As a product manager, understanding how features actually work in your codebase can improve your effectiveness.
The gap between product vision and technical implementation often leads to miscommunication, unrealistic timelines, and features that miss the mark. What if you could peek under the hood of your product, understand the technology better, and have more informed conversations with your engineering team?
Enter Claude Code: an AI-powered tool that lets you explore Git repositories, inspect code, and understand features.
The Product Manager's Technical Blind Spot
Product managers face a unique challenge. You're responsible for defining what gets built, but you often lack visibility into how it's built. This creates several problems:
- Communication gaps: Engineers explain technology in a way that's hard to understand for non-technologists
- Less than ideal feature requirements: Without understanding existing architecture and code, you might propose features or feature requirements that are less well honed than if you had a deep understanding of the code.
- Slower decision-making: Every technical question requires scheduling time with busy engineers, creating bottlenecks in your workflow.
The traditional solution has been to either learn to code yourself (time-consuming and often unnecessary) or remain dependent on engineering translations (slow and requires a lot of meetings).
What is Claude Code?
Claude Code is an AI-powered command-line interface that helps you interact with codebases using natural language. Think of it as having a junior engineer available 24/7 to explain any part of your codebase, trace how features work, and answer technical questions in plain English.
Claude Code can:
- Navigate complex codebases to find relevant code automatically
- Explain technical implementations in non-technical language
- Trace how data flows through your application
- Identify dependencies and connections between features
- Answer "what if" questions about potential changes
- Search Git history to understand why decisions were made
The key advantage for product managers is that you don't need to know where to look or what to look for. You simply ask questions in natural language, and Claude Code does the detective work.
Using Claude Code to Inspect Features in Git
Let's walk through practical scenarios where product managers can use Claude Code to gain feature insights from Git repositories.
Understanding How a Feature Works
Suppose your team built a user authentication system six months ago, and now you're planning to add social login. Instead of scheduling a meeting with engineering, you can ask Claude Code: "How does our current authentication system work?"
Claude Code will search through your codebase, identify the relevant files, and explain the authentication flow in clear terms. You'll learn:
- What authentication method is currently used (JWT tokens, sessions, OAuth)
- Where user credentials are stored
- How the login flow works from button click to successful authentication
- What security measures are in place
Now you can meet with engineering, and have a more informed conversations about adding social login.
Discovering Feature Dependencies
Before proposing a change to your checkout flow, you might ask: "What parts of the application depend on the checkout process?"
Claude Code will trace through your codebase to identify:
- Payment processing integrations
- Inventory management connections
- Email notification triggers
- Analytics tracking points
- User account updates
This visibility helps you assess the true scope of changes and identify stakeholders who need to be involved in planning discussions.
Understanding Past Decisions Through Git History
Git history is a goldmine of context that often goes untapped. You can ask: "Why was the recommendation engine implemented this way? Show me the relevant commits and changes." Claude Code will search through commit messages, pull requests, and code changes to reconstruct the decision-making context. You might discover:
- Performance requirements that drove the approach
- Business constraints at the time
- Alternative approaches that were considered
- Trade-offs that were deliberately made
This historical context prevents you from proposing solutions that were already rejected for good reasons or helps you understand when circumstances have changed enough to revisit old decisions.
Practical Workflow for Product Managers
Here's how to integrate Claude Code into your product management workflow:
1. Feature exploration phase
Before writing specs or user stories, spend 15 minutes exploring the relevant parts of your codebase with Claude Code. Ask questions like:
- "How does the current [feature] work?"
- "What would break if we changed [component]?"
- "Are there similar implementations elsewhere in the codebase we could learn from?"
2. PRD / Feature Plan writing phase
As you write specifications, validate technical assumptions and brainstorm:
- "Is it feasible to add [capability] to [feature]?"
- "What are some possible approaches and things a PM might want to consider based on the code that is there?"
- "What data is currently available for [new feature idea]?"
- "How are we currently handling [edge case]?"
3. Refinement and planning
During sprint planning or backlog refinement, use Claude Code to:
- Clarify technical questions that arise
- Investigate dependencies engineers mention
4. Feature review and QA
When reviewing implemented features, use Claude Code to:
- Understand how a feature works
- Understand what actually got built versus what was specified
- Identify gaps between implementation and requirements
- Prepare informed questions for demo sessions
This workflow doesn't replace conversations with engineers. Instead, it makes those conversations more productive by eliminating basic questions and allowing you to focus on strategic technical decisions.
Real Benefits for Product Managers
Product managers who use Claude Code to inspect their Git repositories report several concrete benefits:
- Faster technical insight: Get answers to technical questions immediately rather than waiting for engineering availability.
- Better PRDs, plans: Write specifications that align with existing architecture and acknowledge technical constraints upfront.
- Improved credibility: Engineers respect PMs who understand technical context and make informed requests.
- Reduced back-and-forth: Fewer clarification cycles because you can self-serve answers to many technical questions.
- Smarter trade-offs: Make better priority decisions when you understand the true complexity and dependencies of features.
- Proactive problem-solving: Spot potential issues before they become blocking problems in development.
- Learning acceleration: Gradually build technical knowledge about your product without formal coding education.
The goal isn't to become a developer or to bypass engineering input. Rather, it's to operate at a higher level of technical literacy that makes you more effective at your core product management responsibilities.
Addressing Common Concerns
"Won't this encourage product managers to meddle in implementation details?" A good PM needs to discipline herself not to solution. That is always the case. Gaining technical insight into the product and features is useful to a PM.
"Do I need to learn command-line tools?" Claude Code requires basic familiarity with terminal commands, but the AI handles the complex parts. Most PMs pick up the necessary commands within a few hours. Check out Nimbalyst below!
"Will this replace communication with engineers?" No. It enhances communication by helping you ask better questions and understand engineers' responses. You'll still need engineering input for strategic technical decisions.
"What if I misunderstand what Claude Code tells me?" Always verify critical information with your engineering team. Claude Code is a tool for exploration and learning, not a replacement for expert judgment.
"Does this only work for certain programming languages?"Claude Code works with virtually all programming languages and can navigate any Git repository, regardless of the tech stack.
Elevating Your Product Management use of Claude Code with Nimbalyst
Nimbalyst is an integrated markdown environment for managing Claude Code. Nimbalyst provides you with:
- A local, WYSIWYG, agentic markdown editor
- A UI to manage Claude Code
- Claude Code and AI session management
- Local, markdown planning, status, & task/idea tracking
- Open format storage in markdown
Getting Started Today
The goal isn't to become a developer. It's to become a more effective product manager by understanding the technical reality of your product and organizing your work in ways that integrate seamlessly with engineering workflows.
When you can inspect code with Claude Code and organize work with Nimbalyst, you transform from someone who defines what should be built into someone who understands what can be built, why it should be built that way, and how to guide the team effectively through the process.
That's the future of product management: technical literacy without becoming a developer, structured planning without heavyweight tools, and better collaboration through shared context.