Mastering ChatGPT: Advanced techniques for workplace communication and productivity | Hiten Shah

Hiten Shah is a serial founder who has started several analytics and security companies, including Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. The latest one, Nira, was acquired by Dropbox in 2024. In this episode, he shares how he turns ChatGPT from a simple chatbot into a personal workplace coach, sales strategist, and productivity multiplier. What you’ll learn: How to create AI versions of your boss by loading operating manuals and personality tests into ChatGPT projectsA simple approach for turning sales frameworks into customized discovery call scripts for any productWhy context is everything—and how to load ChatGPT with the right information before asking for outputsThe “show it what great looks like” technique that dramatically improves AI responsesHow to build a personal AI coach using your own personality assessments and communication styleWhy you should use temporary sessions for random queries to keep your main ChatGPT memory clean— Brought to you by: Paragon https://useparagon.com/HowIAI—Ship every SaaS integration your customers want Notion https://notion.com/howiai—The best AI tools for work — Where to find Hiten Shah: Blog: https://hitenism.com/ X: https://twitter.com/hnshah LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hnshah/ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Hiten (02:55) Why Hiten primarily uses ChatGPT (04:12) The importance of context and memory management (07:58) Demo: Creating “What Would Morgan Do” project (13:30) Using personality types to improve AI coaching (16:20) Building a personal operating system in ChatGPT (20:55) Mixing structured frameworks and personal context (23:20) Demo: Winning by Design sales framework implementation (30:00) Creating discovery call scripts (31:44) Using ChatGPT’s deep research feature to understand Claire’s leadership style (36:30) Lightning round and final thoughts — Tools referenced: • ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/ • Claude: https://claude.ai/ — Other references: • Hiten's Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j15hoR3qZLQMJuW-mtfYFyhXM0CpYHQkZJuUgqHBsZs/edit?tab=t.0 • Winning by Design: https://winningbydesign.com/ • Enneagram: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/ • Human Design: https://humandesign.tools/ • Myers-Briggs: https://www.myersbriggs.org/ • DISC: https://www.discprofile.com/ • Lex: https://lex.page/ • The Lean Startup: https://theleanstartup.com/ • Sean Ellis score: https://pmfsurvey.com/ — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Claire Vo?

  I want to learn how to use ChatGPT the right way. So you gave us one tip, which was be thoughtful about its memories. But what else? What are your tips?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  I usually won't start anything without a ton of context or with the intention of giving it context over time. Just show it what great looks like. It's like a human. If a human doesn't know what great looks like, they're not going to know what great looks like.

• 0:18Claire Vo?

  You do have an example of something that you think is great, which is your boss's operating manual.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  My boss's name is Morgan, so it's what would Morgan do? So I'm going to create the project and then I'm going to add these files here. I want to pitch Morgan the craziest product idea I can think of. What is the best way to pitch it to him so we can go after it? Now it's like, this is what you want Morgan to say. Yeah, that sounds like him.

• 0:44Claire Vo?

  This is a tip for all the ICs out there. Go and replicate your boss and prep for conversations with them.

• 0:56Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Voe, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have a great conversation with Hitten Shah, who's been building B2B SaaS for over 20 years. Not only is he a great founder and product thinker, but he is, by my estimation, a total ChatGPT power user. He's figured out how to load up ChatGPT projects with information about yourself and about your boss to figure out the best way to communicate with each other and get work done. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the integration infrastructure for AI SaaS companies. Are AI features on your 2025 product roadmap?

• 1:41Claire Vo?

  Whether you need to ingest data for RAG from your users' external apps like Google Drive files, Gong transcripts, or Jira tickets, or build AI agents that automate work across your users' various tools, integrations are key to building useful AI features. However, building every one of these integrations costs months of engineering, time you simply can't afford given the rapid pace of AI advancement. Paragon is an all-in-one embedded integration platform for AI products. Industry leaders like AI21, U.com, and CopyAI use Paragon to connect over 100 of their users' SaaS applications,

• 2:22Claire Vo?

  to ingest data for RAG and provide their AI agents with thousands of integration actions. They've accelerated their integration development velocity by up to 50x, allowing their engineering teams to focus on core product features. Want to fast-track your integration roadmap this year? Visit useparagon.com/HowIAI to learn how. That's useparagon.com/HowIAI. Thanks for being here. I am excited to talk about everybody's favorite friend, ChatGPT. Today is all about ChatGPT, right?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:06Claire Vo?

  How did you get to ChatGPT being your favorite?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  You know, it's really funny. I obviously started using ChatGPT first. It existed first. There's a bunch of experiments I did with the API and all that prior to ChatGPT itself, so with OpenAI's APIs. And then, when it came out, started playing around with it. It really wasn't doing what I wanted in terms of my outputs that I was looking for. I think it was still helpful in a bunch of areas that we'll talk about today, but it wasn't quite getting there. So then I started using Claude when it came out. And I was, in the initial days of using this stuff, I was actually way more Claude-heavy, by like, more than 50%, even though ChatGPT came out first, I had access, I upgraded and all that.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  And I think the turning point for me, which I can't prove because I don't know the dates, was when memory started working.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  And that made it so that, and I'm a very like, um, I don't try to talk to ChatGPT about everything. And if I'm going to talk to it about things that are like a little random, I'll actually start a temporary session.

• 4:13Claire Vo?

  I want to learn how to use ChatGPT the right way. So you gave us one tip, which was be thoughtful about its memories. But what else? What are your tips? I'd love to see them.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  One of the biggest things here, we talked about memories, but temporary for things that you don't care for it to remember is really important. And then I'll archive chats because they don't count, so to speak, in the memories from last I checked. You can also unarchive them. At one point, I actually archived all my chats. And then I started pulling out

• 4:44Speaker 01

  the ones I liked. It was definitely a pain for a number of reasons because I have a lot of chats. I have like thousands and thousands. That's why we're not going into me ChatGPT today. I have a blank one with the $200 a month plan or whatever, which was also a game changer. Once ChatGPT introduced that plan, it definitely changed a lot of things for me in terms of my usage. I still get limits with Claude. I barely get limits to ChatGPT, although I use projects a lot. So I definitely hit decent amount of limits, but Claude's limits were also another very like brutal thing for when you're trying to use it and trying to get something out of it, especially when you need it now. I think my next point is something everybody knows, and that's that

• 5:26Speaker 01

  context is everything. So for example, I don't have it shared here, but I have a project to make projects. I have a project to make deep research prompts.

• 5:39Claire Vo?

  Well, this is, this is some of the feedback that we've consistently gotten from guests, which is you can try to improve your output, or you can try to improve your input. And everybody says improve your input and the output will come. And so they, they really recommend, which I think you're going to show us, is how do you front load the time to make sure your prompts make sense, that your projects are set up accurately, that your GPTs are well structured. If you can do that, then you're going to get that consistent, high-quality outcome. So what are those kind of go-to practices that you think everybody should do as they're building these things?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, if you don't love frameworks, then you need to start loving frameworks. I love frameworks, and I don't mean that in the, oh, seeking wisdom, Warren Buffett's mental models and frameworks, although I kind of do, but those are more like a bunch of tools. I think the strategy is if I'm trying to get something done, can I find something that's good enough or great that already works for other people and that someone's already shared? Oftentimes, the models already know the framework. So now you're just trying to tease them into the right spot or give them the framework itself, and then it sort of gets even more contextual about it. And I've just noticed this over and over again.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  So I usually won't start anything without a ton of context or with the intention of giving it context over time. Because I don't want to say that I won't just do a one-sentence prompt. Yeah, I do that all the time, but I don't expect that one-sentence prompt to just magically work. I actually will even oftentimes be like, what context do you need? This is what my goal is. Or, and another one that I don't see enough people doing is taking great outputs, whether it's from AI or not from AI, and using that to help AI codify that kind of output and it lets you build more outputs like that. That's probably one of the magical ones that I've found, which is just show it what great looks like. It's like a human. If a human doesn't know what great looks like, they have to know what great looks like.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  So then you're just getting in some ways, feedback hell, so to speak, of going back and forth until they get it or until you've put something together. But typically, as a human, if you give them an example and say, hey, this is the thing I'd like from you, they can do a pretty good job of filling in the blanks, so to speak. I think AI can do a better job.

• 7:59Claire Vo?

  So you do have an example of something that you think is great, which is your boss's operating manual. So could we use that as an example to get into exactly how you might do this?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll create the whole thing. So I would first create a project, and my boss's name is Morgan, so it's What Would Morgan Do? Or What Would Morgan Say? So it's WWMD. So I'm going to create the project, and then I'm going to add these files here. And so he has an operating manual. Really great human being. Built this out, sent it over when he first joined the company and became my boss. And then I've been sending this to everyone. And now everyone's already seen it and knew people that enjoy it because someone else is sending it to them. Great. So that's his manual. And for anyone that doesn't know, these are things that oftentimes, you know, it used to be a bigger thing back in the day. I think where people would create their operating manuals. So you knew how to work with them.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Now there's some other tactics and stuff that are actually part of other projects that we can talk about. Then he also tends to share a few different sort of document, not documents, but like articles he likes. And so there's one he shared called job is communication. I'm sure it's out there somewhere in the world. If it's not, whatever. So I would put those two things in and that's the project files. Right? Then I would add instructions. So I'm going to open a new chat and be like, I actually would do exactly this. I would add this, add these two in here. So this is a chat. I'm going to keep stick to what I, what I know, which is 400.

• 9:25Claire Vo?

  Wow.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:27Claire Vo?

  Classic.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I'm a, I'm very classic on that. So I'll do that. I'll pick 400. I really like 400, but all of them tend to work. 400 is just faster and gets me what I want quicker. And so here I'll say, I'm, I'm creating project with these documents. And I want to be able to converse with it, with the project and simulate type of feedback or advice that my boss would give me. Can you create the instructions for that project? Knowing that I'll be using these files in the project.

• 10:07Claire Vo?

  I love that you corrected your typo because I just roll right through it. That was very polite of you.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  I, it's funny, like the way I type is always correcting anyway. So it wasn't for chat GPT sake. Cause you know, yeah. So, yeah, but that's great. So, okay. So here it already gives me the objective, find bosses Morgan, great. Uh, system configuration, personal, okay. Okay. Interesting. It has not given me the actual instructions. Right?

• 10:39Claire Vo?

  Yes.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  So I'm like, okay, where are the actual instructions? So I'm going to go, and this, this is like in another doc in there, which I call AI shaping. Cause you're basically trying to shape it to get it what you want. So this is a classic example of, I could paste all this crap in there, so to speak. But and it says project setup, but it doesn't feel right. So it's like, can you give me the specific instructions that I can use in the project? So I can just paste those in there.

• 11:08Claire Vo?

  So I find this a useful kind of like prompt, which is just tell it where it's going to go. And maybe it'll give you a little bit better. Oh no, we got some, oh, well, there's some instructions.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so usually what I've already done is, and this is another trick. I've done this in several chats. So when I find one where it actually did what I wanted, which yeah, we can argue, we'll probably just try this one, or I can copy one over if this doesn't work from where I have it. But this is what I find most useful. If I can get a good output, I will always try to get it to codify the output, especially if it's one where I'm going to have to do this over and over again. So in this case, I said, hey, give me the instructions. I think just for shits and giggles, so to speak, I'm going to use these because I think they might be good enough. And I'm not trying to review it. And I also don't really care too much about this as long as it looks good enough because I can always iterate and do things. And I also use the word simulate.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  I don't always use the word. In this case, I felt like, okay, let's try it like this. So there's just a lot of like, okay, we'll do it like that. But if this were really, really good and I'm like, oh crap, this is impressive. I'd make it codify it and I'd turn it into, I could turn it into a project or something. So one thing I would do if I love this is, hey, can you help me create a project so I can create these type of instructions in the future? And that's what's got me a very good system of projects helping me use.

• 12:30Claire Vo?

  Project for projects.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Projects for projects, yeah, whatever. I know it's.

• 12:32Claire Vo?

  So you're going to add the instructions right in here.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yep, right here. So they're all in here. Cool. Let's say, and then now I'm just going after it. I want to pitch on a pitch, Morgan, the craziest product idea I can think of have for us. What is the best way to, to pitch it to him so we can go after it?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Now it's like, this is what you want, Morgan to say.

• 12:59Claire Vo?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  It's like, thank you. Okay. That sounds like him. Yep. And this part, this is key. So he's our VP of Product and Growth. I report to him. I'm a PM and this is, this, I know his manual. This is the type of stuff he would go for. So now it's like very specific, lead with the AI first CRM, whatever, whatever crap, right? So it basically gives me exactly what I should do when it comes to him. And it even says, what will he respect, et cetera.

• 13:29Claire Vo?

  Oh, man. So we've had a lot of people on the pod or a couple of people who have explained how as a manager, you can replicate yourself, but this is a tip for all the ICs out there. Go and replicate your boss and prep for conversations with them. And you know, it's funny, I read this and I was thinking, oh, is this kind of generic? And I was like, some of that would work on me, some of it wouldn't. But I bet people that work with me could pluck a couple artifacts and make a, make a project or a GPT that really does, uh oh, find out everything about me in a professional sense. There you go. So you're doing it.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  So what I would do if you were my boss is I would literally do this because I know there's enough about you out there. Now, in another kind of example we can give, or it'll be in the doc, I do the same for myself. I call it like a personal OS and it has my personality type, any of the personality tests, Myers-Briggs and everything, and then it helps me a lot. But if I know that about you, so Morgan is actually an Enneagram five, I'm an Enneagram nine. What I would actually do is feed that into the instructions in that as well. If I want to make it specific to me and our relationship. Because these personality tests help you, well, Enneagram in particular helps you with relationships and how to sort of.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Meet in the middle around communications and stuff like that.

• 14:54Claire Vo?

  Yeah, that's actually a really great idea because I do all this when I start as a new leader on a team. I do the work of gathering, you know, has anybody in a disc or any a gram or any, you know, Myers-Briggs, we kind of do that. We also have this questionnaire, which I'm happy to share in the show notes, which is 10 questions about me. What am I motivated by? How do I like to receive feedback? How do I work? All this stuff. And I actually do. I have this repository in a Google Drive file of everything I know about the team that they've been told or that they've told us. And I haven't yet put it in a GPT. And that's so smart because then I could say, you know, and sorry, sorry, Zach and Amanda. I can say, you know, Zach and Amanda are not seeing eye to eye on project X.

• 15:37Claire Vo?

  What would be an effective way, given what you know about them, to come to come together? So a really interesting idea. Uh oh. Psychological warfare in the workplace, all for the greater, all for the greater good. Empowered by OpenAI.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  So we'll, we'll, we'll let it do its thing. It's what I'm doing is I'm doing research on you and I said to get stuff in the professional sense or whatever. Sometimes I'll even include, hey, she's blah, blah, blah at this place. That way it doesn't get the wrong person. So it might, but we'll see. I don't think there's too many claros, but maybe there are. So we should be good. And then, yeah, so we'll see what happens there. We can continue with whatever else.

• 16:21Claire Vo?

  Great. So I love, you know, you, you showed this about someone else and you're, you're doing deep research on me, which, you know, is always going to be thrilling to watch on the other side. But I want to go back to this thing that you said about your personal OS, the self-aware, you know, addition. How did you build that? Why did you build that? You know, who uses it? How are you adding to it? I'm so curious about this specific use case.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  So I have a bunch of these links. This one is the personal OS. So I use my project creator to create this. And it's basically a project description, what to use it for. And then these are the actual instructions, right? So what I would do is basically take this or take the instructions here and put them into a project. So we'll just go do that so that we can show, not tell, right? And then it even says things like files to upload. And then even has like a kickoff prompt if you want to play around or whatever. So I will go here, make a new project. I don't need to put any files in there, but I'll probably do that too. But what you'll notice is up here, it's like, what are these things?

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Right? So this is nine, this is one, three. If you don't know human design, you should know human design, but I'm not going to go into that because it's on the woo woo side.

• 17:37Claire Vo?

  This is the third time human design has come up. I live in San Francisco. I don't know if this is an SF meme that's happening right now, has come up in the last week. So yes, it is quite woo woo. They'll send you a PDF for free, but why not?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I highly recommend. Okay, so I also have a voice and tone guide that was made for me a long time ago because I used to write a lot more. And so I'll just put that in there just for shits and giggles, so to speak, although it probably isn't as relevant. So here, here we are with this. Let's, let's play some games. So I'm going to take Morgan's manual and basically talk to it as if I just got this boss. Because this is kind of what I did. So this manual is from my boss, Morgan. I'm newly reporting to him and would love any and all advice on how best to work with him, considering my own personality, et cetera. By the way, he's an Enneagram type.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  So already it's like, I didn't have to do the work and it's already giving me the contrast. Here I would have to do a bunch of Google searches to be like, type, Enneagram type five and type nine relationship. And then I gotta wait, right? But this is kind of what's interesting where it started mixing in the one, three from human design, which I love. And that's why I love giving it that context. Then there's like, here's our working style alignments, right? All this is true, like I've done this before. I know, I know that this is all very accurate. And then this is where things start getting interesting because it starts coming up with shit. Then that's why I like the one sentence ones are great because it's like, wait, a check in format? Huh? So this is how I could give him a weekly update on whatever, or this is how I could put our one-on-one doc and manage up.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  And he's going to love it because this is how he thinks.

• 19:28Claire Vo?

  Is this how you what you would like? Do you think it's accurate?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've read his manual and I know it by heart and this is like exactly it. And one of the big ones for him, and again, everyone will know this if they know how to lead, but that's a different story. But if you're a good manager, my opinion is that, and so is Morgan's, is that you're just unblocking all day. And he said that in the manual. My job is to unblock you so we can get shit done. Not in those words, those are my words. So yeah, this is perfect. This is exactly what he'd want. Because if there's a blocker, I know he's the first person I should hit up. If I can't solve it any other way, he will just solve it.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And so that's cool. There's some really interesting things around conversations. He does ask you to defend things, but he never makes you feel like you're offended when he asks you to defend things. So he's always got a good way of doing it. So that's an interesting point there. This is kind of interesting. This is interesting, right? So this is in his doc.

• 20:25Claire Vo?

  So it's quoting directly from the manual.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's why I make these projects.

• 20:30Claire Vo?

  Got it.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  If I didn't make it a project, which I've done before and done the same thing, I don't get this level of context coming back to me. I get more of like, oh, you put this in, I'm gonna go fill in the blanks, or I'm gonna do something like that. Here I get these kind of references and all that kind of stuff that I just, it's just much harder to get that in a chat because I used to try this with a chat. Maybe before they had projects, I know they had, and cut some GPT is a whole nother mess I don't like getting into. But yeah.

• 20:57Claire Vo?

  So one of the things that I noticed here that I want to call out is you said you like frameworks. And so what I saw in some of this prompting is here are personality type frameworks or you know, guides that have been well established or well documented, the LLMs probably know about. You also listed a set of interpersonal dynamic or workplace dynamic frameworks for conversations in that list and then loaded that up with an individual's context. And then you're able to, in a pretty structured way, address common workplace things. Whether I'm going to have a hard conversation, I'm going to pitch something, I'm in conflict with someone. And I think that idea of mixing structured frameworks and personal context is really useful.

• 21:43Claire Vo?

  One of the things that I'm really empathetic towards new leaders are I get lots of new leaders in my organization. They're in the biggest job of their career and they always ask, can I get coaching? And I don't know if you, the coaches out there are really, you're really making money out there. Coaches are expensive. Good coaches are expensive, but a lot of times they're doing this work. They're doing 360s to gather information about you. They're applying frameworks to help you understand yourself and someone else. And then they're helping you get out of, you know, mental patterns or giving you other ways to look at problems in a structured way that allows you to move forward. And I think you just basically built like both a kind of coach for you to work with your boss, but I can imagine just a coach for yourself. So if you loaded this up with your own personality.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  So this works. Like this is a coach for me, right? Like, like I'm really mad right now about someone, let's, let's come up with a scenario. Uh, let me make one up. Someone trying to get control over one of the projects I'm working on because they are trying to lick the cookie as, as I've been told happens. So I just did that without even giving it a bigger problem. And then this is where it gets interesting. This reaction makes perfect sense. Okay, fine. Chat GPT, you want to be positive, cool. But then it tells me why, right? It threatens my control,

• 23:10Speaker 01

  not just my control, my integrity of what I'm building. And this is accurate. Like when someone says, oh, I've started your control. I'm like, yeah, I'm a control freak, but that's not the problem here. But then it said the integrity. There you go.

• 23:21Claire Vo?

  Okay. So you've done deep research on me. I'm going to give you my Enneagram and my Myers Briggs. And because we're fun in my team, I'm a Sagittarius. We're going to toss that into the mix. And I just want to test, I want to test if this passes my brand new to it sniff.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:38Claire Vo?

  Well, while we're waiting for that to happen, let's switch over to one more use case, which is your sales use case, which I think is super interesting.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, this one's really fun. I find myself over, over time, getting really excited about frameworks that I have applied in work and also that the people who built them, applied them, and I can prove it. So whether that's Lean Startup from Eric Ries, or I guess they call it the Shawn Ellis Score now, it's, it was always called the Product and Market Fit Score in my world, but that and a bunch of these other frameworks. So when I landed on this Winning by Design framework, I was like over the moon. And so I did what a lot of people would do if you were really curious about it. So I did a site colon, their website, file type PDF in Google. And this is before deep research and all that, of course. So I found all their PDFs, which was before AI too. So I was like, okay, great. Now I can

• 24:30Speaker 01

  use these and do what I'm about to show you. It took hours to do this kind of stuff, and now I can do it in seconds, literally. So basically, I have, I have this entire kind of context put in. So this one's already set up. I can obviously set it up again, but the deal is, there's a bunch of these documents. And these documents are all about the framework and the various processes. These are all publicly available. They also have a bunch of private ones you can get if you go through their courses. Then, I use my instructions project, you got it, to basically build this. It's pretty simple and straightforward. It's not really crazy because a lot of the context is in the files. So, and again, this is easy to tweak anytime.

• 25:12Claire Vo?

  This will be familiar to anybody that's in a revenue organization. All leaders come in and they have their favorite sales framework, enable the field on it, you get a bunch of PDFs, but then I'm hoping you're going to show us how to apply this consistently over time. Okay, great.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  So I actually did this already. So I actually asked it, what can you help me with? So I didn't even want to like, again, I do a lot of that sometimes with these projects just because I want it to tell me what it thinks it can help me with. Just like a human, right? Like, what can you do for me? Or what's your best skill? Whatever. So it's like, I can create and refine, create or refine sales processes. Wow. Okay. So I can build a discovery call script. Cool. Proper discovery call playbook. Draft that. Cool. Design customer-centric stories messaging. Run impact meetings. Coach your GTM team. Cool, cool. Okay, great. Where do I start? Okay. Can you create a spice discovery guide? And I did it for your product. And it didn't know much about your product because it didn't, I didn't go do a web search.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  I solved that problem too, as you probably can guess, but and then it's basically like, okay. VP of Product, Director of Product Management, cool, this is a problem space. So now I know that if I give it this context myself, it will probably tweak things. So already I think I'm winning because I can, I have now learned something of how to use this thing, which is another piece I go into. And then now it goes into situation because the whole premise of this framework is there are questions you should be asking on sales calls. So you're only demoing like five or 10 minutes of a 20 or 30 minute call, not even five or 10, five minutes. So what you're trying to do is diagnose pain. So we imagine these are like those discovery calls. So these are a set of calls or a set of questions, which is like how many PMs are on your team, whatever. Great.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  I literally, every time I do this, I'm surprised by at least one or two questions in there, which would have been super challenging for me to think of on my own. So that's where I find a lot of the value. Otherwise you can look at me like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is obvious. Yeah, a lot of it is, but that's not the point. The point is that if you're going to go get on a call and you want to use this sales process, you want to do a really good job, hopefully. These questions help you figure out how to do that.

• 27:14Claire Vo?

  Yeah, this question under pain, I don't ask, but I should, which is where do things typically break down? I'm not good at, at pain discovery. So this is already giving me, giving me some ideas.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so like, and pain is like, you know, as you know, one of the most important things when you're trying to actually do sales. And then the impact questions are always valuable. But again, this is part of the value of the framework. So I think the key thing to highlight is, I love that you like that. It makes perfect sense. It's the framework producing it. It's not chat GPT. I mean, it is, but it's that framework that taught chat GPT how to answer these questions very precisely because it has like 20 PDS from these people, you know? And then, uh, critical event is a big one. So if you're in the sales, you know that you need to figure out if there is a date tied to the initiative and there's an initiative tied to it. So this is great. So yeah, I, I had to do it, right? So then to your point, oh, maybe it doesn't have context, maybe it doesn't know enough. Great.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  You can imagine what I did. I did a, a deep research prompt. I asked for a deep research prompt on it. I did it in the sales winning by design project on purpose, even though the project is not meant for that. Of course it can do whatever the heck I try to get it to do, but I purposely did that because I wanted to improve the winning by design outputs. So already did this yesterday. It's right here. So I did some kind of analysis. It got me all kinds of things about your product company, whatever's going on. You know, same prompt it gave me, did all the corrections. So now all I do, and this is how dummy I am about it. Because it usually works. I'll just

• 28:47Claire Vo?

  You hit the copy button.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Don't even need to read it. I don't care. It's all good. Don't worry about that. Okay. Now, here is context on chat PRD in terms of the history, et cetera, of the product and research related to it. Fine. Whatever. It could say whatever. Then I would probably go with N and say, please improve the deliverable above using this new context, this updated context.

• 29:18Claire Vo?

  I am a dash carrot, dash, you know, arrow little instructor as well.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  All the time.

• 29:26Claire Vo?

  This arrow.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  It just feels like it splits it up, but it probably doesn't matter, but I just want to do that. I love it. So this is, this is my point about the memory, right? It'll tell you when it does that.

• 29:36Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  So oftentimes I'll sit there and just start pruning it.

• 29:39Claire Vo?

  Yep.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  And so that's what I like about it is like, just makes it really easy to go cut that out of the memory if I want to.

• 29:44Claire Vo?

  I don't need that. Yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. So here you go. Purpose, spice, journey map. It did a little bit of a different thing, which is fine. Like, but at the end of the day, it's not even telling me what the gap analysis is. Maybe it got confused about something, but I don't, I don't know. Maybe not. But yeah, that's, that's the way I would do this stuff. And I'd probably prompt it a little differently and be like, okay. And I'll probably say this, can you give, give me a demo script for the most relevant ICP slash persona, whatever, in case it doesn't get it, that the research identified. And I don't even know if the research identified this, but

• 30:20Claire Vo?

  Because you just, you just clicked the copy button.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yes. Uh, savvy sales of your, oh, interesting.

• 30:28Claire Vo?

  Well, so I think what it did, if I read above, you didn't prompt it very well.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 30:33Claire Vo?

  Which is it, it tried to integrate the framework into my product.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:37Claire Vo?

  As opposed to integrate the framework into the pit.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  So let's do it again.

• 30:42Claire Vo?

  Yeah, but I, this is one of the things I love about AI is, you know, imagine I told some research analyst, go do this for me and they came back three days later and I was like, no, no, sweet child. Totally wrong. So expensive. You get this wrong, whatever. It's 90 seconds. We just lost. And we can just give it another go.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly.

• 31:06Claire Vo?

  And I think this goes back to what you said at the beginning, which was, who cares if you have to re-prompt it? It's so cheap. It's so fast. Like who cares if we have to do this again? It totally just works.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'll keep doing that. I don't care. Like it takes nothing, right? And I think that's great. Like I kind of love the mistakes it makes. Actually, sometimes I learn all kinds of weird shit from the mistakes it makes. Yeah. You keep saying rev ops and product persona, which is interesting.

• 31:34Claire Vo?

  Well, I think this gives us, whether or not it gives us a good output, it gives us some good ideas. Let's see if our research, your deep research on Claire is done. I don't think there's actually that much interesting about me on the internet, but let's, let's see.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  About to find out.

• 31:50Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:51Claire Vo?

  Oh, we got it. Okay. So you got a novel.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  That was the point.

• 31:56Claire Vo?

  On Claire.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:57Claire Vo?

  I do have board rolls, so.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Oh, you do? Okay.

• 32:00Claire Vo?

  Look at me.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay. I just wanted to check. Okay. Yeah. No, I, I'm never surprised at how much it gives me these days because it tends to give me a lot when I do these kinds of prompts. I do these kinds a lot.

• 32:12Claire Vo?

  Okay. So you're copying it.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  What is the best way we should do this? Should we make a project?

• 32:16Claire Vo?

  Yeah, make a project.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:19Claire Vo?

  Claire has.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:21Claire Vo?

  It's just Claire.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, download that. Let me put that in here.

• 32:29Claire Vo?

  Okay. Very exciting.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, okay. Claire is my boss. There is research on her from the internet in the project files. Want your help as I'm working.

• 32:45Claire Vo?

  With her.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  With her. Okay.

• 32:47Claire Vo?

  Okay, any enneagram one?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Claire is an enneagram one, okay.

• 32:54Claire Vo?

  I'm a ENTP, Myers-Briggs.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  ENTP, okay.

• 32:58Claire Vo?

  Hard D disc.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Hard D disc, okay.

• 33:03Claire Vo?

  Um, and a Sagittarius, of course. Fire sign.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Sagittarius.

• 33:09Claire Vo?

  It's I U S, whatever, it'll suck.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Something like that, close enough.

• 33:14Claire Vo?

  Double G. Yeah.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Double G, alright.

• 33:16Claire Vo?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  I don't know any Sagittarius, obviously, wait, did I get it right? Okay, we got her right. Might as well capitalize it. Okay, cool. What do you want to ask it?

• 33:25Claire Vo?

  I have to tell Claire no on a roadmap item she wants.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Like, I don't even know if this will work.

• 33:31Claire Vo?

  Well, we're gonna find out.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's because it's just so dirty with the research, right? And then, but we did get the enneagram, so. Okay, so now you're gonna have to judge this one.

• 33:40Claire Vo?

  Okay, I'm gonna judge it, alright. Let's see if we got, she's known to empower strong convictions that are backed by evidence or framed in terms of business fact. Okay, I want to be upfront. I do like, I want to be upfront. That's great. Um, I famously, though, this is very meta for this conversation, famously hate frameworks. So that framework, prioritization framework, is not gonna work for me. Okay, it doesn't meet the bar. Yep, that's good. If helpful, I'd like to set it up as a structured experiment. Totally would work on me. Lightweight experiments, that's the easiest way to get, to get what I want. Yeah, use experimentation language. It opens the door without giving false hope. Sure, hope springs eternal.

• 34:21Claire Vo?

  This is, I don't know, you know? It, it doesn't, it's decent advice. It would probably work on me.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  That's kind of my point, right? So now here's another little fun one I did. I actually did this. I did deep research on myself and I happen to have it sitting there. And I happened to be at dinner with a very old friend of mine from college. And I'm, and I did something like this. I don't remember the exact prompt. And I basically took my deep research and said, please describe he.

• 34:48Claire Vo?

  Oh, oh, good, goodness.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Right? And then I just showed him because I wanted to show him the power of this thing. And he's like, that's you. Like literally everything it said was me.

• 35:00Claire Vo?

  I am pragmatic. Uh, okay. Leadership style, high velocity. That's the one I want. When people ask what it's like to work with me, I say, I go very fast. So that really got me. Okay, let's go. Product philosophy. Let's see if this one gets right.

• 35:19Claire Vo?

  Cross functional by design. Yeah, I think that's right.

• 35:23Claire Vo?

  Yeah, okay, let's go to my core traits. Oh, they got me right. Builder at heart. That's the one I want. Be, I like the, the quote is ridiculous. So we'll highlight this on the podcast. Be more entitled.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I, I have found this to work for pretty much everyone I've done, as long as it's the right person.

• 35:46Claire Vo?

  Yeah. Okay, this was, this was great. Okay, so you've shown us, I just, I'm going through everything you've shown us. You've shown us how to make projects to make projects or prompts to make prompts. You showed us how to manage knowledge and prune knowledge, as you say, which I think is a really useful tactic. You've given us a lot of great GPT frameworks for knowing thyself, knowing your manager, knowing each other, and using that to give feedback to each other. And then you've shown us that despite my personal anti-framework bias, this has actually compelled me to think maybe I'm just applying frameworks the wrong way. And if I had an easy tool where somebody else did it for me, I would use it.

• 36:26Claire Vo?

  So you've, you've shown how you can scale sort of like training and frameworks into always on GPTs or models. So this is, it's been all about chat GPT, but it's been super useful. We're going to do a couple lightning round questions and then I'm going to, I'm going to get you out of here. So question number one, you said that most of your AI usage is chat GPT. You mentioned.

• 36:50Claire Vo?

  Claude a little bit. What else is in your stack?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  I use AI three to six hours a day is what I'm clocking in at. It's always three at the minimum. It used to be about two and the specific tools are ChatGPT and Claude. The most useful tool I use is not Publix. I can't talk about it or the name. It's actually a desktop app.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  And, and that's outside of ChatGPT.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Outside of that, I try probably 10 to 20 new tools a week. I guess here's what I'll say.

• 37:27Claire Vo?

  Yep.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  I think the tools are fine. But when I go back to AI tools, nothing beats a blank canvas for me from ChatGPT today. And there's a bunch of reasons why, but the one that I keep coming back to that I see people making a big mistake of, which we kind of did here to to demonstrate it, which is

• 37:50Speaker 01

  so many people try to go to automation. When I need to understand what's the prompting that's going to work? And how do I get this thing to spit out reliable prompts? Again, we call it evals and stuff in the product world, which I have lots of opinions on. But the bare metal, the chat messing with that, like right now, in five minutes, I could fix that sales winning by design thing. So it actually gives the output we want is probably the instructions. It probably doesn't understand that when I give it context, it needs to use the context and nothing else. Right? Simple thing. I could fix it. If I tried to automate that and say, I want to do automated sales script where I just toss it in and do it and use one of these automated tools. I know there's all these fancy often ones, even Zapier, et cetera. I'm probably going to be stuck with all the outputs suck. Okay. And then I'm done.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  But I don't want to be done. I want to go build the plan on how to build the automation. And the only way to build the plan is to manually do it repeatedly. Then there's the which model and all that, which is a whole nother can of worms. Uh, cause like you use API for obvious reasons with the product you're building. You have a specific model that you know, every time you throw the prompts at it that you like to throw at it. It gives you the output that the customers like. So I think people are erasing the automation and that's a mistake.

• 39:02Claire Vo?

  Yeah. And I'll, I'll just call out my friend Pete Kuman at Y C did this article basically begging, begging AI product people to let users manage the prompts a little bit better. So.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I have so many opinions on that and, and. Yes and no. I think the big one that I would point people to if they need actual, true, good inspiration on that is a product called Lex. Lex dot page, L E X. They've instrumented the whole product so you can tear up all the prompting, make it your own, et cetera, in a very impressive way. So the yes and no is like, some products it makes sense. I think others, it will lead you in a bad direction. And I haven't told Pete this yet, but I've read his whole thing and I have similar thoughts in general. Some of the products we're building, the Lex model makes sense. And I call it the Lex model because Nathan's one of the best product people out there. Don't tell him I said that, although he's gonna hear it.

• 39:54Claire Vo?

  We love Lex.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so, but the way he thinks about this is very much aligned with what Pete was saying. I would just advise people that some products don't make sense to make the user see all that or do all that kind of work.

• 40:08Claire Vo?

  Yep.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  So then the onus is back on us product people. So.

• 40:11Claire Vo?

  All right. And then, uh, speaking of work, I am going to wrap with my final question, which is when chat G P T is not working for you. Yes, you're a prompt master, but if you need to get inside, I, I won't ask you what Enneagram chat G P T is, but if you need to get inside its head, what's your prompting technique? Do you get mad? Do you do all caps to offer money?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know people like to treat it like a human and that's because the interface is making us treat it like a human, not because it is a human. And I think there's a whole world out there to talk about that would, that would take us many, many hours and a bunch of drinks. But high level, I bluntly just say, this is incorrect. So right now I would say, hey, this is incorrect. Your instructions must be wrong because I'll give it an assumption of mine of what's wrong. Please blah, blah, blah, or do blah, blah, blah. But I don't like try to bribe it or any of that. I know those tricks work, but to me, that feels artificial.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  And I'd instead like to find the same, the same way to get what I want without the bribe, just like with a human, I wouldn't want to bribe them all the time because they're going to get trained on wanting the bribe. And I know ChatGPT with the memories and all that is going to get trained on your bribing. So please don't bribe it unless you want to head down that path, just like with a human. And so I guess the TLDR is if you're going to treat it like a human, think about incentives.

• 41:37Claire Vo?

  You are, this just made me think of my eight-year-old and my six-year-old. And you're right, the second they know a bribe works, they look for the bribe. Okay, this has been so great, very useful. Where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  I'm on Twitter, HNSHA, I tweet way too much. Yeah, that's it. Like, whatever else, like, just, just a person that's been in tech probably way too long and loves playing with these things. But more importantly, I think we're, we're, everyone says we're in an incredible time and this and that, but it's like, if you have access to the tool, you should use the tool. And if you need help using the tool, like, hit me up. I don't know. Most of my friends hit me up and I built things for them. But like, that's why, you know, I thank you for having me on here.

• 42:22Claire Vo?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Thank you, Claire.

• 42:25Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.