Product and leadership roles are changing—and “PM is dead” still holds. Claire Vo, CEO of ChatPRD (100,000+ users) and former CPTO at LaunchDarkly, Color Health, and Optimizely, joins Wade to talk about what that means for how you show up: as a leader driving adoption or as someone deciding whether to lean in.
They cover why CEO "AI Mandates" and headcount freezes don’t move the needle—and what does.
Claire shares how she frames AI as career development for skeptics, the rituals that actually stick (AI Fridays, hack weeks, “no lanes”), and why executives have to get hands-on themselves (“era of the hard skill”). She gives concrete ways to start if you’re rusty: the Sunday Scaries Zapier agent, vibe coding a prototype, exec hackathons—and why leader vulnerability makes it safe for everyone to experiment. They also talk about making space for ideas at every level (dogfooding, the “cringe” channel, trading certainty for ambition), what the future product role looks like, and why hiring for willingness to learn and fearlessness about tooling beats tenure. Claire walks through how she’s building ChatPRD with fewer humans—where she’s not constrained and where she still invests in people—as a lens on how work is shifting.
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- Why “PM is dead” still holds and what the skill of the future looks like for product and leadership.
- What actually drives AI adoption—and why CEO edicts don’t.
- Why execs’ jobs are changing too and where to start if you’re embarrassed or rusty.
- How to create an environment where ideas can come from anywhere.
- Why leaning in now is a career move and what hiring looks like when adaptability and tooling matter more than tenure.
- How one AI-native company is built: where humans still matter and where they don’t.
Guest: Claire Vo — CEO & Founder, ChatPRD. X: @clairevo.
