Here’s a sentence you don’t hear often in tech: we have too much engineering output and not enough people to tell engineers what to build. That is, roughly, the situation Anthropic found itself in after deploying Claude Code internally.
Amol Avasare, Anthropic’s Head of Growth, recently flagged the issue publicly. The company’s engineering teams have been operating at two to three times their effective headcount since adopting Claude Code. A five-person team now ships like a team of 15 to 20. The constraint moved downstream, from the keyboard to the whiteboard.
So Anthropic did something counterintuitive. It told its growth team to hire more product managers, not more engineers.
When the bottleneck moves
In some periods since the tool’s research preview launched in February 2025, over 80% of merged production code was attributed to the AI coding system. Product managers, the people who decide which features get built, in what order, and for whom, have not scaled alongside the new engineering throughput. The gap is now wide enough that Anthropic is actively posting roles to close it.
