How I AI - How I turned Claude into a self-improving PM assistant | Daniel Blum (PM, Melio)

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Daniel Blum is a product manager at Melio, a B2B payments company, and one of the most systematic thinkers I’ve had on the show when it comes to personal AI infrastructure. He’s spent the past yea...r building a Claude- and Cowork-based productivity system that manages his Notion board, processes his Slack and email, and runs self-improvement loops every week without needing to be prompted. Beyond his own workflow, Daniel built and scaled a “Workstation” onboarding plugin that gets any Melio employee up and running with a personalized Claude setup in about 15 minutes.What you’ll learn:Why Daniel says the two rules that make any AI system powerful aren’t about the tool you pickHow his weekly prep automation fills an entire Notion board from scratch every Sunday, without his touching itThe morning brief feature that teaches Claude new internal terms on its own, so company jargon never slows it downWhy he describes Notion as “read-only” now, and what that says about how PM workflows are changingThe self-improvement loop that watches Daniel’s edits, spots recurring friction, and suggests new skills to buildHow he uses a skill called “Improve” to filter the endless flood of AI tips without drowning in themWhat he built to scale his personal system to every PM at Melio, and the UX lesson he learned the hard wayThe capability gap that’s still keeping him from running 100% of his work through Claude—Brought to you by:Optimizely—Your AI agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teamsJira AI SDLC—Get your tokens’ worth with Jira—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Daniel’s background and the PM overhead problem he needed to solve(03:30) His AI stack at Melio(05:00) The two rules that make any AI system genuinely powerful(06:00) The Notion board Cowork built for him (and manages on his behalf)(07:30) How he contextualizes Claude with voice memos, links, and recurring updates(09:00) His weekly prep automation(11:00) His morning brief(15:00) How Claude flags unknown internal terms and saves them to context(17:30) Running 70% to 80% of his workday through Cowork(19:00) Chrome connector vs. MCPs for tools without integrations(20:00) The real ROI question: why the early weeks feel slow, and why you push through anyway(25:00) Scaling the system to the team with the Workstation plugin(26:30) The self-improvement loop(31:00) How the Improve skill separates actually useful AI tips from the hype(32:00) The Workstation onboarding flow, and the UX lesson from distributing “Spectacular”(38:00) The 20% Claude still can’t do, and what changes when it can(41:00) What Daniel spends his reclaimed time on(42:30) Claude rage—Tools referenced:• Claude: https://claude.ai• Notion: https://notion.so—Other references:• From a $6.90 newsletter to $3M API: How a non-coder built Memelord | Jason Levin: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/from-a-690-newsletter-to-3m-api-how?utm_source=publication-search• How the founder of Morning Brew built a Claude content machine that never runs out of ideas and never sounds like slop | Alex Lieberman: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-the-founder-of-morning-brew-built?utm_source=publication-search—Where to find Daniel Blum:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blumd/Website: https://www.imdanielblum.com—Where to find Claire Vo:ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/Website: https://clairevo.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/X: https://x.com/clairevo—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I cannot describe how powerful it is. I'm really able to do in a day now what used to take me a week. But more than that, I'll say it's a lot of deeper work. There's things that I do today that I just wasn't able to do before. Whether it's more in-depth research, whether it's being more data back, anything you do today, you can do it almost at the top level. One of the things, even at a company level that I tell people is, look, you've got to go through the pain of switching your systems.
Starting point is 00:00:29 And it's not going to be as efficient. And yes, of course, like the old way will be faster because it's muscle memory. But if you get to the next level, not only will you have a system that works better for you, but everybody will have more skills. Today, I say I manage about 70 to 80% of my time in front of the computer with co-work alone. We've seen a couple morning briefs, but I want to see what you think makes sure is different. In this daily brief, my cowork runs through my recent slacks, my emails, my journal notes. And it looks for context that it doesn't understand in these things.
Starting point is 00:00:59 And it says like, oh, if there's a file I wasn't aware of, there's a milestone, there's a goal, it would ask me about it and say, hey, like, what is this? Is this important? Should I read this? And this is, I think, where the real magic happens. This is really genius. I'm curious how this scales beyond you. So you have your system.
Starting point is 00:01:16 Your, you know, 10xpm now. Congratulations. How does this affect the team? How do they use systems like this? Welcome back to How IAI. I'm Clarevow, product leader, and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build. better with these new tools. Today I have Daniel Bloom and he's going to show us his Claude Co-Work system to rule them all. It self heals, it self-optimizes, and it's way
Starting point is 00:01:44 better than the morning briefing you have going on. Let's get to it. Optimizely agent platform for marketers is built on a bigger idea, a whole directory of agents now joined by a newly revealed squad of virtual teammates, each with a defined role and a personality of their own. This isn't about faster drafts, it's about handling the coordination too. The research, the approvals, the handoffs, the routing, the back and forth that quietly eats your week and never makes it into anyone's highlight reel. Get the story behind it all. Hear the confessions from marketers who have handed off the busy work. Meet the squad and understand what virtual teammates can do for you at optimizely.com slash how IAI.
Starting point is 00:02:31 Daniel, welcome to How IAI. I am so excited to have you on this episode because every week, every month, I think things get better. And I'm always impressed with how much more organized. Everybody but me seems to get with their AI and their personal productivity. And so tell me, like, what brought you to building this big system and what problem are you trying to solve? Cool. Well, Claire, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. As somebody who's been an early adopter of AI for quite a while, I think it took already like a good few months ago or even a year ago, we were able to solve some of the big, or at least improve some of the big jobs to be done for PMs, even with simpler tools like with gems, you could improve your specs and you could improve your research. But I think as I was progressing with my AI adoption, I really felt that one of the biggest things that hangs over me and really makes my day-to-day more difficult is all this just overhead of being a PM, of coordinating a bunch of things, remembering endless tasks that arise on Slack and meetings and action items and just trying to maneuver this whole, this whole chaos that happens every single day, while at the same time wanting to do,
Starting point is 00:03:54 depth work and focus and really think, I felt that that was something that was really, really difficult for me. And I was getting nowhere near solving it until I was able to actually build a system with co-work that I'm actually still a little bit surprised at how powerful it is and how much it's helped transform this problem for me. So tell me about your personal AI stack as a PM. How did you pick the tools that go into it? And then I want you to show us how it all kind of works. Perfect. So I'll say, I think most of my choices were made by my company, Melio, and the tools that I'm in our stack. But thankfully, I'm pretty satisfied with those. So for a long time, we only had like the Gemini Enterprise and we were using that. And just a few months ago,
Starting point is 00:04:46 we got the Clod Enterprise and co-work. And that's when things really changed for me. And besides that, I'm basically bound to whatever, whatever tools we have and use. So this is what I work based off of. Okay. So this is good for everybody out there who is stuck with the tools that they're stuck with. You can still make it look at work. I think that Claude is obviously like a big part of this stack was co-worked just the big unlock for you. Like where did you, when did you start building this and what was the early tools versus what you use now? Yeah. So I think first of all, and you're first saying, I think it's very correct. And in general, I'll say, like,
Starting point is 00:05:26 I was bound by constraints of an average PM all the time in terms of having, you know, not endless tokens and needing to work within budgets and bureaucracy. And I think it's very possible and very doable within all those constraints that, you know, real PMs face. And I think it's very important to say. And in terms of the tool, so co-work was definitely the big unlock for me. But I think while I love co-work,
Starting point is 00:05:51 It's not co-work in itself. And I think Codex could be great for this as well or chat GPT work. I think the real importance is for a system to, A, be able to rewrite its own core files. And that means that it keeps on improving. And B, just have connections and integrations to as much of your ecosystem. When these two rules apply, there is a significant opportunity to really, really improve the way you work. And while I was working with Gemini Gems earlier, and there's obviously some incredible things that can be done with those,
Starting point is 00:06:27 these two elements make a system really powerful and also really integrated into your daily life, but also self-improving, which is one of the biggest unlocks here. Okay, well, let's show it to us. I want to see how you actually manage your life as a PM. Let me start with this notion board, right? So this is nothing incredible. It's just a standard PM notion.
Starting point is 00:06:50 board. It has three sections. One is top of mind, which are the large initiatives that I just think of on any given time. It has my this week, which is basically the priority that I have for this week. And it has inbox, which is things that arise from Slack, email, calendar, and co-work picks up and fills them in here. Now, the cool thing about this board is not that it exists, but the fact that not only did co-work build this completely on its own. I was working with a very simple and messy Google Doc before, and I think Nocean got, I think Co-work got tired of it and basically decided to build this for me, but also it actually manages it on my behalf. And I think that's the pretty cool thing that I want to show. And I'll walk through how it does it. I'll say that the most important
Starting point is 00:07:42 thing about this is that it knows me really, really well, because I spent a lot of a lot of time and effort contextualizing it and maintaining this context and also centralizing all of my work in it, which took some time to get used to, but the ROI is just absolutely insane there. And I really felt how well it knows me just when prepping for this for this episode, when I knew that because this is my real environment, I couldn't show, you know, names and projects and sensitive stuff. So basically, I just created this skill on Cloud called Demo, and I just told it replace all the terminology and specifics with generic terms. But because it knows me so well, basically in one prompt, I was able to replace my manager's name with your manager and my top
Starting point is 00:08:27 initiative. You can see here with headline feature. And that's how well it knows me. It was just able to replace all of these. And it just makes it for a really, really seamless and comfortable collaboration. Tell me a little bit about how that context is saved. Is it just that you just put everything in notions. So when it's searching, it kind of knows, is there something more purposeful around your kind of personal brain? How do you, how do you inject context into the system? So I'll say when I built up the system, it was very important for me to build something scalable. So I did a lot of research on like how to build, how to set up your clot MD and the context files. And basically I set it up. So there's a context file around every topic that, that I,
Starting point is 00:09:12 have in like every area of my work and my goals and my and you know my colleagues and everything that you can imagine i spent a lot of time manually contextualizing in the beginning whether through like feeding it links and and different decks and stuff like that and also just a lot of you know whisper just dictating endless information and blabbering endlessly about everything that i can think of which is just incredibly powerful and how much context you can give relatively easily and quickly And then this system basically updates itself on a recurring basis every few weeks. It runs and updates the knowledge files based on, you know, different things that have occurred and different changes. And we will see some of that just in a minute.
Starting point is 00:09:57 I love it. Well, let's switch over to cowork and show us how kind of the system is architected and then how you maintain it and use it over time. Perfect. So it all starts with one recurring. task, which is a composition of several skills called the weekly prep. So the weekly prep is the very basic task that helps me start my week. I'll say that I won't run this live just because I want to be mindful of time. But generally speaking, this task helps me go through all these things that you just saw in the notion and fill them in. So we basically have the top of mind,
Starting point is 00:10:34 this week and the inbox. And what this series of skills does, it pulls. It pulls. and information from my entire ecosystem, from my Notion, my calendar, Slack, from granola transcripts of meetings, and basically recommends what I should be focusing on this week. If there's new top of mind items that need to be added or removed, it would recommend that. It would recommend moving, removing,
Starting point is 00:11:00 finishing things from this week, and the same with the inbox. And this basically, on Sunday mornings, this is our beginning of the week. It helps me start with a very, very, clear and focused list of what I actually want to do. And then finally, it helps me prep for my meetings. So it runs me through the meetings that I'm going to have and ask me how I want to prep for them, whether it's like a serious preparation that requires its own task in my weekly
Starting point is 00:11:25 priority, whether it's a quick reminder or just meetings that don't really need any prep. And then I confirm all of this and I'm set to go and this is the start. And does that push all of it into Notion? Yes, and that basically, this test that I ran earlier basically created this state that we have now, the notion that we have right now. But I'll also show you how it updates it. Yeah, let's look at that. Perfect. So the unique thing about this is that I think, and this is something I ran into after having created the first weekly prep,
Starting point is 00:12:03 I think one of the things any PM can resonate with is the fact that there's two words. There's this beautiful, clean, organized world that's in our weekly priority or our roadmap where everything is very clear and beautiful and fits in. And then there's reality where, as we said, this chaos of slack and meetings and urgent priorities and executive asks and endless things that just flow in it out. And what I was feeling in the beginning is this real gap between what I was doing and prepping and what it was happening in real life, or I was spending all this time doing all these small tasks. And I think I've built the system to really work alongside me. And part of the fact that it
Starting point is 00:12:45 knows me really well is also that it knows how I work. So for example, I'm inbox zero, both on Slack on email. So it knows that if something was saved on Slack and is no longer, it means it's likely done. Or if something was on inbox in Gmail and is no longer so that it probably means I already read it. And that really, really helps in how we collaborate smoothly. So basically, let me run to my next scheduled task, and this is called the Morning Brief. And this is, I think, where the real magic happened. So actually, we're going to run this live right now. I have to laugh because I think folks' AI set up is a real reflection of their internal
Starting point is 00:13:29 personality. And you strike me as somebody who is organized and thoughtful. You're an inbox zero person. I am sorry to anybody that tries to text or email me. I am like a chaos reins person. I cannot put my stuff in a table. I cannot put my stuff in a con bond board. I need just a bot.
Starting point is 00:13:51 And I need when it's two in the morning or it's six in the morning or it's two in the afternoon. I just need to be like, dear bot, what's going on? What's going on? And so it's always fascinating to me to watch people who I just, pre-AI, have, like a much more structured approach to their work. And then post AI, I think it really reflects in how you build your system because mine looks, it probably should look like something like this, but it looks nothing like this. Well, I think I'll say first of all that you are correct in me being quite an organized person,
Starting point is 00:14:28 but I will say like, again, in reality, a lot is a mess and a lot is like, I've found out how much is like business logic in my brain. And I've had this experience with the system where I continuously like do discovery on myself and how I work. And I continuously run into this places where the system is not good enough because it doesn't cover this. And when it doesn't cover like it has a blind spot,
Starting point is 00:14:51 then it becomes much less powerful. So over time I've like covered all different angles. And I think it's doable. I think it's doable. And up until recently I would say in a way I was also operating chaotically. you know, some of the tasks were in saved on Slack. Some of them were like in my inbox. Others were just like tabs that are open in Chrome. And I've just had Claude like learned to work with all
Starting point is 00:15:14 of these and say, all right, I'll take, unfortunately it can't take an open tab as a task, but everything else had just learned to look at the same way I do. Well, let's look at this morning brief because we've seen a couple of morning briefs, but I want to see what you think makes sure is different. Okay. So I think there's several things, but I'll walk through this very, very quickly and show the different parts. And I'll highlight the interesting thing. So the first part is that this brief basically walks me through my meetings. I think one of the biggest pains of PMs is we have ton of meetings. We need action items. We need to act on them. Almost every meeting creates new work. But we have to run to the next meeting. And oftentimes it's back to back until the end of the
Starting point is 00:15:54 day. And then, you know, so this helps me kind of catch up on yesterday's meetings. And it shows all the different things. And basically you can see this takes the granola transcripts. And it gives me a one liner about each meeting and if there's an action item. So here I can see from all of these meetings looking through them, there's one action item to share the walkthrough and recording of a, and a write-up in the feature channel with GoTo Market. And that's it. So it's going to offer me to expand or draft any summaries. I'm going to say, no, let's continue for now. And we're going to walk on over to the next phase, which I think is pretty cool. One of the things that I think is super powerful with co-work and with these harnesses is that you can set them up for improving themselves.
Starting point is 00:16:40 And one of the things I've done is I've over time, I'm building up towards Claude being more agentic and being more able to act on itself. And I'll show you this, and I think it's pretty visible in this flow. This part is pretty cool, where basically one of the difficulties in life is keeping the context clear, right? So you have the system, you contextualize it in those things, but then how do you make sure that it keeps track? So this is one of the ways I've thought of. So basically what it does is imagine in this daily brief,
Starting point is 00:17:12 my homework runs through my recent slacks, my emails, my granola notes, and it looks for context that it doesn't understand in these things. And it says like, oh, if there's a file I wasn't aware of, there's a milestone, there's a goal, it would ask me about it and say, hey, like, what is this? Is this important?
Starting point is 00:17:27 Should I read this? So here it flagged something. Let's see what it is. A term I didn't know. The settlement cap. All right, this is some payments thing. And it says, like, I read the thread and understand it's a limit working through. Want me to save?
Starting point is 00:17:41 Yeah. So I'll say, save, yes, save it to the context. So basically, this is how Claude helps me keep it contextualized and not lose track of things. This is really genius. And I want people to just take a pause and reflect on what this is because it looks like, for your context, you are making sure that Claude understands internal definitions, terms, goals, etc. And so many of us work inside companies where the things that we say are not in the training data, well, not yet at least, they're not in the training data.
Starting point is 00:18:12 And so actually proactively prompting Claude to say, like, I don't understand what you're talking about here. Can we define it together? And then I'll save it to my context and I'll know what you're talking about. Moving forward is really, really sharp and something we haven't seen on the podcast. I love this. Yeah, so it's super hard to just keep track. And the unlock is that you're able to say, oh, I can just ask Claude to be my partner and doing this and automatically, you know, follow up and insist on getting this knowledge
Starting point is 00:18:42 is a really, really big unlock. Amazing. So you run it weekly. You run it daily. Do you actually spend time in the notion or are you still like navigating all this with Claude. So the main idea is that notion is almost a read only for me. I look at the notion to get my focus, to remind me of my top of mind, to remind me of my priorities and focus this week. You know, every so often I'll mark something as done if I just finished it. But generally,
Starting point is 00:19:16 my goal is to have a notion as something I only look at and Claude manages on my behalf. And in general, I'll say this is something that has happened to me naturally, but I think it's one of the core pillars of building a strong system. Today, I say I manage about 70 to 80% of my time in front of the computer with co-work alone. Almost everything I do here is through co-work. And I try to do more and more of it because anything that I don't do in co-work, then the context is not as well caught as if I do it through co-work, whether it's, you know, other applications, whether it's Jira,
Starting point is 00:19:52 Slack, queries, anything generally. Are you using co-work with Chrome at all? Like, are you using browser use, or are you purely just using connectors and MCPs for all of this? Yeah, so I would say in the beginning I was using, like, Chrome a lot. In my personal cowork that I have, I use Chrome a lot. As time proceeds and there's more and more MCPs and connectors, then obviously those are comfortable.
Starting point is 00:20:24 But the Chrome connector is a critical, critical piece of the puzzle for when you don't have these connectors and integrations, and you need to use the browser. And do you feel like this is really saving you? Like, what's the benefit here? Is it like saving your time? Do you feel like you just know everything? Are you getting better work done?
Starting point is 00:20:44 Like, why? Because, you know, again, these systems take time to maintain. And I think we're all sort of at this point with our AI systems. We're like, okay, they're all super cool. but like, why are we doing this? And so I'm just curious, like, what is the benefit you're getting as a PM to running this system? Yeah. So it's a great question.
Starting point is 00:21:02 And I think honestly, oftentimes we make systems that don't give us great benefit. I just, I built a personal agent that its main work is sending memes about my wife in our shared channel on Telegram, which, hey, to me is huge value, I think. It's helping me win arguments, but jokes aside, I think... Quick pause. You need to watch our episode with Jason, the CEO of Meme Lord, who actually has a meme API so you can plug that into your agent. That was a very weird episode that we did. So I haven't watched it yet,
Starting point is 00:21:39 but I will say it's literally like the top-to-do task in my... In like the Claude session that I manage of my agents and what's next, the meme API is definitely the next one. Yeah. But I'll say, I think it's a really, really good question. And I will say also that probably in the beginning, it's not going to, like the ROI is not going to look great, especially when you set up something that's as robust and as significant,
Starting point is 00:22:07 it's going to take some time because while it doesn't know you and your personal, we can call it business logic and like the way you operate, it's going to be very frictionful. And everything it does or says or thinks, it's going to be a little bit off and you're going to lose trust and you're going to be very skeptical and then you're going to double check everything.
Starting point is 00:22:28 But the value tremendously compounds. It's just incredible. The more you kind of power through these first few weeks of a, contextualizing ruthlessly and continuously sharing everything you can and be centralizing whatever work you can in co-work or in your harness, even if it doesn't feel so natural,
Starting point is 00:22:50 over time, it is just, I cannot describe how powerful it is. And I'll say personally, I think, first of all, I'm really able to do in a day now what used to take me a week and I stand behind that. It's, and you know,
Starting point is 00:23:04 it's something that sounds like a, like a hypey LinkedIn post headliner, but it's, it's true. You know, it's insane. I look at the way I work through these like this week, and oftentimes I can get through this week in a good day, which is just mind-blowing. But more than that, I'll say it's a lot of deeper work.
Starting point is 00:23:27 There's things that I do today that I just wasn't able to do before, whether it's more in-depth research, whether it's better being more data-backed when checking things, working less off of hunches and more off of like facts and researches, whether it's competitive researchers, like anything you do today, you can do it almost at the top level, as opposed to back in the day, moving, moving fast, meant you need to, you know, operate on a lot of hunches, not work off of data, not be as robust in terms of your documentation. And today it really, really changes. I love it. I love it. You've sold me. I don't.
Starting point is 00:24:10 know if I'm going to get as organized as you. But I, and I think that's absolutely right. One of the things, even at a company level that I tell people is, look, you got to go through the pain of switching your systems. And it's not going to be as efficient. And yes, of course, like the old way will be faster because it's muscle memory. But if you get to the next level, not only will you have a system that works better for you, but everybody will have more skills. And I think that's almost the more important part where this is a personal productivity system that works for you. That's great. But I'd say probably the bigger benefit is it forced you to learn how to use co-work and use these AI tools in a different way. And as a product builder,
Starting point is 00:24:53 you have to know that stuff. You have to think about, well, what if my product's being used only through Claude? What do I want that to look like? And I think it's just if you are a product, it is just one of the most important things that you could do. This episode is brought to you by by Jira by Atlassian. The teamwork graph in Jira delivers 44% more accurate agent results with 48% less token usage. That's a huge difference when working with AI coding agents like quad, cursor, codex, or copilot. The hardest part of shipping with AI isn't the code. It's the context.
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Starting point is 00:25:56 Try them free at jira.dev. That's j-I-r-a.d-dev. I'm curious how this scales beyond you. So you have your system. Your, you know, 10x PM now, congratulations. How does this affect the team? How do they use systems like this? How do you share?
Starting point is 00:26:17 How does that work? A lot of what you brought up is super relevant in that sense. And I think one of the things that have made me, you know, in a sense, wait for co-work. For example, when a few months ago there was this endless hype about cursor and about Claude Code. and I was kind of sitting on the sidelines and waiting, like, should I adopt these, like, tools that are not meant for me and are super technical can be scary. And I'm glad I waited for co-work because it's a lot about, like, you know,
Starting point is 00:26:50 just UX and experience and simplicity and a lot of the tools that we've built for the team and whether it's the gem that helps the team writes specs, product specs that we did almost a year ago or what we call the workstation that we have that I'll show a little bit later. At the end of the day, if you make something accessible and simple and the value is clear, then it gets adopted much better. All right. Before we get to the workstation flow, which is going to be how you get this across the company,
Starting point is 00:27:21 across the team, you also have some self-improving loops that I think are really interesting. So how do you improve this over time? How does it get better? What have you figured out there? Yeah. So I think this is one of the coolest unlocks that have helped me continuously improve the setup while not dedicating too much time to it. And basically, it's almost not self-improvement, but it's Claude helping me improve it. So I'll walk you through something called the self-improvement loop.
Starting point is 00:27:48 It's a scheduled task that runs weekly, and it has several skills attached to it, and I'll walk through them. So again, it works in parts, a trick I've found really helpful when I have a bunch of information that Claude feeds me. So I'm going to walk through this in retroactive. So first of all, the first part is how my drafts landed. So what I found over time is that when I write with Claude, it'll give me a draft and then I'll change it and I'll just send it. But the thing there is that Claude doesn't learn what the gap is between the draft that it wrote and what I actually sent.
Starting point is 00:28:22 So I have Claude, when running this task, looking for a draft that it's shared with me. And I didn't respond and then looking to see if I sent them in a different way. learning from those draft and saying, oh, so we actually ended up writing this and doing the learning on it on its own. So in this specific week, I see that there was nothing learned and insignificant, but this is very helpful in continuing improving and, you know, polishing Claude on how I write. Now, this is a cool one. The second one, and this is skills that are worth building. So basically Claude on an ongoing basis looks for things that I do on a recurring basis and suggests turning them into skills. Many of my skills actually ended up being from this flow. So you could see it. I've been
Starting point is 00:29:07 prototyping a bunch lately. So it's helping me. It's suggesting I create a claw design handoff skill between co-work and where I do the research and design where I actually build a prototype and a bunch of other interesting skills that I've built. I have a skill like this, by the way, that's handoff between co-work and code, which I use kind of as the executing arm of co-work. This is the second part. The third part is fixes to my existing setup. So basically all of my skills and recurring tasks have lines in their files to collect feedback and friction from my interaction with them. So over time, they gather this.
Starting point is 00:29:46 I don't need to do this proactively. Whenever I ask for a fix or something, they gather and track this information. And every week, it surfaces the top frictions from my interaction with Claude and suggests to improve them. So these are also super helpful, as you can see. And then finally, this is a really cool one. This is actually the improved skill. So basically, we're all dealing with an endless flood. I think this resonates with anybody.
Starting point is 00:30:15 Endless flood of tips hyping up from X and LinkedIn and newsletters and blogs about setups and how to improve your AI usage and you must have this and you must build that. And I found this incredibly overwhelming. On one hand, I don't want to drown in it. At the same time, I want to be able to actually implement what's relevant. So I've built a skill called Improve, which is basically like a very critical auditor for these.
Starting point is 00:30:41 And I share them usually through my phone, through a Slack channel with Claude. And I asked them, like, is this real? Is this powerful? How does this adapt to what we have now? Is this needed? And then it helps me review it. And together we basically decide whether we want to build it or not. So here I ran it against clear.
Starting point is 00:30:59 your how I AI episode on designing loops. And it basically gave me like a criticism of the episode. It said it's like a good video. And it says like, listen, loops at the end of the day are essentially like scheduled tasks. So you're running loops in many ways. But I don't have goal loops that are the way you suggested. So this is something I can adapt.
Starting point is 00:31:20 There's some things I can adopt. And basically this helps me, you know, keep track of all the things that I run into and all these like tips and tricks. and at the same time not drown in them and also not, you know, given to the hype too much. So these are all the different things I do to, you know, Claude helps me continuously improve it over time
Starting point is 00:31:39 with as little, you know, dedicated effort as possible. Love that. We could have done the entire episode on the last three minutes. It's so good. You know, the first one where it's like, take everything that you wrote for me that I hated and did it separately or dropped or rewrote and then just learn from that.
Starting point is 00:31:58 That's genius. We saw. Alex Lieberman had like a write like me self-learning loop, but this one is really interesting because it takes the indirect signals of rewriting and built it. I also in the loops episode have a skill writing loop. So I think that's a good one. Look at our work over the last couple week or last week and write loops. And then what was it? Let me look at the third one real quick. So the third one is just taking interactions with Claude over the week. It's similar to welding new skills, but just fixing existing. Yeah. And then the third one, which is so genius.
Starting point is 00:32:35 And I wish more people did this is build in feedback or telemetry into your skills and then review that over time and improvement. I've seen a couple folks. Like I think Intercom does this a little bit with some of their skills that they share across the org. But I haven't seen anybody for themselves say anytime that you gather feedback from me, positive, on a skill or you hear feedback from me that's indirect, put it somewhere that we can review on a weekly basis, super, super, super smart. And then, of course, ingest all this great content, especially from Hawa AI, and improve your systems. I love it. What I also love that you've told us you do is you take this mega system that you've built across Notion, across Claude, this
Starting point is 00:33:22 improving loops, and you figured out a way to scale this to the org. in, is it called Workstation? Workstation. Okay, let's see that. For sure. So basically, I'll say that one of the main things that were important for us, and we were debating whether to do this with Claude Code, which was much more powerful or with co-work,
Starting point is 00:33:46 and we decided I'm doing it with co-work. We have this, what we call the Workstation, which is essentially this, I would say, operating system. It started out for PMs in Nielio. but it actually expanded to all Amelia workers. And basically what it does is, you know, it creates an ecosystem and an operating system for you. But I think the cool thing here is this onboarding,
Starting point is 00:34:10 and it's important to say I built this with some very, very talented and smart colleagues of mine. We really insisted in the beginning on a good UX. And after having, you know, a few PMs try to do it with cloud code through the terminal and taking three days, you know, to install everything and run all the dependencies, we understood that we need to do something that's simple. So basically one of the key elements of this workstation
Starting point is 00:34:34 is that it basically does everything for you. So it's a UX built into the flow, into the chat. So basically what it does is walks you through everything you need to do. So besides just, you know, clicking on a few confirms and maybe addressing a few questions, it basically gets you up to speed on everything. It gets all your tools connected, confirms your roles, maps your colleagues, your management where you sit,
Starting point is 00:35:00 looks at your calendar and what that looks like and your Slack helps you create your own voice so that you basically, from day zero, you're writing in a way that sounds like you and just doesn't sound like a stranger, captures your goals and basically helps you get moving really, really fast. I couldn't do the full flow here because I have it set up already. But you could see it's very, very simple. It takes you hand in hand. and guides you to this, like, very, very robust system that helps you, you know, work in co-work fully and become native. I love this. I have seen so many people try to train this into their team, like sit and say, okay, step one, step two, step three, step four, etc.
Starting point is 00:35:46 Just making a skill to say, okay, do you have all your connectors set up? Great. Have we pulled your voice? Great. Have you told me about you? great, like tell me, you know, let me settle this up. And then from day zero, someone on your team, look, they're going to customize it. Maybe. Some people won't, though. And so if everybody's starting from this, it takes, what, 15 minutes, something like that? Yeah. I love it. And then you just
Starting point is 00:36:13 do this as like a shared skill. This is a plugin. So everybody has it in our library and anybody can access it. And, you know, now it's already like, it's become quite a big thing. Like my colleagues have taking it to the next level and it's really, really impressive. But yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I think for me, this landed when about a year ago I built our spec writing gem, call it spectacular. And I was using it for my own and I built it to be really, you know, back in the day, a year ago, you know, getting, you know, holding up the template was something really hard to
Starting point is 00:36:49 achieve and making it not hallucinated in a long spec was like something that's hard. And after I built something that was really powerful and good for the way I was working and I was exciting to, I was excited to distribute it. I had like live demos with several PMs that I watched them operated from zero. And I saw how different. Like I thought it was already this complete, fully like baked tool. And I saw them using it and struggling because it was completely adjusted to how I work. And that's when it started when into this gem I built this UX that guides you hand in hand. It tells you like, all right, I'm your, I'm your spec writing assistant.
Starting point is 00:37:25 Here's how you can work with me. Here's what I recommend you to do. Here's how you can start and basically guiding them hand in hand, making it simple and accessible. So yeah, good UX and simplicity is critical even for, you know, internal teams and PMs and technical people. I love this so much. This is, I mean, this is something if you haven't taken it away as somebody watching this
Starting point is 00:37:47 podcast, every company should go do this and build like your sort of like bootstrap, my personal AI skill or plugin inside Cloud or inside Kodex. Everybody starts from the same page. And you can just get your most like AI-pilled people on the team to build up for you and share. And then everybody can have shared ownership over it over time. Daniel, this has been awesome. Just to recap for folks, you have Notion as sort of like a read-only database, source of truth for all your context and priorities for a week.
Starting point is 00:38:18 you run two anchoring automations in co-work, which is your weekly setup, which sets up this whole notion thing, props you for meetings, priorities, and then your daily briefing that kind of cycles through the next day, takes care of stuff. And then you've been able to scale this in the org through kind of a workstation plugin that anybody can use and kind of set up this thing for themselves. And now you're living your best life. And again, you know, bosses don't listen to this, but the man says that he can do in one day what he used to do in a week. So you're getting real, just like real productivity gains from this. And you have learned maybe to be more organized and Claude plus Notion have made you more organized as a PM. So everybody's, everybody's benefiting here.
Starting point is 00:39:16 This has been awesome. I want to do like a couple quick lightning round questions and then we will get you back to all your highly productive work. You know, I want to go back to you saying that you operate almost 70, 80 percent through Claude and through co-work. What do you think is missing? What is that remaining 20, 30 percent? And do you think it's going to be 100 percent at some point or kind of what's that gap and what's that gap and what's, missing in in terms of you being able to use AI or use cloud for everything? So it's a really, really good question. I think the missing piece, and my personal sense is that it's very close, is A, the ability to operate in the cloud essentially in a way that's unrelated to when my computer is open and running. I think that's critical. And I think that was also created with a Claude tag, which we don't yet have in our company. But I've heard good things also that it's expensive, I don't know, but the ability to run a clawed away from your computer or have it run on its own, something like OpenCla or like a Hermes, is really, really
Starting point is 00:40:29 critical to do more of these things and to achieve more. I've found some ways to work around this. Like I have a Slack channel that Claude pulls, and when I'm away from the computer, I can send him some things, and then he could read them later, but it's still something that has to happen online. and this is, I think, the real missing piece. Once I have something that's able to operate in the cloud when I'm away from my computer when it's off and, you know, coordinate, like, act on things, that will be huge.
Starting point is 00:40:59 And also, closely related is just the ability to actually, like, you know, do things. So I've been building up the system in order to enable, to basically prepare for it. I've been having Claude not only capture my tasks and when they're done. But basically it looks at my tasks. It assigns like what it looks,
Starting point is 00:41:19 what it would imagine is a closed scenario. So let's say somebody asked a question and I saved it on Slack. So it would say, okay, if there's a reply and it's unsaved, it means it's done. And then it looks at how I resolve these things. And that's building up towards the time where I hope that for the simplest task that may take up time and be annoying, you know, when somebody asks you for something or somebody asks about a file that you need,
Starting point is 00:41:43 or no or to schedule a meeting, then it would just know to do that on its own and it wouldn't need me. And that's what I'm building up towards and that will be really powerful. That's the dream. But we're not at the dream yet. And so I'm curious, you know,
Starting point is 00:41:59 we, our audience is a lot of PMs. And I'm just curious, now that you have this extra capacity and time, what are the product tasks that you're doubling down on, that you're doing even more, you're spending even more time on, Where do you think the effort should go? I'm not going to say anything surprising, but just purely in-depth work.
Starting point is 00:42:19 That's one. So talking to customers, talking to users, and a lot of research, I think those two are really, really important and given. And also just the standard things that NEPM aims to get more time for. But I think that in today's world, something that really, really is important and interesting and that is new is, a, improved. the system. So I think the beauty about this is that if a system is built correctly and on the right pillars, it can grow and improve over time. And I've improved my system basically week over week. And this is done through, you know, dedicating time to research and learn about AI, catching up to speed on how things are progressing and implementing them. I have a skill that's
Starting point is 00:43:04 called improve, which I send posts and tweets and articles to with like recommendations and tips about AI setup. And together we review it and see if it fits for me or if it's just like LinkedIn hype and how it can collaborate with what my system is today. And we continuously improve the system together with tips from a bunch of resources. This is a skill that I think is critical today
Starting point is 00:43:29 in order to be able to keep up and become better. Yeah. I love it. And then finally, my favorite question I ask everybody, you're organized. So maybe you're a nicer. than me when Claude is not doing what you want, when AI is not giving you the response that you want, what do you do? Do you yell? Are you nice? Are you polite? So I think after having watched
Starting point is 00:43:56 quite a few of your episodes, I think my response is pretty similar to everybody. If I'm using whisper, I may yell. I don't get road rage, but I get Claude rage. So I think like I can, I don't, I don't know if I've cursed, but I've definitely like raised my voice. And I'm also frustrated at the fact that that doesn't go through whisper well enough. Like I'm like, you know, exclaiming passionately. And then I just see the transcript and it's like, why isn't this working? So whisper folks, if you're out there, this is a feature request. Make my exclamations be more felt.
Starting point is 00:44:32 I love it. Yeah, I have this. Speaking of Claude Rage, I have this hypothesis. I have this aura on. I have this hypothesis that you can tell what model I'm working with with to like, how agitated and stressed I am. So maybe that will be a future how I AI benchmark. I'm baking annoy bench, which is like how furious.
Starting point is 00:44:54 An agent or an AI makes me. This has been so much fun. Thank you for showing us your full system. I think it's totally accessible. I think a lot of people are going to put this in their own improved skill. And I love how you're figuring out ways to share this with the rest of your team. where can we find you and how can we be helpful to you? Awesome.
Starting point is 00:45:15 So this has been super fun, Claire. Thank you so much. People can find me on LinkedIn, Daniel Bloom, and also on my website, I'm Danielbloom.com. I can share some of these resources. This, a big part of this system is available for download. So check out the website. And yeah.
Starting point is 00:45:35 Awesome. Well, thank you for joining High AIA. Thank you, Claire. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at how IAIIPod.com.
Starting point is 00:46:04 See you next time.

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