Gabriel Illanes M.

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

AI companies (Tech companies) need to focus on bigger bets

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @AnthropicAI's Head of Growth Amol Avasare:

1. Engineering is getting the most AI leverage—and it’s squeezing PMs and designers. With Claude Code, a five-engineer team now produces the output of 15 to 20 engineers. But PM and design productivity haven’t scaled proportionally. The result is a compressed ratio where one PM is effectively managing the output of a much larger engineering team. Anthropic's growth team is responding in two ways: hiring even more PMs (!), and formally deputizing product-minded engineers to act as mini-PMs for any project with less than two weeks of engineering time.

2. Anthropic is using Claude to automate its own growth. The internal initiative is called CASH (Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth). It works across four stages: identifying opportunities, building features, testing quality, and analyzing results. Right now it handles copy changes and minor UI tweaks. The win rate is comparable to a junior PM with two to three years of experience, and improving rapidly.

3. The one part of PM work that AI can’t automate yet: getting six people in a room to agree. Amol and his head of design joke that even with AGI, it’ll still be impossible to align six stakeholders. Cross-functional coordination—managing opinions, navigating politics, mediating tradeoffs—remains the bottleneck that AI doesn’t touch for larger projects. This is why Amol believes PM roles aren’t going away, and may actually grow.

4. 60-80% of Anthropic’s growth team's projects have no PRD. For smaller work, kickoffs happen on Slack—messages back and forth with product-minded engineers who can push back and ask the right questions. For larger projects, Amol believes in a proper 30-minute cross-functional kickoff (legal, safeguards, stakeholders) to surface concerns early.

5. Adding friction to onboarding drives growth—if the friction helps users understand why the product is for them. His work Mercury, MasterClass, Calm, and now Anthropic, adding steps to onboarding flows consistently improved conversion. The key: cut annoying friction that doesn’t add value, but add friction that helps users understand why the product is for them.

6. AI companies need to focus on bigger bets, not better A/B tests. Amol’s argument: if your core product value is driven by AI, then the future value is orders of magnitude higher than today’s value, because model capabilities grow exponentially. In that world, micro-optimizations capture a shrinking share of a growing pie. Traditional growth teams do 60% to 70% small optimizations and 20% to 30% big swings. At Anthropic, they flip this ratio.

7. Amol built a weekly AI agent that scans Slack for cross-functional misalignment. Using Cowork with the Slack MCP, he has a scheduled task that looks across his projects and conversations and surfaces areas where teams are about to do overlapping work or pull in different directions. A colleague on the enterprise team already caught major misalignment that would have caused weeks of wasted effort.

8. A traumatic brain injury taught Amol the principle that now drives his work: freedom through constraints. In early 2022, a kick to the head during a Muay Thai sparring session caused a traumatic brain injury. Amol spent nine months off work and months relearning to walk, unable to look at screens or listen to music for more than 20 seconds. He was re-injured a month after joining Mercury and had to take two more months off. He’s still not fully healed. But the constraints—no alcohol, no caffeine, mandatory breaks, daily meditation—have become the habits that let him operate at the intensity Anthropic demands. “The true freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don’t get what you want.”

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@totalplaymx @DnyGarciaa lo mismo me pasa, qué paso?

[Slack @SlackHQ]

Now building is a team sport.

Introducing Slack Code: a new way for your team and AI agents, like @AnthropicAI's Claude Code, Claude Tag, Devin from @cognition, @github Copilot, @ChatGPT, and @vercel agents, to write, review, and ship code together.

Just mention an agent to spin up a channel, pull in your team, and start building. All in the open. All in Slack.

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@entel porfa me responden ?

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@entel llevo mas de 1 año tratando de regular mi sutación con ustedes. Les escribo por mensaje, me responde un bot que. vaya a whatsapp. Voy a whatsapp y su bot no me responde nada, sino que me envía links que no sirven a mi caso. Me pueden dar una mano?

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@entel buenas he intentado de todas formas contactarme con su WhatsApp y no funciona. Tienen otro medio?

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@entel

Vengo levantando desde hace rato este tema, me echan una mano por favor ?

No funciona su whatsapp 🚨

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@entel Buenas por favor me dan una mano con esta solicitud ? Toda la resolución del problema está de su lado . Gracias

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@entel Buenas, cómo van ?

Llevo desde la mañana tratando de contactarme con su servicio al cliente y aun no lo logro. Me pueden dar una mano ?

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@entel Buenas llevo meses intentando resolver un problema con ustedes. En la sucursal me dijeron que me contactarían y aún no recibo respuesta. En WhatsApp está funcionando mal su servicio

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@TELMEXSoluciona @totalplaymx Podrían venir a instalar hoy mismo ?
Me puedes comentar un poco más de los detalles de conectividad y precio del plan ?

Gracias

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@totalplaymx tienen la peor asistencia al cliente. Sinceramente llevo 1 semana intentando agendar una hora. Ya me fallaron 2 veces con la visita del técnico. Cuánto más tengo que esperar ?

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@totalplaymx @TotalplayAyuda Ya les envié un dm

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

@TotalplayAyuda llevo más de una semana tratando de dar de baja mi plan y no hay forma. Me pueden dar una mano por favor ?

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

Perdí todas mis fotos de europa 😔

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

Intenso el inicio de año. But ya tengo depa, ya conocí las torres del paine y tengo buen café. No me puedo quejar

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

Placer navideño : las calles vacías de Santiago

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

Wey. En la playa duermo muy bien

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

Me he portado muy bien

[Gabriel Illanes M. @gaboillanes]

Here we go