This week I almost completely automated 2 things for @Buffer that we never seem to have enough time for otherwise:
- Competitive intel
- Maintaining our internal product strategy documentation
Now, every Monday, Claude scours the internet and pulls anything noteworthy that over 2 dozen other players in social media management are doing, scouts for mentions of new players in the space, even note pricing or packaging changes, builds out a summary with links and key takeaways, drops the summary in a Notion database, and shares when it’s ready in an open Slack channel.
On alternating Wednesdays, Claude will peruse every internal post, message, Linear update and Granola note for evidence of any decisions or updates that affect product strategy, and propose updates to an internal wiki we have articulating our strategy across the areas of Buffer. I approve changes, but it can add new sections and ping the relevant PM when a new page is added that might represent their area of focus.
This has been pretty mind blowing already, even though I know I can improve on both of these. The first pass of each has been received super positive internally. I already caught one major product update from a fellow social platform I’d missed, and learned about 2 new upstarts I hadn’t heard about.
And tackling both took probably 2 hours of total time in Claude Cowork. I started the product strategy one using Dispatch from my phone in the car before picking up my daughter from preschool.
Things like this don’t necessarily help me become 100x more productive, but they help me do much better work, and help with ensuring that my team and I are focused on the things that matter the most.
As an aside, it’s a bummer (read: it’s a massive problem of short-term thinking and perhaps also greed) that the sentiment across much of “big” tech is that the answer is some arbitrary definition of “productivity” and using that as a justification for layoffs. It’s not this at all – it’s that AI, when implemented well, can help your team work better and smarter by filling the gaps of work that otherwise aren’t being done at all.
I hope my 2 examples inspire you to try something similar!