Check out the conversation on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Brought to you by:
Bolt.new - Ship AI-powered products 10x faster
Product Faculty - Get $150 off their #1 AI PM Certification: code AAKASH150
Customer.io - Send smarter messages using your product data
Ariso - Ship AI agents and features faster, with fewer regressions
Land PM Job - 12-week live course to master the PM job search
Today’s Episode
Whether you’re using a PM OS, or using regular Claude, or using another AI harness (like ChatGPT Work or Codex)…
One of the most important parts of any PM’s AI setup is the skills you have.
Today’s guest Oji Udezue, CPO at Typeform, Calendly, and Parsable, and he goes into a masterclass of what skills PMs should have, how to build them, and how to use them.
Enjoy:
The landscape of PM automations is changing rapidly. Between graphs, loops, scheduled tasks, cowork, claude code, lindy, relay… it’s hard to break it all down.
I’m giving a free webinar on Claude Automations next Tuesday. Join me:
Do you want to get 1:1s with me to talk AI, PM, and landing a job? If so, join the next edition of my Land PM Job cohort program:
Today’s Deep Dive
Thanks for having me in your inbox. Here’s your hand-written key takeaways:
Why PMs need a broad range of skills
The top skills every PM should have and use
1. Why PMs need a broad range of skills
Oji is currently running ProductMind, where he works with companies to become AI-native. And one thing he has observed is:
We see PMs who are not speeding up their product judgment, speeding up their orchestration skills to match the new speed of the engineers
There are loads of repos out there for tokenmaxxing, or engineering, but there are almost no good repos for PM skills (one exception: mine).
The way Oji conceptualizes a business in his book Building Rocketships, every company has three layers:
Business
Product
Code
Only having skills at the bottom most layer is a huge gap. That’s why Oji has generously open-sourced business and product skills:
2. The top skills every PM should have and use
Oji ran his demo in Claude Code inside Antigravity, which is a VS Code fork. Skills work with any AI model or IDE you like, though.
Oji’s system has 17 skill files:
The most important thing about these skills is what they cover. They cover the stages of product development that actually require PM judgment: finding the problem, deciding what to build, getting people to value, making money, setting direction, and running the work.
In addition, there are two unique things about how Oji set up his skill system:
The project scaffolding skill
The concept of gates
Let’s walk through each.
The Project Scaffolding Skill
The way Oji has orchestrated the system is it has a new project scaffolding skill at the heart of it all.
What executes is an 11-step workflow, and the first 4 steps never touch code.
By the end you have a market research doc, a product brief, a project-specific CLAUDE.md, a folder structure, a tests folder, CI wired up, and secrets already in .gitignore.
The Concept of Gates
LLMs very rarely tell you no. And this skill will tell you absolutely no, don’t do this.
Everything in Oji’s skills is built around this fact.
Take vet-a-feature. It’s built on the idea of the sharp problem test:
Three questions. Fail one and the idea is dead.
What do people do today instead? If there’s an easy workaround, you don’t have a problem.
How many people have it, and how often? Daily beats monthly at a tenth of the market size.
Will anyone pay? Check what they already spend on the workaround.
Then the bar. You need to be 3x better than what they do now, or nobody switches.
Other skills similarly work with gates. And what this does is it helps you build trust in the LLM’s response and replicate real PM judgment.
You want to build skills with gates that tell you no.
Final Words
With AI where it is today, the scarce skill is no longer building something. It’s the judgment to say this one and not that one. I call it Taste at Speed.
You cannot prompt your way to this skill, and you can’t hire an agent to hold it for you. You have to own it as a PM.
As much as these automations help…
Always apply your judgment on top, and do not ship AI slop!
Get More of Oji
Go Deeper
I’ve done extensive testing on what makes a good skill and how to build a PM OS for paid newsletter subscribers (that go much deeper than this podcast).
→ Get the founding plan to get access.
I also have several free podcasts on Claude Code that you may find helpful: my 3 part series with Carl Vellotti, PM OS with Dave Killeen, Team OS with Hannah Stullberg, Company OS with Jiaona Zhang, and Claude Code for CPOs.
→ To never miss an episode, subscribe on YouTube and follow on Apple & Spotify.
Finally, in my live course, I teach you how to do extremely advanced PM automation Claude Code.
→ Join us.
