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Engineers at Anthropic, empowered by AI tools, are now capable of creating entire product features in days instead of weeks.
The decision to ship Anthropic's Co-Work was made in a 10-day sprint, prompted by the momentum and non-technical use cases observed with Claude Code.
Due to the rapid pace of technological change in AI, creating a product vision longer than one year is not considered feasible at Anthropic.
At Anthropic, the product development process involves creating fewer and less detailed product specifications compared to traditional methods.
Anthropic's Co-Work product can spin off sub-agents to perform tasks in parallel, including searching the web.
Anthropic heavily relies on internal dogfooding and feedback from its most advanced internal users to gather "bleeding edge feedback" for product development.
Prior to the development of Co-Work, some sales employees at Anthropic were using Claude Code for non-technical tasks like generating lead lists and call scripts.
Anthropic's internal sales employees who were early adopters of Claude Code for sales tasks have now migrated to using Co-Work.
An early prototype of Anthropic's Co-Work featured a highly structured, workflow-tool-like UI which was abandoned because it felt too rigid for users.
The Co-Work team at Anthropic operates on a monthly planning cycle using a spreadsheet with a maximum of around 12 P0-priority items, each with a single Directly Responsible Individual (DRI).
At Anthropic, a product "vision" is typically limited to a three-to-six-month timeframe.
A key role of the design function at Anthropic is to curate and bring cohesion to ideas from multiple teams that may be working on similar or colliding projects.