I Stopped Using ChatGPT After Discovering This AI Tool (And It Changed Everything)

Why Claude Code hit $500M ARR in 4 months — and why every product manager should be using it instead of traditional AI chatbots

I used to spend 3 hours every week copying and pasting files into ChatGPT, reformatting outputs, and losing my best prompts in endless chat histories. Then I discovered Claude Code. Last week, I analyzed 47 customer interviews, wrote a complete PRD, and built a working prototype — all in a single afternoon.

There’s a fundamental problem with how most of us use AI.

We open ChatGPT or Claude. We paste in some context. We ask a question. We get an answer. Then we start over.

Every. Single. Time.

We’re treating AI like a search engine when we should be treating it like a teammate who actually understands our work.

Claude Code changes everything. And there’s a reason it hit $500M ARR in just 4 months — it’s the first AI tool that actually works the way we think.

The Copy-Paste Prison

Let’s be honest about how most PMs use AI right now:

You have a folder of customer interviews. You want insights. So you open ChatGPT, paste the first interview, get a summary, paste the second interview, get another summary, and by interview #5, you’ve hit the context limit and lost half your work.

Or you’re writing a PRD. You need it to match your company’s style. So you paste your style guide, write the PRD, close the tab, and next week when you need another PRD, you start the entire process over from scratch.

Or you have a brilliant prompt you’ve refined over weeks. It’s perfect. It works every time. But it lives in a random chat thread from two months ago, and you spend 15 minutes trying to find it again.

This is insane.

We wouldn’t work this way with a human teammate. We’d give them context once, and they’d remember it. We’d save our best processes, and they’d be instantly reusable.

Why are we accepting less from AI?

How Claude Code Actually Works

Claude Code isn’t just another chatbot. It’s an AI that lives in your project.

Here’s what makes it fundamentally different:

1. It Starts With Your Context

You don’t paste files. You point Claude Code at a folder, and it loads everything. Your docs, your code, your research, your examples — all of it, automatically.

2. It Plans Before It Acts

Traditional AI tools just start generating. Claude Code thinks first. It creates a step-by-step plan, shows it to you, and waits for your approval before executing.

3. It Works in Parallel

Need to analyze 10 customer interviews? Claude Code can spin up 10 parallel workflows, process them simultaneously, and synthesize the results. What would take you hours takes minutes.

This isn’t incremental improvement. This is a complete rethinking of how AI should work.

The 5 Ways Product Managers Are Actually Using It

Let me show you what’s possible when AI actually understands your work.

1. Research That Doesn’t Feel Like Work

You’re launching in a new market. You need competitive intelligence fast.

With ChatGPT, you’d manually copy competitor websites, paste them one by one, and try to remember what you learned from each.

With Claude Code, you point it at a list of competitor URLs, Reddit threads, and your internal market research docs. It processes everything in parallel, identifies patterns across sources, and gives you a synthesized competitive analysis with specific recommendations.

One command. Complete research. Done in minutes.

2. PRDs That Sound Like You

You need to write a AI PRD. You have a company writing style, specific business context, and example PRDs that represent your standard.

With ChatGPT, you paste all of this in every time and hope it remembers your preferences. It doesn’t.

With Claude Code, you create a project folder with your business info, writing style guide, and example PRDs. Every time you ask for a new PRD, it references this context automatically. The output doesn’t scream “AI wrote this” — it sounds like you wrote it.

Because it learned from you.

3. Meeting Notes That Actually Matter

You have 5 hours of meeting transcripts from user interviews. You need structured action items with owners and due dates.

With ChatGPT, you paste one transcript at a time, get generic summaries, and manually format everything.

With Claude Code, you drop all transcripts into a folder, create a custom command for your exact format (more on this in a moment), and get perfectly structured action items in seconds.

Then you save that custom command. Next week, one click does the entire workflow again.

Your best processes become instant and repeatable.

4. Customer Interview Analysis at Scale

50 customer interviews. You need to identify patterns, compare pain points across segments, and extract the most compelling quotes.

With ChatGPT, this is impossible. The context limits make it impractical, and you lose continuity between conversations.

With Claude Code, you organize interviews by segment, run parallel analysis on each group, and get a comprehensive report that actually connects the dots across all 50 conversations.

What used to take a week takes an afternoon.

5. Prototyping Ideas in Hours, Not Weeks

You have an idea for a new feature. You want to validate it with users, but waiting for eng resources will take weeks.

With ChatGPT, you can generate code snippets, but they don’t work together, and you spend more time debugging than building.

With Claude Code, you describe the concept, and it builds a working prototype you can actually test. Not production-ready, but good enough to put in front of users and get real feedback.

Ideas become testable in hours instead of weeks.

Getting Started: Your First 30 Minutes

The beauty of Claude Code is that you can be productive in minutes, but there’s depth when you need it.

The Basics

1. Install in one command from docs.claude.com
2. Launch from your project folder, not from your desktop
3. Type init to create a CLAUDE file — this is your project’s memory
4. Use clear between tasks to manage context and keep things focused
5. Works inside any IDE — Cursor, VS Code, whatever you use

That’s it. You’re functional.

The Game-Changers

But here’s where it gets powerful:

Custom Commands

Save your best prompts with a name. Type /meeting-notes or /competitive-analysis and instantly reuse workflows you’ve perfected. No more digging through chat history.

Plan Mode

Hit shift+tab before complex tasks. Claude creates a detailed checklist of what it’s going to do. You review it, approve it, and then it executes. No surprises.

Custom Agents

Build specialized agents for different perspectives. Run your PRD through a “designer agent” for UX feedback, an “engineer agent” for technical feasibility, and an “exec agent” for strategic alignment. Get multi-angle feedback instantly.

Parallel Processing

Spin up 3 agents to analyze 3 different customer segments simultaneously. What would take sequential hours happens in parallel minutes.

Smart Folder Structure

Create folders like /writing-styles, /business-info, and /examples. Reference them in any prompt, and Claude Code pulls the context automatically. Your project knowledge becomes permanently accessible.

Real Example: The 3-Hour PRD That Took 20 Minutes

Let me show you what this looks like in practice.

Last month, I needed to write a PRD for a new AI-powered feature. Here’s what I did:

Step 1: Pointed Claude Code at my /business-info folder (company strategy, target users, business metrics)

Step 2: Referenced my /examples folder (3 previous PRDs that represent our standard)

Step 3: Gave it the feature requirements and let it work

Step 4: Used my custom /exec-review agent to get feedback from an executive perspective

Step 5: Refined based on feedback

Total time: 20 minutes.

The PRD wasn’t perfect — no AI output ever is. But it was 85% there. The structure was right. The language was right. The level of detail matched our standard.

I spent 10 more minutes polishing it, and it was done.

Before Claude Code: 3 hours from scratch.
After Claude Code: 30 minutes total.

That’s a 6x productivity gain on one of the most time-consuming PM tasks.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

AI tools are getting better at tasks. But Claude Code is different — it’s getting better at work.

Tasks are discrete. You do them once and move on.

Work is continuous. You have context that builds over time, processes that repeat, and outputs that need to be consistent.

Claude Code is the first AI tool designed for actual work, not just tasks.

And that changes everything.

When AI remembers your context, learns your processes, and operates at your speed, you stop thinking about it as a tool and start thinking about it as a force multiplier.

You don’t just work faster. You work at a higher level.

The Productivity Unlock Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s what nobody tells you about Claude Code:

The real power isn’t in what it does for you. It’s in how it changes what you think is possible.

When PRD writing drops from 3 hours to 30 minutes, you write more PRDs. You explore more ideas. You validate more hypotheses.

When research drops from days to hours, you research more. You dig deeper. You make better decisions.

When prototyping drops from weeks to hours, you test more concepts. You iterate faster. You ship better products.

The compound effect of saving time on everything is that you can do work you previously didn’t have time for.

That’s the real unlock.

Beyond the Tutorial: Where This Is Going

Claude Code is less than a year old. It’s already this powerful.

Imagine where it’ll be in 12 months.

Watch the full tutorial Claude Code here to see all of this in action, including advanced workflows and custom agent setups that will change how you work.

Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The future of PM work isn’t about AI replacing us. It’s about AI making us capable of things we couldn’t do before.

Claude Code is the first tool that actually delivers on that promise.

The question is: what will you build with all the time you’re about to get back?