Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) - Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Mike Krieger is the chief product officer of Anthropic and the co-founder of Instagram. After leaving Meta, he co-founded Artifact, an AI-powered news app that I absolutely loved, and joined Anthropic to lead product in 2024.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How Anthropic uses AI to write 90-95% of code for some products and the surprising new bottlenecks this creates

• Why embedding product managers with AI researchers yields 10x the impact of traditional product development

• The three areas where product teams can still add massive value as AI gets smarter

• How Anthropic plans to compete with OpenAI long-term

• How to use Claude as your product strategy partner (with specific prompting techniques)

• Why Mike shut down Artifact despite loving the product, and what founders can learn from it

• Where AI startups should build to avoid getting killed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google

• Why MCP (Model Context Protocol) might reshape how all software works

• The counterintuitive product metrics that matter for AI

• How to evaluate whether your company is maximizing AI’s potential or just scratching the surface

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Where to find Mike Krieger:

• X: https://x.com/mikeyk

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikekrieger/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Mike Krieger

(04:20) What Mike has changed his mind about regarding AI capabilities

(07:38) How to avoid scary AI scenarios

(08:55) Skills kids will need in an AI world

(11:53) How product development changes when 90% of code is written by AI

(17:07) Claude helping with product strategy

(21:16) A new way of working

(23:55) The future value of product teams in an AI world

(27:18) Prompting tricks to get more out of Claude

(29:52) The Rick Rubin collaboration on “vibe coding”

(32:42) How Mike was recruited to Anthropic

(35:55) Why Mike shut down Artifact

(42:41) Anthropic vs. OpenAI

(47:11) Where AI founders should play to avoid getting squashed

(51:58) How companies can best leverage Anthropic’s models and APIs

(54:29) The role of MCPs (Model Context Protocols)

(58:25) Claude’s questions for Mike

(01:03:15) Claude’s heartfelt message to Mike

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Referenced:

• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/

• Claude Opus 4: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/opus

• Dario Amodei on X: https://x.com/darioamodei

• AI 2027: https://ai-2027.com/

• Tobi Lütke’s leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/tobi-lutkes-leadership-playbook

• Claude Shannon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon

• Information theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

• TypeScript: https://www.typescriptlang.org/

• Python: https://www.python.org/

• Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/

• Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/bend