Claude Code for product managers: research, writing, context libraries, custom to-do system, and more | Teresa Torres

January 19, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

🎙️ The Voices & The Context

The Format: Casual, practical interview on a podcast (How I AI), with live demos in VS Code, Obsidian, and Claude Code terminal.
The Key Players:
- Host: Claire Vaux, product leader and AI obsessive, guiding the demo with enthusiasm and recaps.
- Guest: Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits, internationally acclaimed speaker/coach; fascinating for her non-technical pivot to Claude Code (Claude AI in VS Code terminal) for everyday workflows.
The Vibe: Fun, Educational, Inspirational—high-energy demos, laughs about "pair programming" with AI, and relatable overwhelm with tasks/research.

🗝️ Key Themes & Topics

Discussed: Custom AI-powered productivity hacks using Claude Code, Obsidian markdown files, and minimal coding for massive efficiency gains.

Topic 1: Task Management Revolution – Ditched Trello for Claude-integrated system; daily /today slash command scans markdown tasks (with YAML frontmatter for due dates/tags), pulls team updates, generates to-do lists, auto-tags sales pipelines—Claude as "pair task manager."
Topic 2: Automated Research Digests – Cron jobs scrape arXiv daily for personalized keywords (e.g., synthetic users, personas); Claude summarizes saved PDFs next day, integrated into to-do list—filters academic firehose for quick

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Teresa Torres**
2 (02:40) **Why Claude Code for Non-Coders**
3 (04:20) **Custom Task Management in Claude Code & Obsidian**
4 (06:10) **Daily /today Slash Command Demo**
5 (09:00) **Creating & Managing Tasks Live**
6 (11:00) **Obsidian as File Browser & Local Search**
7 (14:20) **Embedding Notes & Claude Search in Tasks**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Teresa Torres is the author of Continuous Discovery Habits and an internationally acclaimed speaker and coach. In this episode, Teresa demonstrates how she’s built a personalized productivity system using Claude Code to manage her tasks, automate research collection, and improve her writing. She shows how non-developers can leverage AI tools to create personalized workflows that match their unique needs and thinking style.

What you’ll learn:

How Teresa built a personalized task management system in Claude Code that matches her exact workflow needs
Why she moved from Trello to a markdown-based system that gives her complete control and searchability
How she automated academic research collection with daily digests of relevant papers
Her strategy for organizing context files to make Claude more effective without overwhelming it
Why “pair programming” with Claude has become her approach to everything from writing to task management
How she uses Claude as a writing partner while maintaining her authentic voice
The power of slash commands and automation to reduce friction in daily workflows

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Teresa Torres

(02:10) Why Claude Code became Teresa’s productivity tool of choice

(03:00) The evolution from browser-based AI to terminal-based workflows

(04:14) Demo: Creating a personalized task management system

(07:52) How the task system works with markdown files and Obsidian

(12:56) Quick recap