Anthropic's product team is led by ex-bankers and traders. This is who it's hiring.

Many of the shiny jobs at AI labs like Anthropic involve deep researchers in the weeds of AI advances. There's a lot more to it than just that though; the Anthropic lab has a small team of product managers (PMs) led by ex-bankers, traders and VCs. Members say the team is incredibly difficult to hire for.

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Catherine Wu, head of product for Claude Code, recently appeared on a podcast to discuss Anthropic's product team. She said it has 30-40 product managers currently, and that it will "pretty much hire anyone" with the right product taste. The problem is that taste is "still a very rare skill to have."

Wu said the Anthropic product team has two halves. Product research is “responsible for understanding all of the feedback from our customers for our models and then feeding that to the best research team to act on it." That team is led by Dianne Na Penn; she spent the first four years of her career as a JPMorgan high-yield bond trader following the financial crisis, but went on to work as head of product for LLM modelling in Amazon's Alexa AI team. Wu also worked at JPMorgan briefly, interning in its equity derivatives desk before stints at Scale AI and VC firm Index Ventures.

Wu said the other product team is product growth, "responsible for growing [users] across our entire product suite." That team is led by Amol Avasare; he worked in Macquarie's TMT group as a graduate, but joined Anthropic from fintech unicorn Mercury.

The function of these PMs is to get users "onto the golden path," and interact with Claude in the most efficient way possible. "We get tens of thousands of GitHub issues asking for every single thing under the sun," Wu said. "It takes a lot of care and taste to figure out which of these is worth building.” She said that, generally, Anthropic hires product managers with engineering backgrounds as they'll have a better idea of how difficult each of those technical problems would be to solve.

There were rumours that product managers were falling out of fashion earlier in the decade. For example, Meta's 2023 'year of efficiency,' notably focused on creating a "optimal ratio" of engineers to everything else at the expense of product. AI seems to have changed things; Wu said that "as code becomes much cheaper to write, the thing that becomes more valuable is deciding what to write."

Anthropic's product team also has a "small pod of folks who collaborate very closely" with its deep research people. Things may be different at competitor OpenAI; insiders there previously told us that some of the longest-serving researchers "don't respect the product side as much." 

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