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Cat Wu, Anthropic’s Head of Product for Claude Code, describes the hiring filter on her team in her interview with Lenny Rachitsky:

I think all of the roles are merging. PMs are doing some engineering work. Engineers are doing PM work. Designers are PMing and also landing code. You can either hire a lot more engineers who have great product taste, or you can keep your engineering hiring the same and hire a lot more PMs to help guide some of their work. On our team, we’re pretty focused on hiring engineers with great product taste. This way we can reduce the amount of overhead for shipping any product. Like there are many engineers on our team who are fully able to end to end go from see user feedback on Twitter through to like ship a product at the end of the week with almost no product involvement. And this, I think, is actually like the most efficient way to ship something. So I think like engineer and PM are kind of overlapping and you will get a lot of benefit from having more of either. I think product taste is still a very rare skill to have and we’ll pretty much hire anyone who we feel has demonstrated this strongly.

This is what the Full Stack Builder pattern looks like as a hiring filter. The headline is the merging of roles. Wu’s own background says where the bench comes from:

Yeah, I was an engineer for many years. I was then a VC very briefly before joining Anthropic. And actually almost all the PMs on our team have either been engineers or ship code here on Claude Code. And so that’s one of the things that I think helps build trust with the team and also just enables us to move a lot faster. And then actually our designers also have been front-end engineers before.

So to be clear, Wu doesn’t say that the roles have merged, but what she’s describing is the continued blurring of lines.

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