How I turned Claude into a self-improving PM assistant | Daniel Blum (PM, Melio)

I cannot describe how powerful it is. I'm really able to do in a day now what used to take me a week. But more than that, I'll say it's a lot of deeper work. There's things that I do today that I just wasn't able to do before, whether it's more in-depth research, whether it's being more data-backed. Anything you do today, you can do it almost at the top level.

One of the things, even at a company level, that I tell people is, look, you got to go through the pain. Of switching your systems and it's not gonna be as efficient. And yes, of course, like the old way will be faster because it's muscle memory. But if you get to the next level, not only will you have a system that works better for you, but everybody will have more skills.

Today I say I manage about 70 to 80% of my time in front of the computer with Cowork alone.

We've seen a couple morning briefs, but I wanna see what you think makes yours different.

In this daily brief, my Cowork runs through my recent Slacks, my emails, my granola notes, and it looks for context that it doesn't understand in these things. And it says like, Oh, if there's a file I wasn't aware of, there's a milestone, there's a goal, it would ask me about it and say, hey, like, what is this? Is this important? Should I read this? And this is, I think, where the real magic happens.

This is really genius. I'm curious how this scales beyond you. So you have your system, you're, you know, 10x PM now. Congratulations. How does this affect the team? How do they use systems like this? Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Clara Vo, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have Daniel Bloom, and he's going to show us his Claude co-work system to rule them all. It self-heals, it self-optimizes, and it's way better than the morning briefing you have going on. Let's get to it. Optimizely Agent Platform for Marketers is built on a bigger idea, a whole directory of agents now joined by a newly revealed squad of virtual teammates, each with a defined role and a personality of their own. This isn't about faster drafts. It's about handling the coordination too. The research, the approvals, the handoffs, the routing, the back and forth that quietly eats your week and never makes it into anyone's highlight reel. Get the story behind it all. Hear the confessions from marketers who have handed off the busywork. Meet the squad and understand what virtual teammates can do for you at optimizely.com/story. Daniel, welcome to How I AI. I am so excited to have you on this episode because every week, every month, I think things get better and I'm always impressed with how much more organized everybody but me seems to get with their, uh, AI and their personal productivity. And so tell me, like, what brought you to building this big system and What problem are you trying to solve?

Cool. Well, Claire, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. As somebody who's been an early adopter of AI for quite a while, I think it took already like a good few months ago or even a year ago, we were able to solve some of the big, or at least improve some of the big jobs to be done for PMs with even with simpler tools like with Gems, you could improve your specs and you could improve your research. But I think as I was progressing with my AI adoption, I really felt that one of the biggest things that hangs over me and really makes my day-to-day more difficult is all this just overhead of being a PM, of coordinating a bunch of things, remembering endless tasks that arise on Slack and meetings and action items and just trying to maneuver this whole chaos that happens every single day while at the same time wanting to do in-depth work and focus and really think, I felt that that was something that was really, really difficult for me and I was getting nowhere near solving it until I was able to actually build a system with Cowork that I'm actually still a little bit surprised at how powerful it is and how much it's helped transform this problem for me.

So tell me about your personal AI stack as a PM. How did you pick The tools that go into it, and then I want to— I want you to show us how it all kind of works.

Perfect. So I'll say I think most of my choices were made by my company, Melio, and the tools that I'm— are in our stack. But thankfully, I'm pretty satisfied with those. So for a long time, we only had like the Gemini Enterprise and we were using that. And just a few months ago, we got the Claude Enterprise and Cowork. Uh, and that's when things really changed for me. Uh, and besides that, I'm basically bound to whatever, whatever tools we have and use. Uh, so this is, this is what I work based off of.

Okay, so this is good for everybody out there who is stuck with the tools that they're stuck with. You can still make it work. I, at work, I think that Claude is obviously like a big part of this stack. Was Cowork just the big unlock for you? Like, where did you, when did you start building this and what was the early tools versus what you use now?

Yeah, so I think first of all, on your first saying, I think it's very correct. And in general, I'll say like I was bound by constraints of an average PM all the time in terms of having, you know, not endless tokens and needing to work within budgets and bureaucracy. And I think it's very possible and very doable within all those constraints that, you know, real PMs face. And I think it's very important to say. And in terms of the tools, so Cowork was definitely the big unlock for me, but I think while I love Cowork, it's not Cowork in itself. And I think Codex could be great for this as well, or ChatGPT Work. I think the real importance is for a system to A, be able to rewrite its own core files, and that means that it keeps on improving, and B, just have connections and integrations to as much of your ecosystem. When these 2 rules apply, There is a significant, significant opportunity to really, really improve the way you work. And while I was working with Gemini Gems earlier, and there is obviously some incredible things that can be done with those, these 2 elements make a system really powerful and also really integrated into your daily life, but also self-improving, which is one of the biggest unlocks here.

Okay, well, let's, let's show, show it to us. I want to, I want to see how you actually manage Your life as a PM?

Let me start with this Notion board, right? So this is nothing incredible, it's just a standard PM Notion board. It has 3 sections. One is top of mind, which are the large initiatives that I just think of, you know, on any given time. It has my this week, which is basically the priority that I have for this week. And it has inbox, which is things that arise from Slack, email, calendar, and Cowork picks up and fills them in here. Now, the cool thing about this board is not that it exists, but the fact that not only did Cowork build this completely on its own, I was working with a very simple and messy Google Doc before, and I think Notion got, I think Cowork got tired of it and basically decided to build this for me, but also it actually manages it on my behalf. And I think that's the pretty cool thing that I want to show. And I'll walk you through how it does it. I'll say that the most important thing about this is that it knows me really, really well because I spent a lot of time and effort contextualizing it and maintaining this context and also centralizing all of my work in it, which took some time to get used to, but the ROI is just absolutely insane there. And I really felt how well it knows me just when prepping for this episode when I knew that because this is my real environment, I could shouldn't show, you know, names and projects and sensitive stuff. So basically I just created this skill on Claude called Demo, and I just told it replace all the terminology and like specifics with generic terms. But because it knows me so well, basically in one prompt I was able to replace my manager's name with your manager and my top initiative you can see here with headline feature. And that's how well it knows me. It was just able to replace all of these and it just makes it for a really, really seamless and comfortable collaboration.

Tell me a little bit about how that context is saved. Is it just that you just put everything in Notion so when it's searching, it kind of knows? Is there something more purposeful around your kind of personal brain? How do you, how do you inject context into the system?

So I'll say when I built up the system, it was very important for me to build something scalable. So I did a lot of research on like how to build, uh, how to set up your Claude MD and the, and the context files. And basically I set it up so there's a context file around every topic that I have and like every area of my work and my goals and my colleagues and everything that you can imagine. I spent a lot of time manually contextualizing in the beginning, whether through like feeding it links and different decks and stuff like that. And also just a lot of Whisper just dictating endless information and blabbering endlessly about everything that I can think of. which is just incredibly powerful and how much context you can give relatively easily and quickly. And then this system basically updates itself on a recurring basis. Every, every few weeks it runs and updates the knowledge files based on, you know, different things that have occurred and different changes. And we will see some of that just in a minute.

I love it. Well, let's, let's switch over to Cowork and show us how kind of the system is architected and then how you maintain it. And use it over time.

Perfect. So it all starts with one recurring task, which is a composition of several skills called the weekly prep. So the weekly prep is the very basic task that helps me start my week. I'll say that I won't run this live just because I want to be mindful of time, but generally speaking, this task helps me go through all these things that you just saw in the Notion and fill them in. So we basically have the top of mind, the this week, and the inbox. And what this series of skills does, it pulls in information from my entire ecosystem, from my Notion, my calendar, Slack, from granola transcripts of meetings, and basically recommends what I should be focusing on this week. If there's new top of mind items that need to be added or removed, it would recommend that. It would recommend moving, removing, finishing things from this week, and the same with the inbox. And this basically on Sunday mornings, this is our beginning of the week. It helps me start with a very, very clear and focused list of what I actually want to do. And then finally, it helps me prep for my meetings. So it runs me through the meetings that I'm going to have and asks me how I want to prep for them, whether it's like a serious preparation that requires its own task in my weekly priority, whether it's a quick reminder or just meetings that don't really need any prep. And then I confirm all of this and I'm set to go. And this is the start.

And does that push all of it into Notion?

Yes. And that basically, this task that I ran earlier basically created this state that we have now, the Notion that we have right now, but I'll also show you how it updates it.

Yeah, let's look at that.

Perfect.

So.

The unique thing about this is that I think, and this is something I ran into after having created the first weekly prep, I think one of the things any PM can resonate with is the fact that there's 2 worlds, right? There's this beautiful, clean, organized world that's in our weekly priority or our roadmap where everything is very clear and beautiful and fits in. And then there's reality where as we said, this chaos of Slack and meetings and urgent priorities and executive asks and endless things that just flow in and out. And what I was feeling in the beginning is this real gap between what I was doing and prepping and what was happening in real life, where I was spending all this time doing all these small tasks. And I think I've built the system to really work alongside me. And part of the fact that it knows me really well is also that it knows how I work. So for example, I'm inbox zero, both on Slack and on email. So it knows that if something was saved on Slack and is no longer, it means it's likely done. Or if something was on inbox in Gmail and is no longer so, then it probably means I already read it. And that really, really helps in how we collaborate smoothly. So basically, let me run to my next scheduled task, and this is called the morning brief. And this is, I think, where the real magic happens. So actually, we're going to run this live right now.

I have to laugh because I think folks' AI setup is a real reflection of their internal personality. And you strike me as somebody who is organized and thoughtful. You're an inbox zero person. I am sorry to anybody that tries to text or email me. I am like a chaos reigns. person. I cannot put my stuff in a table. I cannot put my stuff in a Kanban board. I need just a bot. And I need, when it's 2 in the morning or it's 6 in the morning or it's 2 in the afternoon, I just need to be like, dear bot, what's going on? What's going on? And so it's always fascinating to me to watch people who I just, pre-AI have like a much more structured approach to their work. And then post-AI, I think it really reflects in how you build, build your system because mine looks, it probably should look like something like this, but it looks nothing like this.

Well, I think I'll say first of all that, uh, you are correct in, in me being quite an organized person, but I will say like, again, in reality, a lot is a mess and a lot is like, I, I've found out how much is like business logic in my brain. And I've had this experience with the system where I continuously like, do discovery on myself and how I work. And I continuously run into these places where the system is not good enough because it doesn't cover this. And when it doesn't cover, like it has a blind spot, then it becomes much less powerful. So over time, I've like covered all different angles. And I think it's doable. I think it's doable. And up until recently, I would say in a way I was also operating chaotically. You know, some of the tasks were saved on Slack. Some of them were like— in my inbox. Others were just like tabs that are open in Chrome. And I've just had Claude like learn to work with all of these and say, all right, I'll take— unfortunately it can't take an open tab as a task, but everything else it just learned to look at the same way I do.

Well, let's look at this morning brief because we've seen a couple morning briefs, but I want to see what you think makes yours different.

Okay. So I think that there's several things, but I'll walk through this very quickly and show the different parts and I'll highlight the interesting things. So the first part is that this brief basically walks me through my meetings. I think one of the biggest pains of PMs is we have a ton of meetings, we need action items, we need to act on them. Almost every meeting creates new work, but we have to run to the next meeting and oftentimes it's back to back until the end of the day. And then, you know, so this helps me kind of catch up on yesterday's meetings and it shows all the different things. And basically you can see this takes the granular transcripts and it gives me a one-liner about each meeting and if there's an action item. So here I can see from all of these meetings, looking through them, there's one action item to share the walkthrough and recording of a, and a write-up in the feature channel with go-to-market, and that's it. So it's going to offer me to expand or draft any summaries. I'm going to say no, let's continue for now. And we're going to walk on over to the next phase, which I think is pretty cool. One of the things that I think is super powerful with co-work and with these harnesses is that you can set them up for improving themselves. And one of the things I've done is I've over time, I'm building up towards Claude being more agentic and being more able to act on itself. And I'll show you this and I think it's pretty visible in this flow. This part is pretty cool where basically one of the difficulties in life is Keeping the context clear, right? So you have the system, you contextualize it, it knows things, but then how do you make sure that it keeps track? So this is one of the ways I've thought of. So basically what it does is imagine in this daily brief, my coworker runs through my recent Slacks, my emails, my Renola notes, and it looks for context that it doesn't understand in these things. And it says like, oh, if there's a file I wasn't aware of, there's a milestone, there's a goal, it would ask me about it and say, hey, like, what is this? Is this important? Should I read this? So here it flagged something. Let's see what it is. A term I didn't know, the settlement cap.

All right.

This is some payments thing. And it says like, I read the thread and understand it's a limit working through. Want me to save? Yeah. So I'll say save. Yes. Save it to the context. So basically this is how Claude helps me keep it contextualized and not lose track of things.

This is really genius. And I want people to just take a pause and reflect on what this is because it looks like For your context, you are making sure that Claude understands internal definitions, terms, goals, et cetera. And so many of us work inside companies where the things that we say are not in the training data. They, well, not yet, at least. They're not in the training data. And so actually proactively prompting Claude to say like, I don't understand what you're talking about here. Can we define it together? And then I'll save it to my context and I'll know what you're talking about. Moving forward is really, really sharp and something we haven't seen on the podcast yet. I love this.

Yeah, so it's, it's super hard to just keep track and, and the unlock is that you're able to say, oh, I can just ask Claude to be my partner in doing this and automatically, you know, follow up and, and insist on, on getting this knowledge is a really, really big unlock.

Amazing. So you run it weekly. You run it daily. Do you actually spend time in the Notion or are you still like navigating all this with Claude?

So the main idea is that Notion is almost a read-only for me. I look at the Notion to get my focus, to remind me of my top of mind, to remind me of my priorities and focus this week. You know, every so often I'll mark something as done if I just finished it. But generally my goal is to have Notion as something I only look at and Claude manages on my behalf. And in general, I'll say this is something that has happened to me naturally, but I think it's one of the core pillars of building a strong system. Today I say I manage about 70 to 80% of my time in front of the computer with Cowork alone. Almost everything I do here is through Cowork and I try to do more and more of it because anything that I don't do in Cowork, Then the context is not as well caught as if I do it through Cowork, whether it's, you know, other applications, whether it's Jira, Slack, uh, queries, product, anything generally. So.

Are you using Cowork with Chrome at all? Like, are you using browser use or are you purely just using like connectors and MCPs for all of this?

Yeah. So, I would say in the beginning I was using like Chrome a lot in my personal cowork that I have. I use Chrome a lot. As time proceeds and there's more and more MCPs and connectors, then obviously those are comfortable. But like the Chrome connector is a critical, critical piece of, you know, of the puzzle for when you don't have these connectors and integrations and you need to use the browser.

And do you feel like this is really saving you? Like what's the benefit here? Is it like saving you time? Do you feel like you just, know everything? Are you getting better work done? Like, why? Because, you know, again, these systems take time to maintain, and I think we're all sort of at this point with our AI systems where we're like, okay, they're all super cool, but like, why are we, why are we doing this? And so, I'm just curious, like, what is the benefit you're getting as a PM to running this system?

Yeah, so it's a great question, and I think honestly, oftentimes we make systems that don't give us great benefit. I just, uh, I built a personal agent that its main work is sending memes about my wife in our shared channel on Telegram, which, hey, to me is huge value. I think it's helping me win arguments. But jokes aside, I think—

Quick pause. You need to watch our episode with Jason, the CEO of Memelord, who actually has a meme API so you can plug that into your agent. That was a A very weird episode that we did.

So I haven't watched it yet, but I will say it's literally like the top to-do task in my, in like the Claude session that I manage my agents and what's next. The meme API is definitely the next one. Yeah. But I'll say, I think it's a really, really good question. And I will say also that probably in the beginning, It's not gonna, like the ROI is not gonna look great, especially when you set up something that's as robust and as significant. It's gonna take some time because while it doesn't know you and your personal, we can call it business logic and like the way you operate, it's gonna be very frictionful and everything it does or says or thinks, it's gonna be a little bit off and you're gonna lose trust and you're gonna be very skeptical and then you're gonna double-check everything. But the value tremendously compounds. It's just incredible. The more you kind of power through these first few weeks of A, contextualizing ruthlessly and continuously sharing everything you can, and B, centralizing whatever work you can in Cowork or in your harness, even if it doesn't feel so natural over time, it is just— I cannot describe how powerful it is. And I'll say personally, I think first of all, I'm really able to do in a day now what used to take me a week. And I stand behind that. It's, and you know, it's something that sounds like a hypey LinkedIn post headliner, but it's true. You know, it's insane. I look at my, the way I work through these like this week, and oftentimes I can get through this week in a good day. Which is just mind-blowing. But more than that, I'll say it's a lot of deeper work. There's things that I do today that I just wasn't able to do before, whether it's more in-depth research, whether it's better being more data-backed when checking things, working less off of hunches and more off of like facts and researches, whether it's competitive researchers, like Anything you do today, you can do it almost at the top level, as opposed to back in the day, moving fast meant you need to, you know, operate on a lot of hunches, not work off of data, not be as robust in terms of your documentation. And today it really, really changes.

I love it. I love it. You've sold me. I don't know if I'm gonna get as organized as you, But I, and I think that's absolutely right. I, one of the things, even at a company level that I tell people is, look, you gotta go through the pain of switching your systems and it's not gonna be as efficient. And yes, of course, like the old way will be faster because it's muscle memory, but if you get to the next level, not only will you have a system that works better for you, but everybody will have more skills. And I think that's almost the more important part where This is a personal productivity system that works for you. That's great. Um, but I'd say probably the, the bigger benefit is it forced you to learn how to use Cowork and use these AI tools in a different way. And as a product builder, you have to know that stuff. You have to think about, well, what if my product's being used only through Claude? What, what do I want that to look like? And I think it's just, if you are in product, it is just one of the most important things. That, that you could, you could do. This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian. The teamwork graph in Jira delivers 44% more accurate agent results with 48% less token usage. That's a huge difference when working with AI coding agents like Claude, Cursor, Codex, or Copilot. The hardest part of shipping with AI isn't the code, it's the context. What's the right ticket? What did the spec say? What got decided in Slack? The teamwork graph pulls all of that from across your entire stack, from Jira and Confluence to GitHub, and feeds it directly to your agents before they write a single line. You assign the work, the agent gets everything it needs, and a PR surfaces when it's ready. No digging, no context switching, no broken flow. Same team, smarter agents. Try it free at jira.dev. That's J-I-R-A dot D-E-V. I'm curious how this scales beyond you. So, you have your system, you're, you know, 10x PM now. Congratulations. How does this affect the team? How do they use systems like this? How do you share? Kind of how do the— all does that work?

A lot of what you brought up is, is super relevant in that sense. And I think one of the things that have made me, you know, in a sense, wait for Cowork, for example, when a few months ago there was this endless hype about Cursor and about Cloud Code and I was kind of sitting on the sidelines and waiting, like, should I adopt these like tools that are not meant for me and are super technical, can be scary. And I'm glad I waited for Cowork because it's a lot about like You know, just UX and experience and simplicity and a lot of the tools that we've built for the team and whether it's the gem that helps the team write specs, product specs that we did almost a year ago, or what we call the workstation that we have that I'll show a little bit later. At the end of the day, if you make something accessible and simple and the value is clear, then it gets adopted much better.

All right. Before we get to the workstation flow, which is gonna be how you get this across the company, across the team, you also have some self-improving loops that I think are really interesting. So how do you improve this over time? How does it get better? What have you figured out there?

Yeah, so I think this is one of the coolest unlocks that have helped me continuously improve the setup while not dedicating too much time to it. And basically it's almost not self-improvement, but it's Claude helping me improve it. So I'll walk you through something called the self-improvement loop. It's a scheduled task that runs weekly and it has several skills attached to it and I'll walk through them. So again, it works in parts, a trick I've found really helpful when I have a bunch of information that Claude feeds me. So I'm going to walk through this in retroactive. So first of all, the first part is how my drafts landed. So what I found over time is that when I write with Claude, It'll give me a draft and then I'll change it and I'll just send it. But the thing there is that Claude doesn't learn what the gap is between the draft that it wrote and what I actually sent. So I have Claude when running this task looking for drafts that it shared with me and I didn't respond and then looking to see if I sent them in a different way and learning from those drafts and saying, oh, so we actually ended up writing this and doing the learning on its own. So in this specific week, I see that there was nothing learned and insignificant, but this is very helpful in continuing improving and polishing Claude on how I write. Now, this is a cool one. The second one, and this is skills that are worth building. So basically Claude on an ongoing basis looks for things that I do on a recurring basis and suggests turning them into skills. Many of my skills actually ended up being From this flow. So you could see it, I've been prototyping a bunch lately, so it's helping me. It's suggesting I create a Claude design handoff skill between Cowork and where I do the research and design where I actually build the prototype and a bunch of other interesting skills that I've built. I have a skill like this, by the way, that's handoff between Cowork and Code, which I use kind of as the executing arm of Cowork. This is the second part. The third part is fixes to my existing setup. So basically all of my skills and recurring tasks have lines in their files to collect feedback and friction from my interaction with them. So over time they gather this. I don't need to do this proactively. Whenever I ask for a fix or something, they gather and track this information. And every week it surfaces the top frictions from my interaction with Claude and suggests to improve them. So these are also super helpful, as you can see. And then finally, this is a really cool one. This is actually the improve skill. So basically, we're all dealing with an endless flood. I think this resonates with anybody, endless flood of tips hyping up from X and LinkedIn and newsletters and blogs about setups and how to improve your AI usage. And you must have this and you must build that. And I found this incredibly overwhelming. On one hand, I don't wanna drown in it. At the same time, I wanna be able to actually implement what's relevant. So I've built a skill called Improve, which is basically like a very critical auditor for these. And I share them usually through my phone, through a Slack channel with Claude. And I ask them like, is this real? Is this powerful? How does this adapt to what we have now? Is this needed? And then it helps me review it. And together we basically decide whether we wanna build it or not. So here I ran it against Claire, your How I AI episode on designing loops. And it basically gave me like a criticism of the episode. It said it's like a good video. And it says like, listen, loops at the end of the day are essentially like scheduled tasks. So you're running loops in many ways, but I don't have goal loops that are the way you suggested. So this is something I can adapt. There's some things I can adopt. And basically this is Helps me, you know, keep track of all the things that I run into and all these like tips and tricks, and at the same time not drown in them and also not, um, you know, give into the hype too much. So these are all the different things I do to, you know, Claude helps me continuously improve it over time with as little, you know, dedicated effort as possible.

Love the, we could have done the entire episode on the last 3 minutes. So good. You know, I, the first one where it's like, take everything that you wrote for me that I Hated and did it, did it separately or dropped or rewrote and then just learn from that. That's genius. We saw Alex Lieberman had like a write like me self-learning loop, but this one is really interesting because it takes the indirect signals of rewriting and builds it. I also in the loops episode have a skill writing loop. So I think that's a good one. Look at our work over the last couple weeks or last week and, and write loops. And then what was it? Let me look at the third one real quick.

So the third one is just taking interactions with Claude over the week. It's similar to building new skills, but just fixing existing ones.

Yeah. And then, um, and then the third one, which is so genius, and I wish more people did this, is build in feedback or telemetry into your skills and then review that over time and improvement. I've seen a couple folks, like I think Intercom does this a little bit with some of their Skills that they share across the org, but I haven't seen anybody for themselves say, anytime that you gather feedback from me, positive, negative, on a skill, or you hear feedback from me that's indirect, put it somewhere that we can review on a weekly basis. Super, super, super smart. And then of course, ingest all this great content, especially from How I AI, and improve your systems. I love it. What I also love that you've told us you do is you take this mega system that you've built. Across Notion, across Claude, this improving loops, and you figured out a way to scale this to the org in, is it called Workstation? Workstation. Okay. Let's, let's see that.

For sure. So basically, um, I'll say that one of the, one of the main things that were important for us, and we were debating whether to do this with Claude Code, which was much more powerful, or with, uh, Cowork, and we decided on doing it with Cowork. We have this, what we call the workstation, which is essentially this, I would say, operating system. It started out for our PMs in Melio, but it actually expanded to all Melio workers. And basically what it does is, you know, it creates an ecosystem, an operating system for you. But I think the cool thing here is this onboarding, and it's important to say I built this with some very, very talented and smart colleagues of mine. We really insisted in the beginning on a good UX. And after having, you know, a few PMs try to do it with Claude code through the terminal and taking 3 days, you know, to install everything and run all the dependencies, we understood that we need to do something that's simple. So basically one of the key elements of this workstation is that it basically does everything for you. So it's a UX built into the flow, into the chat. So basically what it does is walks you through everything you need to do. So besides just, you know, clicking on a few confirms and maybe addressing a few questions, it basically gets you up to speed on everything. It gets all your tools connected, confirms your roles, maps your colleagues, your management, where you sit, looks at your calendar and what that looks like in your Slack, helps you create your own voice so that you basically from day zero, you're writing in a way that sounds like you and just doesn't sound like a stranger. Captures your goals and basically helps you get moving really, really fast. I couldn't do the full flow here because I have it set up already. So, but you could see it's very, very simple. It takes you hand in hand and guides you to this like very, very robust system that helps you, you know, work in Cowork fully and become native.

I love this. I have seen so many people try to train this into their team, like Sit and say, okay, step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, et cetera. Just making a skill to say, okay, do you have all your connectors set up? Great. Have we pulled your voice? Great. Have you told me about you? Great. Like, tell me, you know, let me set all this up. And then from day 0, someone on your team, look, they're going to customize it. Maybe some people won't though. And so if everybody's starting from this, it takes what, 15 minutes, something like that?

Yeah. I love it.

And then do you just do this as like a shared skill?

This is a plugin. So everybody has it in our library and anybody can access it. And, you know, now it's already like, it's become quite a big thing. Like my colleagues have taken it to the next level and it's really, really impressive. Uh, but yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I think for me, this landed when About a year ago, I built our spec writing gem, call it Spectacular, and I was using it for my own and I built it to be really, back in the day, a year ago, holding up the template was something really hard to achieve and making it not hallucinate in a long spec was something that's hard. And after I built something that was really powerful and good for the way I was working and I was excited to distribute it, I had like live demos with several PMs that I watched them operate it from zero and I saw how different, like I thought it was already this complete, fully like baked tool and I saw them using it and struggling because it was completely adjusted to how I work.

Yeah.

And that's when it started, when into this gem I built this UX that guides you hand in hand. It tells you like, all right, I'm your spec writing assistant. Here's how you can work with me. Here's what I recommend you to do. Here's how you can start and basically guiding them hand in hand. Making it simple and accessible. So yeah, good UX and simplicity is critical even for, you know, internal teams and PMs and technical people.

I love this so much. This is, I mean, this is something if you haven't taken it away as somebody watching this podcast, go, every company should go do this and build like your sort of like bootstrap my personal AI skill or plugin inside Claude or inside Codex. Everybody starts, um, from the same page and you could just get your most like AI-pilled people on the team to build it for you and share, and then everybody can have shared ownership over it over time. Daniel, this has been awesome. Just to recap for folks, you have Notion as sort of like a read-only database source of truth for all your context and priorities for a week. You run 2 anchoring automations in Cowork. Which is your weekly setup, which sets up this whole Notion thing, props you for meetings, priorities, and then your, um, daily briefing that, um, kind of cycles through the next day, takes care of stuff. And then you've been able to scale this in the org through kind of a, a workstation plugin that anybody can use and kind of set up this thing for themselves. And now you're living your best life and Again, um, you know, bosses don't listen to this, but the man says that he can do in one day what he used to do in a week. So you're getting real, just like real productivity gains from this. Um, and you have learned maybe to be more organized and Claude, uh, plus Notion have made you more, more organized as a PM. So everybody's, everybody's benefiting here. Um, This has been awesome. I want to do like a couple quick lightning round questions, and then we will get you back to all your highly productive work. You know, I want to go back to you saying that you operate almost 70, 80% through Claude and through Copilot. What do you think is missing? What, what, what is that remaining 20, 30%? And do you think it's going to be 100%? At some point, or kind of what's that gap and what's missing in terms of you being able to use AI or use Claude for everything?

So it's a really, really good question. I think the missing piece, and my personal sense is that it's very close, is A, the ability to operate in the cloud essentially in a way that's unrelated to when my computer is open and running. I think that's critical. And I think that was also created with the With a Claude tag, which we don't yet have in our company, but I've heard good things also that it's expensive. I don't know, but I think the ability to run Claude away from your computer or have it run on its own, something like OpenCLaw or like a Hermes is really, really critical to do more of these things and to achieve more. I've found some ways to work around this. Like I have a Slack channel that Claude polls, and when I'm away from the computer, I can send him some things. And then you could read them later, but it's still something that has to happen online. And this is, I think, the real missing piece. Once I have something that's able to operate in the cloud when I'm away from my computer, when it's off and coordinate, like act on things, that will be huge. And also closely related is just the ability to actually like do things. I've been building up the system in order to enable, to basically prepare for it. I've been having Claude not only capture my tasks and when they're done, but basically it looks at my tasks, it assigns like what it looks, what it would imagine is a closed scenario. So let's say something, somebody asked a question and I saved it on Slack. So it would say, okay, if there's a reply and it's unsaved, it means it's done. And then it looks at how I resolve these things. And that's building up towards the time where I hope that for the simplest tasks that may take up time and be annoying, you know, when people, somebody asks you for something or somebody asks about a file that you need or know, or to schedule a meeting, then it would just know to do that on its own and it wouldn't need me. And that's what I'm building up towards, and that will be really powerful.

That's the dream, but we're not at the dream yet. And so I'm curious, you know, we, our audience is a lot of PMs. And I'm just curious, now that you have this extra capacity and time, what are the product tasks that you're doubling down on, that you're doing even more, you're spending even more time on? Where do you think the effort should go?

I'm not gonna say anything surprising, but just purely in-depth work. That's one. So talking to customers, talking to users, and a lot of research. I think those 2 are really, really important and given And also just the standard things that any PM aims to get more time for. But I think that in today's world, something that really, really is important and interesting and that is new is A, improving the system. So I think the beauty about this is that if a system is built correctly and on the right pillars, it can grow and improve over time. And I've improved my system basically week over week. And this is done through dedicating time to research and learn about AI, catching up to speed on how things are progressing and implementing them. I have a skill that's called Improve, which I send posts and tweets and articles to with like recommendations and tips about AI setup. And together we review it and see if it fits for me or if it's just like LinkedIn hype and how it can collaborate with what my system is today. And we continuously improve the system together with, you know, tips from a bunch of resources. This is a skill that I think is critical today in order to be able to keep up and become better.

Yeah. I love it. And then finally, my favorite question I ask everybody, you're organized, so maybe you're nicer than me. When Claude is not doing what you want, when AI is not giving you the response that you want, What do you do? Do you yell? Are you nice? Are you polite?

So I think after having watched quite a few of your episodes, I think my response is pretty similar to everybody. If I'm using Whisper, I may yell. I don't get road rage, but I get Claude rage. So I think like I can, I don't, I don't know if I've cursed, but I, I've definitely like raised my voice and I'm also frustrated at the fact that That doesn't go through Whisper well enough. Like, I'm like, you know, exclaiming passionately, and then I just see the transcript and it's like, why isn't this working? So Whisper folks, if you're out there, this is a feature request. Make, make my exclamations be more felt.

I love it. Yeah, I have this— speaking of Claude rage, I have this hypothesis. I have this aura on. I have this hypothesis that you can tell what model I'm working with, with like how agitated and stressed I am. So maybe, maybe that will be a future How I AI benchmark. I'm baking annoy bench, which is like how furious—

That would be amazing.

An agent or an AI makes me. This has been so much fun. Thank you for showing us your full system. I think it's totally accessible. I think a lot of people are going to put this in their own improved skill. And I love how you're figuring out ways to share this with the rest of your team. Where can we find you and how can we be helpful to you?

Awesome. So this has been super fun, Claire. Thank you so much. People can find me on LinkedIn, Daniel Bloom, and also on my website, imdanielbloom.com. I can share some of these resources. This, this, a big part of this system is available for download. So check out the website and yeah.

Awesome. Well, thank you for joining How I AI.

Thank you, Claire.

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