Via Lenny’s Podcast
“This is bringing the product to where the people are. You don’t want to make people use a different workflow. You don’t want to make them go out of their way to learn a new thing. It’s whatever people are doing—if you can make that a little bit easier, then that’s just going to be a much better product that people enjoy more. And this is the principle of latent demand, which I think is the single most important principle in product.”
— Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny, at 47:09
Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s Head of Claude Code, describes Latent Demand as the ways users misuse, hack, or work around a product to complete tasks it was never designed for. He sees Latent Demand as the clearest signal for what to build next. “This principle of latent demand . . . is just the single most important principle in product.”
Boris learned this principle from Fiona Fung, founding Product Manager of Facebook Marketplace.
- Facebook Marketplace was launched in 2016 because roughly 40% of posts in Facebook Groups were related to buying and selling things, even though Groups were not designed for commerce.
- Facebook Dating emerged from observing that some 60% of profile views were people viewing the profiles of non-friends of a different gender.
Anthropic’s Claude Cowork product likewise emerged from latent demand.
- Boris noticed a data scientist was using Claude Code in Terminal to do SQL analysis, even though many engineers avoid the Terminal. Soon, most of Anthropic’s data scientists were doing the same.
- On X/Twitter, non-technical users were using Claude Code to grow tomatoes, analyze genomes, recover photos from a corrupted hard drive, and even read MRIs.
The signal was clear: non-coders wanted an agentic AI tool and some were willing to “jump through hoops” and use Terminal to get it. So the team built Cowork—Claude Code in the Claude Desktop app—giving non-technical users the same capability without touching Terminal.
