The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude)
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What is the design process and why is it considered dead?
This design process that designers have been taught we sort of treat it as gospel. That's basically dead. You as a designer actually like do not have the time to make these beautiful mocks anymore.
A big part of the design role now is helping engineers and teams execute, not just telling them here's the design.
A few years ago, sixty to seventy percent of it was mocking and prototyping. But now I feel the mocking up part of it is thirty to forty percent.
You're better off not blocking that, letting them cook.
It's not just designers who are feeling like, Oh yeah, we have to keep up with engineers. I think even engineers are like, How do we keep up with ourselves?
How to keep up with all our agents. There are seven agents who are constantly running.
The result of engineering changing a bunch is that design is sort of forced to change. We used to go off and make this two-year, five-year, ten-year vision even. Now it becomes a vision that's three to six months out and isn't necessarily creating this beautiful death, sometimes just creating a prototype that points people in the right direction.
Boris on the podcast recently was saying Claude Code is now helping him come up with ideas.
It will get better at taste and judgment and design. We might be holding on to that a little bit too much.
Where will human brains continue to be valuable? At
the end of the day, someone has to decide what is actually going to get built and what actually matters. Someone still needs to be accountable for the decision.
What do you now look for when you're hiring designers?
There's probably three archetypes of folks that are really interesting to me right now.
Today's guest is Jenny Wen. Jenny was head of design for Claude, is now leading Design for Claude co-work. Prior to that, she was director of design at Figma, where she led the design teams behind FigJam and Slides. She was also a designer at Dropbox and Square and Shopify. And what I love about this conversation is that Jenny is living in the future of where design as a profession is heading, and she is here to give us a glimpse into what that looks like and how How much things are going to be changing for designers? It is pretty wild and extremely interesting. A huge thank you to Noah11 and Emily Lynn Hasham for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Don't forget to check out Lenny's ProductPass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers.
Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs, including me. I switched to Mercury from Chase over a year ago, and it is such a profoundly better experience. It's like an actual product person built a bank versus a banking person building a product. It is fast, it's elegant, it is super easy to set wires, to track my spending, to set up triggers to move money around when accounts get low. We moved all of our invoicing to Mercury, and it is such a smoother experience than anything else we've tried. It's also really easy to grant people on your team just the right amount of access to help take work off your plate.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the design process and why is it considered dead?
0:00–10:08
2
How are designers shifting from traditional mock‑up work to real‑time engineering collaboration?
10:08–18:45
3
What does a typical day look like for a designer at Anthropic?
18:45–26:23
4
Which AI tools and workflows does Jenny use in her daily design work?
26:23–35:39
5
Is Figma still essential for design exploration in an AI‑first world?
35:39–43:59
6
What are the three archetypes of designers Anthropic is hiring right now?
43:59–53:19
7
Will chat‑bot interfaces remain a durable UI for AI interactions?
53:19–1:02:34
8
Why did Jenny move from a director role back to an IC role, and what can designers learn from it?
1:02:34–1:17:22
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