing the arms quite frankly. There has never ever been a better time to be a product geek. I have to ask you, what's overhyped, first underhyped in AI tooling? I'm going to answer in a bit of a weird way. What's hyped, open-claw? What's underhyped, open-claw? Literally, right? Because everyone's going, "Oh my god, this is amazing." You watch Alex Finn, amazing podcaster. He's hilarious. And everyone will pick me up to watch him. And it's just, he's off the extreme of excitement. 10,000 years. He's spending tens of thousands of dollars on Mac servers and our Mac studio, I should say. And crazy, right? But at the same time, there's something in it. And I don't think I think most people in product are so busy and don't have the time to be leaning into AI. They really see it as just not that useful. And I think what we're seeing with open-claw is a fundamentally different way of working with data, that level of persistence, and that length of memory. And you know, it being yours, right? Models are going to get smaller and smaller, where they sit on device. And we won't have to be talking to the cloud anymore. So I think we're seeing something really interesting happening with open-claw that I myself want to spend a lot more time working with. because I think it's directionally fascinating in terms of what kind of business models it opens up at what ways of working, you know, yourself that it opens up and changes. It's security, it is an issue around security right now, but I think if you do it in the right way, it's fascinating. Kimi, just recently, for $39 a month now, you can go to Kimi.com and open up OpenClore hosted in a browser. And it's just fascinating what's happening in that space, which is why obviously some opens put down allegedly a billion dollars to open trouble to get them on board. The man who predicted a one man billion dollar startup in buying one. So we have walked you guys through end to end what it looks like from a daily plan to knowledge scanning across the web to PRD to con one board through to skills, MCPs and hooks. You now have enough information. Stop watching, start doing, clone the repo like we just showed you. If you prefer, you can take my PM operating system. There are other resources out there. You can build your own from scratch after what you've learned. The most important thing for you to do is take a little bit of time to try out these tools. Even if your product leaders haven't given you access to these internally and you can't connect to your internal MCP tools, go build a side project. Try this out. This is not hype. This is coming from somebody with 25 years of experience. You can see how enthusiastic he is. How he is embraced the tooling. There's a lot here. Even if you're not working on AI products, if you're not working on AI features, there's a lot here. If you need a little more guidance, I have a couple more guides with Carl Vellotti, with Rachel Wollin, with Caitlin Sullivan on this podcast. I have a couple guides in my newsletter. Go take out those extra resources. If you need Dave just mentioned Alex Finn, he's a great resource on YouTube and Twitter as well. Take advantage of all these content creators. Build out a system and I guarantee you you will find some value out of it. Until the next episode, we'll see you later. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you could take a moment to double check that you have followed on Apple and Spotify podcasts, subscribe to YouTube, left a rating review on Apple or Spotify and comment it on YouTube. All these things will help the algorithm distribute the show to more and more people. As we distribute the show to more people, we can grow the show, improve the quality of the content and the production to get you better insights to stay ahead in your career. Finally, do check out my bundle at bundle.ockusg.com to get access to nine AI products for an entire year, four free. This includes dovetail, mobin, linear, reforge build, descript, and many other amazing tools that will help you as an AI product manager or builder succeed. I'll see you in the next episode.