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

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. 60 to 70% of it was mocking and prototyping, but now I feel the mocking. Up part of it is 30 to 40 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. Our 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. And your 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. We'll get better at taste and judgment and design. We might be holding on to that a little bit too much. 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 Cowork. Prior to that she was director of design at Figma. Where she led the design teams behind Fig Jam 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's here to give us a glimpse into what that looks like. And how much things are gonna be changing for designers. It is pretty wild and extremely interesting. A huge thank you to No Eleven and Emily Lynn Hasham for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation.

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