Why Claude can’t be your PM (yet): the Anthropic view
Key points
Key takeaways from Lenny and Friends Summit panel with Anthropic CPO Ami Vora and Mike Krieger, hosted by Dan Shipper, recorded live at the Lenny and Friends Summit in September 2026, San Francisco:
PMs are not obsolete. Vora argues the PM role has not gone away: product remains the bridge between real human problems and the technology that solves them; what has changed is the technology now shifts every couple of months, so PMs must throw away what they knew about the tech while holding fast to knowledge of the problem.
Why the APM was right. Krieger describes a shipping project where a PM lead insisted the team needed an APM after he had argued Claude could cover it; once they joined, all the connective tissue — enablingthe customer success team in real time, looping in safeguards, keeping builders heads-down — got handled. He concludes the role has become more operationally demanding, not less.
Roles are blurring again. Vora sees product returning to a generalist problem-solver mode:because tools are so good, teams can now build three versionsand try them rather than debate a single button, so skills like predicting exactly where a finger lands on a phone are fading — it is faster to build and learn from real usage.
Claude is not a convenor yet. Asked why Claude could not simply do the PM job, Krieger says Claude does catch cross-organisational context via slash search,but no one has yet been scheduled into a meeting by it —the convenor role, bringing modelsand people together, still needs a human,and that setting remains switched off for now.
Bet leads own the chaos. Anthropic Labs runs frontier work as bets, each with a bet lead who is the DRI for deciding whether to double down or wind down; Vora says clear leadership inside the chaos becomes more important as everything moves faster.
Agent-native means shared plumbing. Krieger rule: everything a human could do, an agent should be able to do;the next frontier is interfaces the agent can itself malleate. At Anthropic,Claude now builds,maintainsand iterates much of the software the team uses,including a live UI tracking a project with at least four independent orchestration streams.
Advice for every SaaS. Build the right primitives first: an infrastructural layer that both agentsand whatever REST API you have can go through. Bolting agents onto a two-decade-old app is hard,but once the shared plumbing exists,the product can evolve over time.
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