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Podcast Episode

The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

5 clips•Mar 1, 2026•1 hr 17 min•Total amount of saves from this episode
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About

Jenny Wen leads design for Claude at Anthropic. Prior to this, she was Director of Design at Figma, where she led the teams behind FigJam and Slides. Before that, she was a designer at Dropbox, Square, and Shopify. — We discuss: 1. Why the classic discovery → mock → iterate design process is becoming obsolete 2. What a day in the life of a designer at Anthropic looks like, including her AI tool stack 3. Whether AI will eventually surpass humans in taste and judgment 4. Why Jenny left a director role at Figma to return to IC work at Anthropic 5. The three archetypes Jenny is hiring for now 6. Why chatbot interfaces may be more durable than most people expect — Brought to you by: Mercury—Radically different banking: https://mercury.com/?utm_source=lennys&utm_medium=sponsored_newsletter&utm_campaign=26q1_brand_campaign Orkes—The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows: https://www.orkes.io/ Omni—AI analytics your customers can trust: https://omni.co/lenny — Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-design-process-is-dead — Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0 — Where to find Jenny Wen: • X: https://x.com/jenny_wen • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennywen • Substack: https://jennywen.substack.com • Website: https://jennywen.ca — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Jenny Wen (04:23) Why the traditional design process is dead (06:33) The two new types of design work (10:00) How widespread this shift will be (13:00) Day-to-day life as a designer at Anthropic (18:45) Jenny’s AI stack (20:03) Why Figma still matters for exploration (22:25) Advice for working with engineers (24:19) How to maintain craft, quality, and trust in the AI era (27:35) Will AI ever have “taste”? (31:38) The future of chatbot interfaces (35:33) Moving from director back to IC (41:00) The 10-day build of Claude Cowork (46:06) Hiring: the three archetypes (50:44) Advice for new and senior designers (54:42) The value of “low leverage” tasks for managers (57:52) Why the best teams roast each other (01:01:45) The legibility framework (01:07:22) Lightning round and final thoughts — Referenced: • Figma: https://www.figma.com • Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com • v0: https://v0.app • Navigating a Design Career with Jenny Wen | Figma at Waterloo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHcBPMh2ivk • Claude Cowork: https://claude.com/product/cowork • Use Claude Code in VS Code: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/vs-code • Claude Code in Slack: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/slack • Lex Fridman’s website: https://lexfridman.com • Head of Claude Code: What happens after coding is solved | Boris Cherny: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/head-of-claude-code-what-happens • OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai • OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil (CPO at OpenAI, ex-Instagram, Twitter): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/kevin-weil-open-ai • Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn’t even started yet: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/marc-andreessen-the-real-ai-boom • Socratica: https://www.socratica.info • Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-cpo-heres-what-comes-next • Radical Candor: From theory to practice with author Kim Scott: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/radical-candor-from-theory-to-practice • Evan Tana’s ‘legibility matrix’ on X: https://x.com/evantana/status/1927404374252269667 • How to spot a top 1% startup early: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-spot-a-top-1-startup-early • Palantir: https://www.palantir.com • Stripe: https://stripe.com • Linear: https://linear.app • Notion: https://www.notion.com • Julie Zhuo’s website: https://www.juliezhuo.com • Sentimental Value: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27714581 • The Pitt on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/The-Pitt-Season-1/dp/B0DNRR8QWD • Noah Wyle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Wyle • ER on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0FWZSDYRP • Retro: https://retro.app • Granola: https://www.granola.ai — Recommended books: • Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Kick-Ass-Without-Humanity/dp/1250103509 • The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/0394480767 • Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me: https://www.amazon.com/Insomniac-City-New-York-Oliver/dp/162040494X — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. — Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

AI Summary

Jenny Wen, head of design for Claude at Anthropic and former Figma director behind FigJam and Slides, argues that the traditional discovery-mock-iterate design workflow is obsolete amid AI-driven engineering speeds. She shares a designer's daily routine at Anthropic, her go-to AI tools, and strategies for preserving craft and quality as products ship rapidly. The episode explores AI's potential to outpace human taste, the longevity of chatbot UIs, her shift back to individual contributor work, and the three designer profiles she's hiring for now.

Clips

20:20
“Figma excels at exploring 8-10 wild design directions code can't match.”▲ Hide transcript
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Is code the future of design? Do we need a Figma anymore? Do we need a design? What's your sense? Figma is still important? I mean, as a former Figma, maybe I'm biased in that way, but I think there is still, like, when I use Figma, I'm like, yes, this is what I should be using. And it still fills a very good gap for me. I think a lot of that is actually just like, one is exploring a lot of different options. I think that's a really important part of the design process to be able to just think about like eight to ten different ways to do something um i think the best design happens when you're able to just like throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and curate and just like and push yourself to come up with a bunch of these different directions right now coding or or right now working with some of these coding tools doesn't lend itself super well to that because it's super linear you get super invest in one direction and you just iterate with a lot on them for example So Figma has been really great at just like exploring all these different options and I think it still going to exist that way to some extent and then I think there like really fine sort of visual and interaction details that are also really great to to to be able to just try out in Figma again it's a lot of different directions but it's micro directions it's being able to think about like different typography or styles having those in a canvas where you can just explore that specifically is still so so helpful and is not something that I always want to like go directly to code in. It's interesting you still use an IDE because in engineering, it's clearly shifting to command lines, agents, IDs are kind of moving to not be cool anymore. And it makes a lot of sense. You just want to edit some CSS things, some like color stuff. And so I could see why not just telling the agent, hey, just come on, change this one hex value. Just changing it is so much easier. Yeah, it's really annoying to be like, can you change this to this class when you can just go in and change it to a different class. So that's interesting. I wonder if IDUs now become useful for designers and PMs and engineers that have moved on. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Okay.
Captured: Mar 12, 2026⏱ 127sSource: url-groq-ui
39:06
“Design managers: Rotate back to IC like engineering EMs do.”▲ Hide transcript
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But I think somebody who can really function as like giving the team direction as well as doing some of the people management stuff like that tied together, I think, is the future of what managing looks like, at least for now. Like somebody who can really engage with the team in terms of like the work and giving direction there, as well as like creating the environment for them to do their best work. And do you see yourself going back into management long term? I probably will. I probably will. I think I really just love, you know, helping a team like build the best product possible. And my motto there is like whatever it takes, you know, if it's somebody that if the team needs somebody to give the team direction and like set up the team and whatnot, that could be me. If the team just like needs somebody to execute on it, that could be me as well. So the advice I'm hearing for people in design that are especially managers is you almost need to move back into IC in order to truly understand what is happening and how much it's changing so that you can be a better manager. I think so And I think traditionally at least what I seen a lot of like the engineering disciplines like when they hire EMs or even sometimes like directors there they actually make the EMs like take a rotation for a few months and pick up a few tasks and really understand how the technology works before they become a full time manager And I think design probably needs to do something similar to where I think in the past design has been much more like people management oriented. What did you find yourself most rusty in when you went back to IC Designer? Actually, like doing crits, you know, and just getting criticized. Yeah, getting criticized. You're like, oh, yeah, like it is hard to get it is hard to get critical feedback and to hear it and to hear on such a regular basis. Because that's the thing you have to do as a designer is like it's a pretty vulnerable exercise to share work and present it with your team. And then also just get a lot of critical feedback and take that all the time. So currently you're leading design slash IC designing on Co-Work. Is that right? Yeah. Awesome.
Captured: Mar 12, 2026⏱ 124sSource: file-groq-sc
46:53
“Block-shaped generalists flex across PM and engineering roles effortlessly.”▲ Hide transcript
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Also, there's probably three archetypes of folks that are really interesting to me right now. And I think these folks were already interesting to me before, but I feel like is in this era feels especially important. So the first one I would call is like strong generalists. So not just like regular generalists where they're like kind of good at a lot of things, but like people that are like almost like block shaped, you know, in that T-shaped framework where it's like they're really good at like a few core skills, like 80th percentile. good. I think this is like pretty rare and hard to hire for, to be honest. But I like this because the design role we've already seen is kind of like stretching and spanning, right? Like we're all becoming more PM shape or all becoming engineering shaped. And so if you already have strong skills in a few different buckets, it's really easy for you to sort of like flex around and expand your and expand your role. So that's really exciting to me. It's just somebody who is really good at a bunch of things. Again, a huge ask. And then the other person that's really exciting to me is in that T framework like a deep specialist like someone who is T but like the tip of the T probably is like goes down farther than most other people so folks that are maybe like the top you know like 10 percent of the industry and whatnot again super hard to find and i feel very lucky that like you know working at some of these places like folks like these you you can sort of afford to hire them and and actually bring them up on board um and then my last one is probably the one that i think we're all overlooking which is what I call the craft new grad. It's just somebody who is like early career and feels kind of like wise and experienced beyond their years, but is also just like very humble and very eager to learn. I think this person is really interesting right now because I think most companies are just hiring like senior talent, like folks that have done things before, are super experienced but given how much the roles are changing and what we're expected to do is changing I think having somebody who almost has like a blank slate and is just like a really quick learner and is really eager to learn um new tactics and stuff like that and doesn't have like all these baked in processes and rituals in their mind that's super valuable um so I think those are the folks that I think a lot of us are just like overlooking but I'm like really excited about
Captured: Mar 12, 2026⏱ 151sSource: file-groq-sc
53:54
“Claude's no hireable designer yet—just solid first-pass ideas.”▲ Hide transcript
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How good of a designer is Claude, would you say, or Claude Code, would everyone describe? Like, would you hire Claude as a designer or is it like not there yet? I don't think Claude is there yet. I don't think Claude is there yet in terms of a designer you would hire. I think it is not yet the strong generalist or the deep specialist or the correct new grad. I think it's pretty good at a first pass and at presenting a bunch of different ideas to you. But nothing there quite feels like, yeah, special and hireable yet. Which is good news for designers for now. It sucks at this for now. And I'm so curious to see how good it could get at this. That's like such a big open question is can it pump out amazing, novel, unique creative experiences or is this it's just never going to be that good as a human designer? I mean, it's gotten a lot better in the last year or so even. So, yeah.
Captured: Mar 12, 2026⏱ 50sSource: file-groq-sc
1:01:56
“Designers must translate illegible frontiers into killer UX.”▲ Hide transcript
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And I hear you're a big fan of something called the Legibility Framework. Talk about this. Talk about how you use it, why it's so valuable. Yeah, this framework, I think I saw it on Twitter of maybe last year or something. And it was Evan Tana, who is a partner at SPC. He's a BC. So it basically is this like two by two. I don't think it like got so much attention. But once I started seeing it, I actually couldn't stop thinking about it. So on the two by two, he basically has like founders. Like founders can be either illegible or legible. And then ideas can either be illegible or legible. And basically he was saying that like, okay, if both the founder and idea is like super legible, the idea is probably not that novel. And somebody is already like, they're already going to implement it or do it. And you're actually not finding something new. But then where it gets really interesting is where like the idea itself is illegible. And by illegible he means like oh it sort of like really you know on the frontier people might not get it yet Or like the way it being told it just doesn it not like being told in the way that makes the most sense to people And I think this is obviously a good way for a VC to operate because you're trying to look for the opportunities that people don't see and put them out there in the world. But I also think that like part of the role of the designer, at least, at least at a frontier lab at Anthropic is kind of spotting the ideas that are illegible and trying to understand what's there and how to take that and like transform it, whether it's through storytelling or whether it's through like the actual UX and the form factor and put it out there. And I think there's like, like when I mentioned, you know, going through Slack and like looking at all the stuff that people are making, like that's kind of what I'm doing. I'm trying to see like, oh, yeah, what are the ideas that are really that like there's like some energy there around, but like might not make sense yet that that are worth me like thinking about more in my work.
Captured: Mar 13, 2026⏱ 120sSource: file-groq-sc

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