Claire Vo
Claire Vo is the chief product officer at LaunchDarkly and the founder of ChatPRD, likely the most popular PM-specific AI product out there. Before LaunchDarkly, she was a longtime chief product officer at Color and Optimizely. Claire has founded and managed two other companies, Pretty HQ and Experiment Engine, the latter of which Optimizely acquired in 2017.
AI & Technology Skills
Leaders must proactively restructure their organizations and talent ratios in response to AI-driven efficiency gains.
"I hold myself to the bar as a technology leader, I need to be leading the league on understanding what this can disrupt, using these tools to make a better team, and actually shifting the size and sha..."
High-quality AI output depends on precise prompt engineering and providing the model with deep context.
"Prompt really does matter... The instructions matter, the context matters for the quality of the output... I'm getting into a mode now where I may do some model experimentation and tuning behind the s..."
Career Skills
Career advancement requires clarity of goals and making the promotion an easy decision for leadership by solving organizational problems.
"know what you want out of your career, be clear and ask for it, and then make it easy for your boss or whoever can support or champion you to get you from here to there."
Frame promotion requests as solutions to organizational bottlenecks rather than personal career milestones.
"I think the second thing is really the conversation needs to be about what you being in a different position does for the company and why the company needs it. Often the conversation is, 'I want to be..."
Lateral moves into adjacent functions like marketing or engineering can provide the foundation for broader executive leadership.
"PM is such a generalist role, it's okay to go a little left and a little right to go up. I took this marketing growth role... It wasn't only for product, it was for marketing. And I had to learn marke..."
Communication Skills
Prevent organizational pace from degrading to the speed of the calendar by decoupling decision-making from recurring meeting cadences.
"I am really thoughtful that reoccurring meetings do not drive next steps. It's a very tactical thing, but when somebody says, 'Oh, we'll discuss this or we'll decide this in the next meeting,' it's, '..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Evaluate a candidate's seniority by testing their understanding of unit economics and business leverage points.
"I like to ask candidates how they would improve our business model. I think so many PMs come in with a point of view of the product... but don't actually understand the underlying mechanisms of how we..."
A high-performance culture requires explicit, measurable leadership principles rather than vague behavioral descriptions.
"I think you have to define the bar. You have to be really specific, and that means you have to think about pretty deeply what are your leadership principles... and then articulate that and hold people..."
Leadership Skills
Radical candor and clear expectations are kinder than vague feedback when performance or behavior is failing.
"I called both of them individually and I said, 'The way you are operating is not meeting our leadership expectations. If you do not change, you cannot be part of this organization anymore. I believe y..."
Proactively solve leadership's structural gaps by proposing yourself as the solution with a fully formed plan.
"I sat for about a half a day and I thought, I think I can help here, drew out an org chart, put my name on the top, walked into my boss's office and said, 'This is one potential solve of your marketin..."
Combining product and engineering under one leader eliminates functional friction and optimizes for business outcomes rather than departmental goals.
"I'm using CPTO for short code of running product and engineering design functionally together. There should be no debates over what's best for product or what's best for engineering... What is best fo..."
The guest provides a specific framework for auditing a calendar to find 'zone of genius' work and delegating energy-zapping tasks.
"categorize the way you're spending your time into those buckets, and then put the bottom buckets away. Just focus on that top bucket and go, 'How can I be here more?'"
Product Management Skills
AI can drastically accelerate the drafting of product requirements, allowing PMs to focus on high-level strategy and narrative.
"I had used ChatGPT and a prompt to come up with a very serviceable PRD spec for this very technical product... I eventually ran into the monetization and access wall that is the GPT Store right now. A..."