Root CLAUDE.md: what's inside and why lean

Today’s episode

The way PM teams are trending, one PM is going to support 20 people.

Not just engineers. Designers. Analysts. Strategy partners. GTM. Sales. Support.

You cannot answer everyone’s questions about everything. You cannot be in every Slack thread. You cannot be the bottleneck for context that already exists somewhere in a Google Doc no one can find.

But you can give them a high-context, well-organized repo.

Hannah Stulberg is a PM at DoorDash and a former Google PM. She has spent over 1,500 hours in Claude Code.

She wrote the viral Claude Code for Everything series. Her setup is not a personal productivity system. She has structured her entire team’s context into a shared repo that everyone queries.

Her strategy partner - completely non-technical - puts up pull requests every day. Her engineers query metric definitions without asking the analyst. Her designers pull product context without waiting on a PM.

If you are building a team that runs on AI, this is the episode to watch.

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1. Build a Team OS, not a personal OS - A shared repo where every function checks in work. Engineers, designers, and analysts self-serve without asking the PM.

2. Root CLAUDE.md is everything - Doc index, team roster with Slack IDs, channel map. Keep under one page or you burn context every session.

3. Nested indexes save 97% of context - Every folder gets a navigation CLAUDE.md. A customer query used only 3% of the context window.

4. Three token tiers - Always-loaded root (~500 tokens), folder indexes on navigation (200-500), content files on demand (1,000-10,000+).

5. Split analytics by product area - Metrics, queries, schemas separated. Progressive loading prevents waste.

6. Gate launches on repo updates - Feature not shipped until metrics, queries, schemas, and playbooks are checked in.

7. Verified playbooks kill hallucinations - Analyst-audited methodology. Claude follows verified steps instead of inventing its own.

8. Plan mode makes 10x docs - Shift+Tab twice. Five phases: load context, ask questions, build plan, push thinking, review agents.

9. Split long docs across parallel agents - Each writes to a temp file. Orchestrating agent compiles. Prevents context overflow.

10. The flywheel compounds daily - Automate one task, free time, improve the repo. After 1,500 hours still iterating every day.

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Where to find Hannah Stulberg

* LinkedIn

* In the Weeds Substack

Related content

Podcasts:

* My Claude Code PM OS with Dave Killeen

* Claude Code + Analytics with Frank Lee

* Claude Code as PM OS with Carl Vellotti

Newsletters:

* The ultimate guide to context engineering

* Build your PM operating system

* How to use Claude Code like a pro

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