Cat Wu, Anthropic’s head of product for Claude Code and Cowork, has been a key figure in that success. Since joining the company in August 2024, Wu has helped shepherd Claude through a critical phase, leveling it up from a purely informational chatbot to a coding tool and beyond. Wu, who oversees the development of new features, is frequently paired with Boris Cherny, a core member of Anthropic’s technical staff and the creator of Claude Code, leading the pair to be characterized as Anthropic’s “Batman and Robin.”

Wu sat down with me at last week’s second annual Code with Claude conference in San Francisco, where she discussed how she thinks about product strategy, and how she hopes the experience of using Claude will change in the future.

When you’re looking at product strategy, how much of it is reactive to your peers or your competitors? Do you think about that at all?

The main thing that we design for is staying on the exponential, so I think, across our team, we instill in everyone the lesson that AI will just continue to get better. For us, we just need to stay at this frontier. We don’t think about competitors. I think if you do think about competitors, you end up being, like, perpetually two weeks, or like, a month behind how fast you can execute. And so it’s normally not the best way to stay at the frontier.