MaxGradient: The 10-Day Engagement
For the CPO or VP Product. Two minutes.
Craig Calder, MaxGradient. Twenty years of senior product management leadership (eBay, New Relic). I build these systems myself.
What it is. Ten working days with one to four of your product leaders. One hour a day, 1:1, plus 30 to 45 minutes of homework. The homework is their real work, not exercises. One requirement: access to Anthropic's Claude Cowork for each participant, ideally on your Enterprise plan. Confirmed at scoping.
The problem. Engineering can prototype anything now. The question is whether you are prototyping the right thing. Product calls still get made on a sliver of the signal: the conversations, tickets, and interviews nobody has time to read. AI can read all of it. Most teams use it to build faster, not to decide better.
Deliverables.
- The capacity to answer questions that move the needle. At scoping, you say where the evidence is thinnest. Each builder picks a question in that space and answers it by Day 10, on your data, every number traced to a source your team owns.
- Their existing work, faster. Epics, PRDs, interview synthesis: automated where safe, AI-assisted where judgment stays human. Built on your context (strategy, tactics, past artifacts), tuned to your quality bar. Time savings measured, not estimated.
- A thought partner for the rest. An assistant that knows your strategy, your customers, and your history, for everything else they weigh each week.
- A team that fishes on its own. The capability stays when I leave. No subscription. No dependency on me.
Not another license. Your tools have AI features. Your people may have licenses. Neither becomes a capability on its own. Handing out licenses and hoping is rolling out Salesforce with no admin. What is missing is the system: your strategy, artifacts, quality bar, and evidence in one place, set up right the first time. That system is the engagement.
Your part. Three touches. A 30-minute scoping call. A short weekly note on what your builders are producing. The Day 10 review, where they present to you. Nothing to install.
Where AI stops. AI reads the inputs. Your PMs make the calls. Nobody is being replaced; they are getting the evidence they never had time to gather.
Next step. A 30-minute scoping call. Bring the decision you wish had evidence behind it. Scoped proposal within the week.
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