Claude now runs small growth tests as well as a junior product manager
The team grades the AI on four separate jobs, keeps a person in the loop for now, and expects that check to fade.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · Head of Growth (Anthropic): “Claude is growing itself at this point” | Amol AvasareAnthropic is teaching its AI assistant, Claude, to do the job of growing Claude. The early result runs small tests and wins about as often as a junior product manager, someone two or three years into the job.
The effort is called CASH, for Claude Accelerates Sustainable Hypergrowth. Amol Avasare, head of growth at Anthropic, says it is led by Alexei Komissarouk, an engineer who teaches growth engineering, and that it started only a couple of months ago. It did not work well before the model known as Opus 4.5, and a newer version, Opus 4.6, put it on the right track.
The trick is to split shipping into four jobs that can each be scored. First comes spotting opportunities, by studying trends and what worked before. Second comes building the change and preparing it for release. Third comes testing it against a bar for quality and for brand, meaning it looks and sounds like Anthropic. Fourth comes reading the data after release and writing down what was learned.
Each step gets a grade, and the team tries to improve the grade a little at a time. Right now the work is limited to wording changes and very small design tweaks, but Avasare says it is already producing results.
A human still approves what goes out. The team watches whether, week by week, each of the four steps takes less human time and produces better results. For brand checks, the plan is to give Claude a skill, a packaged set of instructions that holds brand rules with clear dos and do nots. As the model gets better at following that package, Avasare expects far less human review, since a bad change can simply be removed.
There is a fifth job the system does not do. That is managing the people involved, the cross-functional stakeholders who must agree on bigger projects. Joel, head of design at Anthropic, joked after a hard meeting: "we will have AGI, and it will still be impossible to get six people in a room to, to get to align." That people problem is why Avasare says product manager work is not going away soon.
Growth is a natural place to start because the loop is short and the score is clear. An idea ships, users click or they do not.
Questions people ask
What is a skill in this context?
A skill is a reusable package of instructions that tells Claude how to do one job, such as follow brand voice, check legal risk, or write in a house style. It can include examples, rules, and files the model should consult before it acts.
Why start automating growth instead of other product work?
Growth work fits because an experiment produces a quick, numeric answer. Change a headline, measure signups over days, and keep the winner. That tight feedback makes it easier to train an AI system than work where success takes months to judge.
When would a person still need to approve a change?
Avasare says a person still approves releases for now, including checks that changes meet the brand bar. For larger projects, he says agreement among teams is still needed, so that stakeholder work stays with people.