Interview with Claire Vo

Lenny's Podcast recently hosted Claire Vo, a force in the product world whose career trajectory reads like a PM's dream. From Associate PM to three-time Chief Product Officer, two-time founder, engineer, designer, and marketer, Claire embodies a philosophy of intentional growth and the profound belief that, with agency, you can truly bend the universe in your favor. This conversation delves into how she orchestrates rapid pace and high quality within large organizations, the evolving landscape of product leadership, and candid insights into navigating the tech industry as a woman.

Bending Your Career Arc: Agency and Intentional Growth

Claire Vo's career path is not one of passive advancement but of active design. She emphasizes a fundamental truth: to achieve your dream career, you must first know what you want. Her method is simple yet profound: "know what you want out of your career, be clear and ask for it and then make it easy for your boss or whoever can support or Champion you to get you from here to there." This isn't about constant self-promotion, but strategic clarity. She recalls an instance early in her career where, noticing a marketing leadership gap, she didn't wait to be asked. Instead, she drew up an org chart with herself at the top, outlining how she could bring product and marketing together, and presented it as a solution to a company problem.

This proactive approach culminated in a legendary tale: selling her startup, Experiment Engine, to Optimizely while 34 weeks pregnant. Recognizing a strategic fit, Claire leveraged her network to maneuver her way into an Optimizely experimentation day, ultimately leading to an acquisition. This audacious move exemplifies her conviction that "the universe is vendable to your will." Her advice to early career professionals and seasoned leaders alike is to focus on how your desired role solves a problem for the company, rather than just fulfilling a personal ambition.

Key Practices:

• Clearly define your next desired role and communicate it to your manager.
• Frame your career ambitions as solutions to organizational problems.
• Actively seek opportunities to expand your scope, even "a little left and a little right" of your core role.
• Embrace a "scrappy" mindset to create opportunities where none seem to exist.

The Startup Clock Speed: Pace and High Bar in Larger Companies

One of Claire's signature abilities is her knack for infusing larger organizations with the agility and urgency of a startup, while simultaneously upholding an incredibly high bar for quality. She clarifies her mandate: "people often think that I get hired into later stage companies because I'm supposed to teach them how to operate like a big company and in fact I say I'm hired to remind them they can operate like a startup." Her strategy for accelerating pace revolves around disrupting the reliance on artificial meeting cadences. When someone suggests deciding something in the "next meeting," her immediate response is to question why it can't be decided sooner.

A core tenet of her approach is setting expectations for a "one click faster" clock speed. This means if a task is traditionally slated for this year, it should be done this half; if it's for this quarter, it moves to this month. This concrete, iterative shift in timelines fundamentally alters the energy and momentum of a team. For quality, Claire stresses defining a rigorous talent bar with specific, measurable career ladders, especially at senior levels. She’s also a firm believer in normalizing feedback, asserting that "clear is kind," and quickly addressing situations where team members aren't a fit to maintain overall team health.

Key Changes:

• Challenge reliance on recurring meetings to drive next steps; push for immediate decisions when possible.
• Implement a "one click faster" mindset: pull deadlines in by one iteration (year to half, half to quarter, etc.).
• As a leader, maintain a fast personal SLA to avoid becoming a bottleneck.
• Define a high talent bar with specific, measurable leadership principles and career ladders.

Beyond Product: The Rise of the CPTO and Technical Leadership

Claire frequently fields questions about the CPTO role (Chief Product and Technology Officer), a position she believes is on the rise. This combined role, overseeing product, engineering, and design, is fundamentally different from a pure CPO role. It demands a deep technical understanding – not just an appreciation, but an actual fluency in how software is built. Claire, a founder who wrote code solo for the first year of her startup, spends significant time on the engineering side, ensuring architectural decisions, infrastructure, and team velocity align with product goals. "I just don't think you can do that job if you don't understand how software gets built on a technical level," she states, highlighting her practice of comparing PRDs with GitHub commits during product reviews.

Beyond technical depth, the CPTO role requires robust operational acumen and organization design skills, given that engineering teams are typically much larger and face distinct challenges, from high-volume recruiting to pager duty responsibilities. The strategic benefit of merging these functions is clear: it optimizes for the "capital P Product" as a whole, rather than having individual functions optimize for their own silos, thereby eliminating debates over what's best for product versus engineering or design.

Key Learnings:

• The CPTO role combines product, engineering, and often design under one leader, requiring deep technical fluency.
• Success in this role demands strong operational and organizational design skills due to the scale of engineering teams.
• It's about optimizing for the holistic "Product" rather than functional silos.
• Leaders in this role are directly responsible for the operational health and scalability of the technology.

Navigating the Tech Landscape: A Woman's Perspective

Claire candidly shares her experiences as a woman in tech, stressing that despite her extensive success, it "hasn't been easy and it's still not easy." She clarifies that this isn't about imposter syndrome, which she has no time for, but about the very real structural and cultural challenges evident in the math: declining numbers of female founders and limited representation in senior tech and engineering roles. She recounts being told by VCs not to get pregnant and, even now, consistently being asked if she's "technical enough"—a question she struggles to imagine being posed to male counterparts with her background as a technical founder and leader of large engineering teams.

Her approach to these challenges is rooted in curiosity and empowerment. She encourages reflection on what is structural, cultural, external, and internal that contributes to these disparities. For women aspiring to leadership, she champions staying in an "empowered space" and recognizing that "the universe is vendable to your will." To shift the industry, she advocates for normalizing seeing diverse faces in technical and leadership roles, believing that "you can't believe it unless you see it." By providing platforms and visibility, the industry can begin to dismantle embedded archetypes and unlock the full potential of all talent.

Key Insights:

• Real challenges for women in tech persist, even at executive levels, extending beyond imposter syndrome.
• Maintain curiosity about the structural, cultural, and personal factors contributing to disparities.
• Focus on personal empowerment and agency to navigate and influence change.
• Normalize visibility for diverse voices and leaders in tech to shift perceptions and inspire future generations.

"I just like building stuff and I I find a lot of fun and I think if you find a career or craft that's fun it's easy to accelerate your growth in that career" - Claire Vo