The Design Process Is Dead: Jenny Wen on How Design Works at Anthropic Now
Lenny's Podcast
Jenny Wen leads design for Claude Cowork at Anthropic, after serving as head of design for Claude. Before that they were director of design at Figma, where they led the teams behind FigJam and Slides, and earlier they designed at Dropbox, Square, and Shopify. In this conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Wen argues that the design process designers have been taught to "trust" (research and discovery, then cycles of diverging and converging on polished mocks) no longer fits how software gets built. In their view, the change is not coming from designers. It is being forced on design by how quickly engineering has changed. The conversation covers what design work looks like instead, how Wen spends their days, where they think human judgment still matters, why they returned from management to individual contributor work, how Cowork shipped, what they look for in hires, and how they run teams.
"Don't trust the design process"
Wen gave a talk at a conference in Berlin in September titled roughly "Don't trust the design process." Their argument was that the canonical design process, which designers have treated "as gospel" and tried hard to preserve, is "basically dead." They think it was already dying before AI. The deciding factor now is that engineers can spin up many parallel coding agents at once. Wen jokes about engineers running "their seven Claudes." Designers, they say, have to let go of the old sequence.
Wen adds that the talk, only three or four months old at recording time, already feels "a little embarrassing" and outdated to them. They point to the release of Opus 4.6, and to many people discovering Claude Code over the holiday break, as accelerating the pressure to change. They also warn that their current opinions might shift again within three months.
Wen frames the change as a follow-on effect. Engineering has changed much more than design in the recent past, and design is trailing behind. They expect design tooling to change over the next year or so. They also describe the shift as empowering: designers now have access to the same coding tools, so they can prototype in real code and do "last mile" implementation and polish, rather than depending on engineers for both.
Two kinds of design work
Wen sees design work becoming "stratified" into two types.
The first is supporting implementation and execution. Anyone can float an idea, and someone (usually an engineer, because engineers are still better at implementation than designers) builds a scrappy version that people can try. In this mode, Wen says, a designer "actually do[es] not have the time to make these beautiful mocks anymore" or to lead the way designers used to.
The second is setting vision and direction. Designers did this before too, but Wen thinks its shape has changed. Teams used to produce two-, five-, or even ten-year visions, often packaged as carefully storytold decks. Wen says nobody knows what will happen in two years given how fast the technology is moving. A vision now tends to look three to six months out, and it may just be a prototype that points people in the right direction. They consider this work harder to make time for, but more important than ever. When anyone can build features in any direction, someone has to point the effort at a shared goal so the pieces make sense together and the work is efficient.
Is this just an AI-lab phenomenon?
Lenny asks whether this only applies to frontier AI companies, and whether a Salesforce or ServiceNow will ever work this way. Wen notes that the Berlin talk turned out to be the most resonant talk they have given. They read that as a sign that people across the industry feel the old process breaking down: designers and PMs are spinning up prototypes with tools like Claude Code and v0. The talk also drew a "decent amount" of backlash from people who had built careers on learning and teaching a stable process and who insisted discovery and other steps could not be dropped. Wen concludes that part of the industry is "not quite there yet."
On whether shipping fast actually produces better products, Wen says you still have to use discretion about when to ship. They believe, though, that executing and testing with real data and a real-user mindset leads to better products, especially with non-deterministic AI models. With these models you cannot mock up every state, theorize your way to an answer, or even build a meaningful clickable prototype. You have to use the real model underneath and watch people bring their own use cases, because use cases get discovered through usage rather than designed in advance. Lenny ties this to Cowork, and probably Claude Code, which emerged from seeing how people actually used the products.
A day in the life at Anthropic
A surprising share of Wen's time goes to keeping up with what is happening inside the company. Wen has worked at companies of similar size, but says this is the first where they have felt compelled to follow everything. There are model developments on the research side, many teams prototyping under various code names, labs teams working close to research, internal prototypes and products they want to try out of curiosity, and internal essays and debates about where the industry and the company are heading. At a typical company, Wen says, they would have treated much of this as outside their reach. Here, both the volume and the kind of work draw them in, partly to spot what is coming toward their own area. "Our Slack is a gold mine," they say, suggesting that the best AI news is probably inside the labs' Slack channels.
Beyond that, Wen describes three main modes. The first is traditional forward-looking design work. The week of recording, they had set aside time to think about where Cowork could go over the next three months, now that the team had spent a while in execution mode, and to visualize that for the team. The second is jamming with engineers: conversations, whiteboarding, reviewing what engineers have built and giving feedback, working as a kind of consultant. The third is time in code. Often an engineer implements a first version of something they worked out together, and Wen then goes in and polishes it with them. Wen calls this a fun part of the job that barely existed a few months earlier.
The traditional practices have not disappeared. The team has a user researcher who runs traditional studies and surveys, and the whole team reads the results. Wen still prototypes and mocks things up. What changed is the toolset and the proportions. A few years ago, they estimate, 60–70% of their time went to mocking and prototyping, around 20% to jamming and consulting with engineers, and about 10% to coordination meetings. Now mocking takes 30–40%, direct pairing with engineers takes another 30–40%, and a new slice goes to actual implementation and shipping.
Wen's AI stack, and why Figma still matters
Wen calls theirs "a fully Claude house." They used Claude chat but have moved essentially all of their chat use cases to Cowork, which they find better at the longer-running tasks they were mostly asking for anyway. They use Claude Code mainly inside VS Code, because they are usually tweaking front-end code and want to see it while talking to Claude. They have also started using Claude Code remotely, from mobile and from Slack. Someone points out an off icon, a teammate @-mentions Claude, and the PR is ready to pick up.
Wen still uses Figma, and says they may be biased as a former "Figmate." In their view it fills two gaps. The first is exploring many options: good design, they believe, comes from throwing eight to ten directions at the wall and curating, and today's coding tools are "super linear," pulling you into iterating on a single direction with Claude. The second is fine visual and interaction detail, such as trying different typography or styles side by side on a canvas. Wen calls these "micro directions" and says they don't always want to go straight to code for them.
Lenny notes the irony that engineers are moving from IDEs to terminals and agents while designers are adopting IDEs. Wen agrees that directly changing a class is easier than asking an agent to do it, and allows that IDEs may end up most useful to designers and PMs.
Working with engineers without becoming a gatekeeper
For designers overwhelmed by how much engineers now ship, Wen's approach is to explain the reasoning behind each piece of feedback, so engineers can pull out principles rather than receive verdicts. For example: "we should have a button here because not everybody realizes you can prompt this," along with the research that supports it. They also point engineers to the design system in code, because Claude writes much of the code and doesn't always pick up design-system components. The goal is to equip engineers to make good calls without Wen present.
On not going crazy, Wen admits it is hard right now. Because designers and engineers can now do so much, they want to do more. It isn't only designers struggling to keep up with engineers, Wen observes. Engineers are asking how to keep up with themselves.
Craft, quality, and trust when shipping fast
Asked how to maintain craft and quality when products ship constantly, Wen first corrects the premise. It isn't that no designer is involved. There is too much for one designer to handle. Their approach depends on where a product sits in its adoption cycle. Some launches are explicitly labeled research previews and caveated heavily. Cowork is Wen's example. The team knew it might not be the easiest to use or the highest quality, and that it would have issues. They had used it extensively internally and believed there was something powerful in it, so they judged that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks. Like the models, Wen says, "this is the worst it's ever going to be."
The condition, in Wen's view, is a promise to users: take feedback, iterate, and visibly keep shipping improvements. What erodes trust and degrades a brand is shipping something early and then never touching it again. Wen agrees with Lenny's phrase "building trust through speed," and adds that the goal is also for people to feel heard, to see that fixes respond to what they were trying to do. Lenny observes that lab teams do this publicly, replying to posts and announcing fixes a day later. Wen says the fast feedback loop is fun for a designer because you learn right away what to do next.
Will AI develop taste?
Lenny cites Boris Cherny saying on the podcast that Claude Code now helps him generate ideas and decide what to build, and asks where human judgment will stay valuable. Wen expects AI to get better at taste, judgment, and design. They think designers may be "holding on to that a little bit too much" by assuming a human will always know the best thing to ship.
Still, Wen argues, someone has to decide what gets built and what matters. They point out that many of the hardest parts of building software aren't the building. The worst moments at work usually involve disagreeing with someone about what belongs in a feature. AI can weigh in, but it can't necessarily resolve that dispute. Wen calls this a kind of taste, though closer to judgment about what to do next than to aesthetic taste. They also stress accountability. Even though Claude writes much of the code today, an engineer is still accountable for whether it works and makes sense in the product. The same will hold for product decisions, "maybe one day" not, but for now the responsibility falls on people.
Lenny pushes further. After watching AI take over coding faster than most people expected a year or two ago, to the point that top engineers don't read the code anymore, he suspects we underrate how good AI will get at product judgment too. He imagines it laying out all the data and a recommendation so that people just "press one." He compares the human role to radiology, where a person is mostly needed to sign off because someone must be liable.
Wen also doesn't think Claude is yet a designer they would hire. It isn't a strong generalist, a deep specialist, or a standout new grad (the three archetypes they describe later). They find it good at a first pass and at presenting many ideas, but nothing yet feels "special and hirable." They note it has improved a lot over the past year.
Why chat interfaces may last
Lenny notes that few people expected chatbots, and now terminals, to be the lasting interface to AI. Wen expects a combination. Anthropic has released widgets in Claude that let the model ask questions interactively and show things like weather and stocks. Wen says these have been received well because people like to see, touch, and click interfaces, and for specific tasks that is more efficient than typing. Leaning into the chat paradigm, though, opened up a flexibility that fixed UIs never offered: effectively infinite ways to work with the model. Wen doesn't think chat, or even talking to a terminal, is going away. Their prediction is that specific UIs will increasingly be generated by the models rather than hand-coded for each case.
Lenny points out that one of the big innovations of OpenClaw was simply letting people chat with an agent through WhatsApp, Telegram, and SMS. Wen reads that as confirmation: talking is how humans interact richly, and now there is another medium for talking to a computer. Lenny adds Kevin Weil's point from an earlier episode that conversation scales across every level of intelligence, which makes it a durable interface as models get smarter.
Stepping back from director to IC
Wen joined Anthropic as an IC, managed a team for a few months when the org structure needed it, and is now back to full-time IC work. At Figma they had managed roughly 12–15 designers at the peak, including a few managers. They chose IC work at Anthropic partly because the work itself excited them. They also wanted to stay close to the craft at an important moment before climbing further, and they had doubts about whether middle management would be a safe job in the future. They say they love both sides equally and had been something of a reluctant manager.
The main payoff, Wen says, has been skills they would not have gained while managing. The design process changed so much in a year that they picked up many hard skills they wouldn't have had time for. If they manage again, that experience will give them empathy for how teams now work. They think that empathy is hard to have if you aren't working this way and testing the tools yourself. Wen compares it to engineering orgs that sometimes have new engineering managers, or even directors, take on tasks for a few months to learn the technology before managing full time. They think design, historically more focused on people management, should probably do something similar.
What felt rustiest on returning to IC work was being critiqued. Presenting work and hearing critical feedback over and over is a vulnerable exercise, and it took readjusting.
On whether design management will last, Wen believes that as long as there are teams, managers add real value. What they see fading is pure people management: career setup, one-on-ones, making sure people feel good at work. The manager who fits the current moment combines people management with giving the team direction on the work itself, while creating an environment where the team can do its best work. Wen expects to manage again, and describes their motto as "whatever it takes": setting direction if the team needs that, executing if the team needs that.
How Cowork actually shipped
Lenny raises the widely repeated claim that Cowork was built in ten days. Wen clarifies that ten days is how long it took to go from what existed internally to something ready to release. The product had been in the works much longer. There had been many internal prototypes on top of various agent harnesses, and the team had prototyped individual pieces of what became Cowork. They tried multiple form factors for how Claude presents a to-do list, how it asks multiple-choice questions, and how to teach users what the use cases are. Wen says they don't know if the team landed on the best possible form, but the pieces were things that already worked internally and that people liked, and releasing would bring more signal. Forcing a ten-day deadline meant shipping whatever they had and iterating from there. Wen says the "10 days" figure became the viral takeaway, but the idea kept resurfacing in different variations, with many people contributing, until "all of a sudden it's the right moment" and looks obvious in hindsight.
Asked what they're proudest of, Wen says simply that the team shipped it, since after working on something for so long a designer mostly sees flaws. They're excited about ongoing work on the homepage, which is meant to present tasks you can give Claude and tasks Claude is working on. Lenny points to a randomizer that suggests ideas. Wen wants the experience to feel more like a shared to-do list between the user and Claude, showing what Claude is doing and what needs the user's attention. They're also thinking about Cowork's "true form factor": whether it should always live in one screen or reach out to the other surfaces it works with.
Wen likes Lenny's description of Cowork as "Claude with hands" and adds their own: Claude that is good at taking "all your garbage" and turning it into something nice. A favorite use is handing it a folder of miscellaneous material and getting something good out of it.
Three archetypes Wen is hiring for
Given the environment, Wen first looks for resilience, a willingness to "roll with it," adapt, and try new methods and tools rather than cling to old processes. Beyond that they describe three archetypes that already interested them but feel especially important now.
The first is the strong generalist. Wen doesn't mean someone who is decent at many things. They mean someone "block-shaped," roughly 80th-percentile good at several core skills. Wen admits this is rare and hard to hire. It matters because the design role is stretching to become more PM-shaped and engineering-shaped, and someone with strong skills in several areas can flex and expand easily. Lenny links this to the "sideways F or E" shape he discussed with Marc Andreessen.
The second is the deep specialist, a T-shape whose vertical goes much deeper than most people's, perhaps top 10% in the industry. One example is a designer technical enough to be close to a software engineer, which helps when working directly with the model. Another is someone exceptional at visual design or icon design. When anyone can make anything, Wen says, that depth helps differentiate the product.
The third, which Wen thinks most companies overlook, is the "crack new grad": early-career, wise beyond their years, humble, and eager to learn. Most companies hire senior people with track records, but because roles are changing so fast, Wen values someone with a near-blank slate who learns quickly and has no ingrained processes and rituals.
Advice for new and experienced designers
For new designers, Wen's advice is to build real things and share them. They remember their own design education as largely theoretical. The strongest new grads they know use the technology, build, and aren't limited by their lack of experience. Wen suggests they may even be "unburdened" by not carrying the expectations that longtime industry people have. Wen points to Socratica, which started at their school after they graduated, as a culture of building and showcasing projects much like a science fair. They mention someone assembling robots that ran on Claude a few years ago, and someone who wanted to put googly eyes on a bus in Boston, as examples of agency combined with a community that builds and shares.
For mid-career and senior designers, Wen doesn't think learning to code from scratch is necessary. Implementation is increasingly part of the designer's vocabulary, though, and designers should bring coding tools into their toolkit and know how to use them, rather than, say, going off to learn React. They speculate that as models and products improve, people will keep moving up the abstraction layers and won't need to understand every line of code.
The value of "low-leverage" work for managers
Early in their management career, Wen learned the standard advice to sort work with a 2×2 into things only you can do and things others can do, and to drop the "low-leverage" nitpicky tasks. Looking at the leaders they respect most, Wen noticed that those leaders deliberately pick certain low-leverage tasks, and that the tasks become high-leverage precisely because a leader is doing them.
Wen's examples: senior leaders who test the product relentlessly, dogfood it, reproduce bugs, and share logs and nitpicks with engineers. That builds deep familiarity with the product and signals that the leader cares and is rolling up their sleeves. Wen has also seen Mike Krieger submit PRs himself, which communicates that everyone is on the same team and nothing is beneath anyone. A more cultural example is a leader going out of their way to make, or vibe-code, a special anniversary card for someone. An assistant could produce the card, but the leader doing it shows how much they care. Wen says they try to choose the seemingly low-leverage tasks that are worth their time, and they see those choices as what makes a leader's style feel distinctive to the people on the team.
Why good teams roast each other
Wen's teams have a reputation for roasting each other while also being happy and high-performing. Wen clarifies that they don't instruct anyone to roast. They treat it as a signal. Friends tease each other because they feel comfortable and safe, and coworkers often don't. When team members poke fun at each other, and at the leader, it suggests they don't fear the leader and don't worry that speaking up will get them fired. On their last team, people imitated Wen's habit of asking in critiques, "Okay, what are next steps?"
The tension is the usual warning against managers being friends with their reports. Wen resolves it by pairing a baseline of psychological safety with clearly high standards. They argue the two reinforce each other: once people trust one another, applying high standards becomes easier because it happens without fear. Wen compares it to being a somewhat tough parent. The team knows Wen will always be there for them and won't fire them on a whim, and also knows Wen wants the best for them and expects great work. Lenny connects this to Kim Scott's Radical Candor: caring personally and challenging directly.
The legibility framework: designers as internal VCs
Wen's favorite framework comes from a tweet by Evan Tana, a partner at the VC firm SPC. His 2×2 rates founders as legible or illegible and ideas as legible or illegible. When both founder and idea are highly legible, the idea is probably not novel, and someone else will likely build it. The interesting cases involve illegible ideas: ideas at the frontier that people don't get yet, or that aren't being explained in a way that makes sense.
Wen thinks part of a designer's role at a frontier lab is to spot illegible ideas, figure out what is valuable in them, and transform them through storytelling or through UX and form factor. Scanning Slack for internal projects is, in part, a search for ideas that have energy around them but don't quite make sense yet.
The concrete example is an internal prototype called Claude Studio, which someone built partway through the previous year. It was a dense, powerful interface on top of an agentic harness (Wen thinks possibly Claude Code at the time), with displays showing knowledge, skills, what Claude was doing, and previews of outputs. As a designer, Wen found it confusing. But they saw a lot of energy around it from researchers, its builders, and others internally, and concluded there was something there they didn't yet understand. The people working on that prototype extracted from it what became the skills framework, the markdown files that instruct Claude on how to do something. Wen wasn't directly involved in that. Later, when designing Cowork, Wen went back to the prototype and pulled out the kinds of information people had found helpful, such as Claude's plan and to-dos and the context and files it was working through. Wen's takeaway is that designers can act almost like VCs inside the company when looking at prototypes. When there is energy around something they don't understand, they should dig in, because people drawn to early ideas often can't articulate why.
Lenny relates this to research he did with VC Terrence Rohan on people who joined companies like Palantir, Stripe, Linear, Notion, and OpenAI early. Two of the patterns they found were ideas that sounded crazy enough that people laughed, and noticing when others were very excited about something even if you didn't get it. The third was top-1% founders.
Lightning round
Wen recommends Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which they admit is an "incredibly aggressive recommendation" at around 1,100 pages. They argue it is worth reading end to end in an era of short attention spans. It traces a controversial figure, Robert Moses, across decades with nuance, restores long-arc thinking, reminds readers that careers are long, and shows how someone gets things done. (Lenny notes that design leader Julie Zhuo was also reading it recently.) Their second pick is Bill Hayes's Insomniac City, a memoir of Oliver Sacks's last days and the love story between Hayes and Sacks. Wen says it has little to do with the podcast's topics but makes them think about mortality, love, and life.
For film and TV, Wen picks Sentimental Value, the Norwegian film by the director of The Worst Person in the World, which they watched on a plane. They praise its subtle pacing, writing, and character relationships, and the way the family house functions almost as a character. They also recommend season 2 of The Pitt, because people enjoy watching others who are very competent at their jobs. Lenny notes that Noah Wyle, who leads the show, was in ER as a younger actor.
Their favorite product is Retro, which they have used for about two years. It's a small-community photo-sharing app where you can only share photos from a given week, with no visible counts or ads. After two years, they can look back at what they were doing the same week in previous years, which has become a special way to relive their life week by week.
Their motto is "it is what it is." Wen says it sounds defeatist but isn't: with so much happening in the world and the industry that you can't control, it brings the levity needed to keep going.
Their favorite Cowork use case is introspection. Wen keeps a folder of local notes written in iA Writer over the years (one-on-one notes, random thoughts, small memos, interview notes) and has Cowork analyze them to surface insights. In a practical case related to hiring, they wanted to articulate what they look for in design craft, which they think many people struggle to put into words. They asked Cowork to read their interview notes and craft-related writing and help them draft a memo and rubric for assessing craft in interviews. What they value, they say, is learning things about themselves that they had been expressing implicitly without realizing it.
Closing
Before the lightning round, Wen shouts out the Anthropic design team, which they describe as humble, not always visible on social media, and resilient through a period when the job has changed dramatically. The team spans very technical, prototype-oriented designers through high-craft designers shipping polished work. Wen says the team is hiring throughout the year, particularly strong generalists and deep specialists, and people excited about the technology who have been building a lot, provided the way the team works sounds "more exciting than terrifying." Wen can be found on X as @jenny_wen. The one thing they ask of listeners is product feedback on Cowork, or anything Claude-related.
This design process that designers have been taught, we sort of treat it as gospel. That's basically dead. You as a designer actually 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.
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%.
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 do we 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 2-year, 5-year, 10-year vision even. Now it becomes a vision that's 3 to 6 months out and isn't necessarily creating this beautiful deck. 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 judgement 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 Cowork. 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 much things are going to be changing for designers. It is pretty wild and extremely interesting. A huge thank you to no 111 and Emily Lin Hasham for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.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. It's free to get started. No in-person visits, no minimum balances. The product also flexes to all sizes of company from startups to large enterprises. Just visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC insured bank, banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC.
This episode is brought to you by Orkes, the company behind open-source Conductor, the orchestration platform powering modern enterprise applications. Modern systems are built on microservices, APIs, and event-driven architectures. But legacy automation tools can't keep up. Siloed low-code platforms, outdated process management, and disconnected API tooling break down under real-world scale and constant change. Orkes Conductor provides a production-grade orchestration layer for coordinating microservices, APIs, data pipelines, human tasks, and agentic workflows with deterministic control flow, retries, observability, and governance. Built for enterprise scale, Orkes supports visual and code-first development with built-in compliance and reliability through a built-in MCP gateway. AI agents handle reasoning and decision-making while safely accessing existing APIs and internal systems as MCP tools. This enables agents to operate across enterprise environments and scale from demos to production, orchestrating systems, agents, and humans together to deliver smarter outcomes faster. Learn more at orkes.io/lenny. That's O-R-K-E-S.io/lenny.
Jenny, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Yeah, excited to be here.
I've been looking forward to this conversation because I spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about the future of software engineering, how much that role is changing, the role of product management, how much that role is changing. I haven't spent a lot of time on how design is changing. Clearly it is also changing in a really big way and you have such a front row seat to where things are heading. I also know you have a lot of very strong opinions about where things are heading. So there's a lot of stuff I want to talk about. I want to just start with this broad question. How is the design process changing with the rise of AI?
It's changing a lot. I think it's still also got a long way to go in terms of the way it's changing. Like I think we've actually seen, you know, engineering change a lot more in the past little while than design actually has. But I think the result of engineering changing a bunch is that design is sort of forced to change.
And so I think some context around this is I did a talk at a conference in Berlin a few months ago in September and I called it like "Don't Trust the Design Process," where I basically just said like, hey, you know, this design process that designers have been taught where you go off and you do a bunch of research and discovery and then you like diverge, you converge, diverge, converge, and it's like this process that we sort of treated as gospel and tried so hard to preserve and we were like, trust the process. That's basically dead. I think it was sort of dying before the age of AI, but given now that, you know, engineers can go off and spin off their like seven Claudes, I think as designers, we really have to let go of that process. And I think that's the big thing that's changing.
But I think even in the past three to four months since I did that talk, that talk actually kind of feels outdated to me, which is a little embarrassing. But especially with the big shift of like Opus 4.6 and a bunch of folks just like really discovering and using Claude Code over the holiday break, I think we're seeing this like force to change our process happen even more.
The way I sort of see it now is like there are basically two types of design work, and design work is kind of like becoming really stratified in this new world. So there's like the first one, which is really just like supporting the implementation and execution. So this is the one where, you know, engineers are using their seven Claudes to create all these features and anybody can like put an idea out there and you can just like talk about an idea and somebody, usually actually an engineer because they're still better at implementing this stuff than we are, they will just make a scrappy version of it and you can try it out, and you as a designer actually do not have the time to make these beautiful mocks anymore or to like kind of lead in this way.
And then I think there's like the second kind of work that feels also really important, which is like creating the sort of vision or direction for things. This one feels like the hardest to make time for, and it's one that we still did before, but I think the shape of it is very much changing because I think we used to go off and say, you know, we're going to do this design vision. We're going to go off and make this like 2-year, 5-year, whatever, 10-year vision even, and we're going to like point us towards something. But the way that the technology is changing now, like we actually don't know, we don't know what's going to happen in 2 years. There's too much changing and it usually becomes a vision that's like 3 to 6 months out and isn't necessarily something that is like creating this like beautiful deck that's like beautifully story told. It's sometimes just like creating a prototype that points people in the right direction.
And I think this kind of work is still really important in this world because in a world where people can spin off their seven Claudes, make whatever features they want in any kind of like direction or implementation, you need to point them towards something. And in order to make sure that we're all making something that makes sense together and is also done in a way where it's like efficient, right? Like if we're all working towards something that has one greater cause, it's like much more efficient to do that than just random things. And so that's like the big shift that I'm seeing, and I think I have opinions about it now, but ask me in like 3 months and it might actually change even more.
So what you're saying here is it's not like you or the design field is like, we need to change. It's engineering and the fact that you can build so quickly just forces the role of a designer to change because, as you said, engineers can just ship, ship, ship, ship, ship, and what you're finding here is like you're better off not blocking that, letting them cook, as they say, and then there's kind of this mode of helping them along as they ship, bring it together, make sure it all kind of connects, guide them a little bit.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I don't think there is like one unifying voice that's like, designers, we need to change right now, but yeah, there is sort of like the follow-on effects of engineering tooling really changing. I think we'll probably see design tooling change in this next year or so as well. But a lot of it right now is trailing bats. And I think it's also really empowering for us too because as designers we also now have access to a lot of these coding tools and we can be a part of the process in a way where we're implementing stuff. Like I'm doing a lot of last mile stuff where I'm implementing all the polish and sort of like working with engineers really closely to get the feature across the line, and also prototype stuff in actual code as opposed to like relying on engineers to do that again.
How true do you think this is at all companies, at say AI companies, non-AI companies? You know, someone may be hearing this, okay, Anthropic, Claude, like okay, it's like they're at the bleeding edge for one, two, it's like developer a little bit, but I think people might be feeling like, okay, this is not going to happen at Salesforce, this is not going to happen at, I don't know, ServiceNow, wherever. So I guess do you feel like this is where all teams are heading? Is it mostly AI bleeding edge companies? How widespread do you think the design process shift is going to be?
So the talk that I did last year has weirdly been like the most resonant talk that I've done, and so I think it's something that people are starting to feel across the industry where they're like, oh yeah, we can't do the old design process anymore. You know, we are using tools like Claude Code and v0 and whatnot to start to spin up prototypes, and PMs are starting to spin up prototypes and stuff like that as well. So I think there's something there emerging. But the other interesting observation with that talk too was there was actually also a decent amount of like backlash. Like people clearly have invested their entire careers in learning, teaching, using this like really stable design process and I think there was a lot of like discrediting, like, oh yeah, like we can't do without discovery, we can't do without these pieces of process. So I think there is still a piece of the industry that is not quite there yet in terms of this way of working, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And a big part of this is like, you could argue, like the question is what leads to the best, most successful products and companies, and you could argue it's spending time doing discovery, user research, mocks, iterating, beta testing, or it could be just engineers ship stuff that's okay, not amazing, good enough, we learn, iterate, build, iterate. Is your sense that that second path is not only just like what everyone's doing, but that actually leads to the better product at this point?
I think you sort of have to choose and use your discretion as to like when to actually ship something. But I think the ability to execute, try something out and try it with like real data and a real user like kind of mindset in the product, I think that does lead to a better product, especially as we're all working with these like new developing AI models that are non-deterministic. You just can't mock up all the states, you know, and you can't theorize, and you can't even make like a clickable prototype with it. You sort of have to use the actual models underneath and you have to sort of see people try it out with their use cases, because with these models, like, you can design them for different use cases, but you have to discover use cases as you see people using them. So yes.
The other thing I always hear, and building on what you just said, is just you don't know what people will do with AI. You don't know how good it'll be at certain things, the nondeterministic piece of it. So you can create these amazing mocks of what it might be and then people use it in a completely different way, which is where Cowork came from and probably even Claude Code at the beginning. And so what's it just like to be a designer at Anthropic? Just like give us a day in the life of working at Anthropic, at the center of the storm.
A good amount of time at Anthropic is actually just like catching up on what's happening at the company. I've worked at a few other companies around this size, but I think this is the company where there's just a lot of like information and a lot of things going on, but I feel really compelled to keep up with it. You know, like there's stuff that is like model developments on the research side, and then at any given time there are just so many different teams prototyping and trying different ideas out, and there's a bunch of different like code names and stuff like that. And a lot of time I'm just like trying to navigate and figure out what those projects are because I think I'm just trying to spot and see like, hey, what's coming up ahead for me, because there's stuff from both the research team but also some of our like labs teams that are closer to research and trying out and prototyping stuff.
And then there's just like stuff I want to try out, you know, like we have a bunch of prototypes and products internally that we can use and I am just curious and I want to try those things out. And then I think there's also a lot of folks who internally have a lot of insights and opinions on where the industry is going, and some of those are just like really interesting to read because a lot of these are like philosophical debates or directions of the company and stuff like that, and yeah, I feel like I just want to keep up with these things. Whereas I think at a normal company I'm like, it's fine, this is stuff that's happening outside of my reach, I don't really care as much, where here I think it's both the volume and the kinds of things that are happening that I'm like really interested in keeping up with. And then aside from that, sort of keep up, that's not a huge part of my job, but I do think it's a really interesting part of it.
Well, it connects to the point you made earlier. A big part of the design role now is helping engineers and teams execute. Not just telling them here's the mock, here's the design. It's helping them stay on track, helping them connect ideas, create a cohesive experience as it's happening. So that makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of it is just curiosity, you know, like it feels like I have this front row seat to so much happening in the industry. And so a lot of it is like, yeah, our Slack is a gold mine, you know, like I'm just excited to read through the things that people are working on and they're saying.
I never thought about how like there's already so much AI news to keep track of as a regular person and then actually seeing what's actually happening inside a lab is a whole new set of feeds to watch.
Yeah. Yeah. It's like I don't, I think that is the best AI news is probably internally if you're ever at one of these companies, in the Slack.
Damn. Yeah.
It's just a problem that keeps getting harder, of just keeping track of what's going on. Okay. So, that's part of the job. What else?
There is still some of like the traditional, like let me think about what's happening in the future and let me like make some designs for that. That's something that for example this week I've allotted some time to where I'm like okay cool, like we have been in a lot of like execution mode for Cowork and now I want to set aside some time to think about, hey, what do the next like 3 months look like and where could that actually go given where the market's at, where the models are at, and what could that be, because I think it still really helps to visualize that and show that to the team and point everyone in the same direction.
And then I also spend a bunch of my day just jamming on stuff with engineers, like a lot of it is just a conversation or like whiteboarding or going through something that they built and giving them feedback on it and being a designer in that kind of way where we're like consulting. And then I spend a part of my day in code, you know, like polishing, implementing stuff. Sometimes what happens is an engineer and I have worked through something and they've implemented a first version of it and I just go in and polish it with them. And that's a really fun part of my job that I think didn't exist as much a few months ago.
Are you still doing elements of the traditional design process? Prototyping, user research, panels, I don't know, just like going out and, you know, like the whole thing you described.
Yeah, I think we're still doing all of that to some extent. Like we have a user researcher on the team who is putting together both like traditional studies as well as surveys, and the whole team is reading those studies and that feedback. We are still prototyping stuff. We are still, I'm still mocking stuff up. I think it's just I have a wider set of tools now and I think the proportion of time I spend doing each thing just has changed.
Got it. Okay. So that's a really interesting takeaway. It used to be that was a huge, like I guess what would be the pie chart of what your life was before, where it's like traditional thinking, planning, prototyping, mocking, research, and then just like feedback and execution, and now today?
Yeah. I think as a designer a few years ago I would say like maybe 60 to 70% of it was like mocking and prototyping stuff up and then spending, you know, the last 20 or so, some of the last 20 or so, like doing the sort of like jamming with engineers, consulting with them, and the last like 10% maybe doing, you know, coordination meetings, etc. But now I feel like the mocking up part of it is like 30 to 40% and then there's that other 30 to 40% there that is now jamming and pairing directly with engineers, and then there's like a slice, I don't know how much I have left, but like there's a slice of it that is now like implementation as well.
Yeah.
Like actually building and shipping.
Yeah. Amazing. So kind of following that thread, what's in your AI stack? What do you as a designer, I know you're a manager, I want to talk about how you actually are, I see, also what's in your AI stack. What tools are you using in your role?
What is in my AI stack? Well, we work at Anthropic. So, we're going deep on the Claude stack. Yeah.
I'm using obviously like chat, Claude chat, and then increasingly more and more Claude Cowork. I've basically shifted all of my chat use cases over to Cowork because I've been finding that yeah, it sort of is better at these longer running tasks, and most of the things I was asking Claude for are these longer running tasks. And then there's Claude Code of course. I use it mostly with VS Code in the IDE because I'm usually tweaking frontend stuff and it helps to just like be able to see the code and then talk to Claude as well. I've been trying to actually use Claude Code more remotely, like through both mobile and through Slack as well. It's really fun for somebody to say like, oh yeah, this one icon's off or something, and you just at-mention Claude and Claude does it and then you pick up the PR and it's done. That's been really, really fun too. And yeah, I think we're a fully Claude house here. So yes, that's basically my stack.
Are you still using Figma as a designer?
I am still using Figma. Yes. Yes.
Okay. I was waiting to hear. Okay. So, Figma is still part of your life. Being a former Figmate, is that what you were called?
Yeah. Yeah. Figmates. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So, I know there's this big debate on Twitter just like, is code the future of design? Do we need Figma anymore? Do we need to design? What's your sense?
Figma is still important. I mean, as a former Figmate, I'm maybe even 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 10 different ways to do something. I think the best design happens when you're able to just like throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and curate and push yourself to come up with a bunch of these different directions. Right now, working with some of these coding tools doesn't lend itself super well to that because it's super linear. You super invest in one direction and you just iterate with Claude on them, for example. So Figma has been really great at just like exploring all these different options and I think it's still going to exist that way to some extent. And then I think there's like really fine sort of visual and interaction details that are also really great 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; IDEs 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 IDEs now become useful for designers and PMs, and engineers have moved on.
Yeah, maybe. Yeah.
Okay. So a lot of your time you spend working with engineers, giving them feedback, kind of nudging them in the right direction. There's a sense I feel of just like your advice is like, let go. Don't feel like you need to be this gatekeeper, but there's this piece of, okay, help them move in a direction that is cohesive and is creating products we're proud of. A lot of designers, I think, are in this boat right now just like, oh my god, I can't keep up with all these engineers shipping stuff all day. What's something you learned about just either how to help your engineers get better at design so that it just ends up being better, or just kind of keeping on top of this and not going crazy?
Whenever I do work with engineers on projects and it's more on like a consulting basis, I do just try to explain, you know, why I'm thinking the way that I'm thinking to help them like extract principles, as opposed to me just being like, "No, I don't think this should go here." It's like, "No, I think we should have a button here because not everybody realizes you can prompt this." And here's an example where it comes from research and whatnot. So, I also just like try to point engineers to our design system and stuff like that in code, because right now Claude is like writing a lot of the code and it's not always picking up stuff in the design system and whatnot. So, as much as I can sort of equip them with stuff that they can use in the future without me, that's helpful. And then on your point of trying not to go crazy, I think it's hard, you know. I think it's really hard right now. And I see this a lot from actually like both engineers and designers where it's like, now that we're sort of capable of doing so much, we want to do more. And so I think 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 right now? So that's something I'm hearing a lot.
That's so true. Oh man, how to keep up with all our agents. Our seven agents we're constantly running.
Yeah.
Okay. So then as a designer, in this profession, craft and great experience and quality and trust are such a core part of the job, to help instill that in the products, because that in theory leads to really successful products and companies. How do you just think about maintaining craft, quality, trust as your products are just shipping a thousand times a day and you're not able to stay on top of them and there's no designer involved?
It's not that there's no designer involved. It's more just like it's almost that there's too much for one designer to handle. But I think with this, I think about where the features or products are, like where they are sort of in the cycle of adoption versus like kind of early preview. So for example, we sometimes will launch things and we will say, hey, this is a research preview. It's early. It's going to have a bunch of these flaws, and we caveat that a bunch. I think Claude Cowork is actually a good example of this, where we labeled it a research preview and we put it out there knowing that, hey, this is like similar to our models. You know, this is the worst it's ever going to be, but we're going to put it out there because we believe, you know, internally we've tried it a bunch and there's something really powerful here that some people will benefit from. It might not yet be the easiest to work with. It might not be the highest quality. It might have some issues with it, but we're going to put it out there because we believe the benefits outweigh the cons. I think that is like okay to do, especially when there is something really valuable with the product already and it's worth putting it out there. But I think the promise you sort of have to make your users is like, hey, we're going to put it out there, but we're going to iterate. We're going to take your feedback and we're going to iterate and we're going to make it better. And you have to sort of commit to that. You have to show that to the world. You have to respond to people's feedback and you have to show that you are continuously shipping and improving it, because I think the way that you really lose trust around quality and releasing something early is if you release it early and then nothing ever happens. That is something that degrades a brand. But whenever you put something out early, it's possible to do that and maintain the brand of your company. And I think that's something that we've been doing pretty well, and I think if anyone's listening can take away from it, it's like, yeah, we're continuing to do that. And I think that is actually really fun for me as a designer, because you put something out there and you actually learn and you get feedback about it immediately and you know what to do next.
The way I've heard you describe this is building trust through speed.
Yeah, for sure. It's building trust through speed, but also just like making people feel like they've been heard and that we're fixing things based on what they're trying to use it for, and their feedback is actually appreciated and used.
Yeah, it's clear when the labs launch stuff, and you all are very good at this. Everyone on the team is tweeting and just like responding to tweets and comments and then shipping, hey, we fixed this yesterday and this is happening. So there's a clear sense of, this is just today, and we know this is broken and we will fix it. And then because Claude Code can code very quickly, the fixes come very fast.
Okay. So another big question that people are asking, that I ask a lot on this podcast, is around just like what skills become valuable. And like another way I've been thinking about it, Lex put it this way recently, is where will human brains continue to be valuable as AI gets smarter. So we've gone through this progression of tab completing segments of code, to 100% of code is written by AI now, like it's crazy, to now AI is reviewing its own code. Boris on the podcast recently was saying Claude Code is now helping him come up with ideas and decide what to build, which is like, okay, wow, look at that, look at it go. The whole product workflows, the product development process, slowly get eaten up by AI. So the question is just like, where will human brains still be useful, at least until we have superintelligence? Do you think AI is going to get very, very good at taste, judgment, design?
I think it will get better at taste and judgment and design. Yeah. Like I think we might be holding on to that a little bit too much and saying like, oh yeah, like, you know, a designer or somebody will always know the best thing to ship or the best version of this. But I do think AI's sense of taste will get better. At the end of the day, someone has to decide like what is actually going to get built and what actually matters. And when I think about people saying like, oh, you know, like AI is just going to build this software for us, a lot of the hard parts of building software are actually like not building it. You know, if you think about the hardest times that you've had at work, Lenny, it's probably things like, oh, you and some other person like disagreeing about like what should go into this feature or what shouldn't go into this feature. And those things still feel like, yes, AI can weigh in, but it can't necessarily solve this dispute between you and somebody else. And so there is something about like deciding what actually goes into the things we build, which I guess is taste in some way, but maybe not taste in like the way we think about like aesthetic taste or whatnot. There's some sort of, like, it's like judgment around what to do next.
Just watching how quickly AI took over coding, which I think a year ago, definitely two years ago, most people were like, I don't think so. I don't think AI will get this good, and that the best engineers in the world trust it so much they're not even looking at the code
anymore. Like, that's where we kind of... it just made me re-evaluate all these assumptions I've had about, okay, AI will never be as good as really good PMs, designers at judging what is great and deciding what to build. But I'm just starting to think I think it will get there. Like even in the example you shared, it could give these two people trying to make a decision: here's all of the data you need to make a decision, and here's why this is the right answer, and just press yes. Press one and I'll go ahead and build it.
Yeah.
So I think we're just... yeah, to your point, I think we undervalue just how good it'll get at this stuff.
Okay. So your sense is it'll get better, but your sense is we'll still need awesome designers to be involved, awesome PMs to help make these decisions, engineers, of course.
Yeah. I think someone will still have to decide, like, oh, we want to build this kind of product, or, given what the AI is presenting us, someone still needs to be accountable for the decision. You know, the same way that even though Claude can write all this code for you today, it is still an engineer who's accountable for, does that code actually work? Does this actually make sense in the product? So I think there's that decision-making/judgment layer, which feels like maybe one day we won't have to do that, but it still falls on us. Yeah.
It doesn't make sense. It makes me think about the radiology example, where there's always the sense that AI is going to take over that field of radiology and tell you what is going on. But the human is mostly useful for signing off on the decision, because someone needs to be liable if they're wrong. Which isn't the best job in the world. But that's a different game, health versus code.
Yeah.
Okay. Another ongoing question in AI and design is just, it feels like chatbots and terminals are just... I don't think anyone expected this to be the lasting user interface to AI, like chatbots. Okay, no, no, no, this is just a temporary stop along the journey, but now it's gone even further and just terminals. Do you have thoughts on just, I don't know, do you think there will be a next step of how we interface with AI, or do you think chatbots and terminals are mostly where we end up?
There will likely be a combination of both, like both UIs and interfaces that you are interacting with, clicking with, and that feel more tactile. We are already seeing this and playing with this within Claude, like the chatbot. So we recently released a bunch of these widgets that let Claude sort of elicit and ask you questions and also show you things like the weather and stocks and whatnot in interactive ways. And I think those have had a really good reception, because people still like to see UIs and touch them and click them, and they are much more efficient than typing something to Claude.
But at the same time, when we really leaned into this chatbot paradigm, I think that just gave us this whole world of flexibility that we didn't get with these sort of baked-in UIs. So my read here is I don't think chat is ever going away, because this opened up this new way of infinite ways to work with the model and to sort of talk to the computer that we just didn't have before. But I think that it will still be most direct for very specific things to exist in this UI. And I think that what will probably happen here is that a lot of those UIs will be generated more and more often by the models, as opposed to something that we're hand coding each instance. But yeah, we're in this space where I don't think chat, and maybe even talking to the terminal, is going to go away.
It's interesting that with OpenClaw, Clawdbot, Moltbot, all the names, one of the big innovations is another way to chat with it, through WhatsApp and Telegram and SMS. Just another form of chatbot, but that was a big unlock: oh, I could just chat with it through WhatsApp.
Yeah. And it's like, chatting and talking to someone is still, you know, what we as humans are doing. And it's a way for us to interact in a really rich way, and now we just have this other medium to interact with a computer, basically.
Yeah. So Kevin Weil, who works at another AI lab I won't mention, had this great point on the podcast that talking is such a beautiful way to handle every level of intelligence. We can talk to people that are very, very smart and not so smart, and it's talking, and it scales so well across the spectrum. We can talk to people at 200 IQ, 300, and talking still works. So that's why it's been this beautiful way to deal with the growing intelligence of models, and it continues to work.
Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah.
This episode is brought to you by Omni. Many product teams today are in the process of debating how to ship AI analytics. The hard part is obvious. Having an LLM guess at SQL in production is a huge mess and just a bad idea. Omni takes a different approach. They have a semantic layer built in so that when you embed their analytics, the AI actually knows your business definitions, not just your raw tables. You can test queries, validate the reasoning, and lock down permissions before anything hits production. If you want AI analytics in your product without building the whole stack from scratch, check out omni.co/lenny for a free 3-week trial. Companies like Perplexity, dbt, and BuzzFeed use Omni to ship analytics their customers can trust. That's omni.co/lenny.
Okay. I want to come back to this whole idea of management and IC. So you've kind of put yourself back into the IC role in a lot of ways. Talk about that, and if you think that's just a thing design managers need to be doing.
Yeah, I have takes on this. So this past year at Anthropic, I joined as an IC at first, and then I managed a team for a few months in an org structure that sort of needed it. And now I'm actually back to doing full-time IC work. And I joined Anthropic as an IC because I was just really excited about the kind of work that there was to be done as an IC here, but also because I was feeling like, you know, I sort of want to be close to the work, and I think this feels like a really important time to do it before I ascend the corporate ranks. And I was having these questions and doubts about, is middle management safe in the future? Is the way that we're working actually... is this going to be a job that persists into the future, or should I try something else and get my hands dirty kind of thing.
And to be totally fair, I actually love both sides of the coin. I love managing people. I love setting up teams and being at that level, but I also just really loved IC work. I was sort of a reluctant manager when I did it, and I was like, okay, I'll do it. So I love both sides of the coin pretty equally.
But I think actually what being an IC across this past year has taught me is that it actually just gave me a lot of skills that I don't think I would have gained if I was just managing throughout this year. Like I mentioned, the design process has changed so much in this past year, and I feel like I've just picked up so many hard skills that I wouldn't have necessarily had the time to do if I was just managing a team. So that's actually the best thing it's afforded me. And I think at any point, if I'm managing a team again, I think it will give me the empathy and understanding of how the design process has changed. And I think that's actually a really important thing right now, because the teams are working so differently. I think it's actually pretty hard to empathize if you are not working in that way, or you're not always testing all the tools and trying stuff. But yeah, it's an interesting time to be a designer, and if I had not worked in this environment, I don't know if I would have totally understood it or known what to do or how to guide my teams. So that's sort of what this year really gave me.
And so you were previously a director of design at Figma, right? How big was your team, just to give people reference?
At the max I probably had, I think, 12, 15 designers or so, and I had a few managers as well.
Cool. And then, okay, so you had this sense that middle management might not last. What's your current feeling? Do you think design management is a thing that persists long term, or do you think everyone turns into ICs?
I think as long as there is a team of people, it helps to have somebody who is managing a team. I think there's real value in managers. It depends on what the shape of the manager is and what they actually do. But the way I think about what a helpful manager is these days is somebody who is not just pure people management, like just somebody to set you up, help you in your career, have one-on-ones, make sure you're feeling good at work. I think that is kind of not a thing as much anymore. But I think somebody who can really function as giving the team direction as well as doing some of the people management stuff, that tied together, I think, is the future of what managing looks like, at least for now. Somebody who can really engage with the team in terms of the work and giving direction there, as well as 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 think I really just love helping a team build the best product possible. And my motto there is whatever it takes. You know, if the team needs somebody to give the team direction and set up the team and whatnot, that could be me. If the team just 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've seen in a lot of the engineering disciplines, when they hire EMs or even sometimes directors there, they actually make the EM 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 too, where I think in the past design has been much more people management oriented.
What did you find yourself most rusty in when you went back to IC designer?
Actually doing crits, you know, and just getting criticized. Yeah, getting criticized. You're like, "Oh, yeah." It is hard to get critical feedback and to hear it, and to hear it on such a regular basis, because that's the thing you have to do as a designer. 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.
Yeah.
So currently you're leading design, designing on Cowork, is that right?
Yeah.
Awesome. So Boris, he was on the pod recently, talked about how there's a lot of debate about what Cowork should be, and there's all these big ideas, and he's like, in the end let's just make it like a terminal basically in the product, just kind of a fancy terminal. Is there anything you could share about just the process of landing on where you landed for that experience of Cowork? I have it here on my monitor, by the way, looking at it.
With Cowork specifically, we have had a bunch of different prototypes internally of what that could look like. And it's one of those things where we tried a lot of things, and then I think we weren't really sure when it was actually going to be ready to ship, and then it was sort of everything all at once. We were like, "Okay, we're going to ship it soon."
It was 10 days. 10 days of building.
Yeah, it was definitely longer than that. Overall it was 10 days to get it from what we had internally to something that we were ready to ship externally. So we'd been building it for a while, but we weren't really sure about the actual form it was going to take. And so the way it got there is actually there were a lot of different other explorations that we had internally on top of different agent harnesses and whatnot. And we had just prototyped little parts of the different interactions that ended up in Cowork. So things like when Claude gives you a to-do list, we tried a bunch of different form factors for that. We tried a bunch of different form factors for the way it presents you different multiple choice questions. We tried a bunch of different ways to teach people what the use cases are and whatnot. And I don't know if we landed on the best form factor ever, but essentially it was stuff that was sort of already working internally, that people liked, that we just thought we were going to get some more signal on by releasing it. So I think forcing ourselves to release it within that 10 days that we did, it was just sort of, whatever we had, let's put it out there, and then let's go out there and iterate from there, which is what we're doing.
And it blew up the internet when you launched it, so it worked out.
Yeah.
Is there a feature of Cowork today that you're either most proud of or just can't wait to fix and improve?
Honestly, I'm just most proud of us actually shipping it, to be honest, and putting it out there. And yeah, I don't know if there's one specific thing yet, because I think when you work on something and you work on it so long, especially as a designer, you're like, I don't know... all I can do is see flaws in it. But I think there's a lot of stuff that I'm excited about. We have been iterating especially on the homepage, to make that something where it feels more like, hey, these are tasks you can give Claude, and tasks that Claude is working on. And so that actually should be rolling out. It might already be rolled out by the time this...
All right. So I see this little randomizer thing where you click it and it gives you all these different ideas.
Yeah. And then when you actually start to work with Claude on stuff, it feels more like a to-do list. It feels more like, these are things Claude's working on, these are things that Claude needs your attention on. And I think there's an opportunity here to make it feel much more like this shared to-do list between you and Claude. So excited to iterate on that. And then I'm also excited to think more about what is the actual true form factor of this. Is it stuck in the screen always, or how does this sort of reach out to the different surfaces that it's working with?
I love that you shared that it wasn't just 10 days to do this thing. There are these numbers that people throw out there: we built it in 10 days. And your point is there was time spent thinking about what direction it should go, and prototyping, mocking, trying stuff. And then it's like, okay, now we know what we want it to be, let's build it and ship it.
Yeah. I think for some reason that became the viral thing that got taken away from all of the Cowork announcements, that it only took 10 days. But I think there have just been so many different explorations and people that have worked on different pieces of Cowork. Yeah, it was not just 10 days, and there were a lot of different people
involved. It's one of those things where the idea kept coming back and it's never the right moment or there's different variations of it, and then all of a sudden it's the right moment and it feels like it was so obvious all along, but there was a long, long journey to get there.
And by the way, for people that don't know much about Cowork, the way I think about it, it's like Claude with hands, where it can do stuff on your computer. How would you describe it, just in a sentence or two?
That's a good description. I actually haven't heard that, but I like that. I might use it more often: Claude with hands. I also think about it as, it's like Claude, but Claude is really good at taking all your garbage and then turning it into something nice. One of my favorite use cases that I really like out of Cowork is just giving it a folder of my stuff, and it doesn't really matter what's in that folder, but I'm able to extract something good out of it.
I've done that many times. Okay, coming back to managing and being a manager and the role of a designer, I want to talk about hiring for a little bit. So, seeing how much is changing in the role of a designer, what do you look for that's maybe new? What do you now look for when you're hiring designers that you think is really important for them to be successful in this new world?
Well, I do think, working specifically in the kind of environment that I do, there's just a sense of resilience and roll-with-it kind of thing that I think is really important, because so much is changing around us and you have to be really willing to adapt, to try out new methods, to try out new tools and learn stuff, as opposed to just being stuck in the old processes and the old ways.
But then I think 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 in this era it feels especially important.
So the first one I would call strong generalists. So not just regular generalists where they're kind of good at a lot of things, but people that are almost block-shaped, you know, in that T-shaped framework, where they're really good at a few core skills, like 80th percentile good. I think this is pretty rare and hard to hire for, to be honest. But I like this because the design role, we've already seen, is stretching and spanning, right? We're all becoming more PM-shaped, we're all becoming engineering-shaped. And so if you already have strong skills in a few different buckets, it's really easy for you to flex around 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-shaped framework, a deep specialist, like someone who is T-shaped, but the tip of the T probably goes down farther than most other people. So, folks that are maybe the top 10% in the industry and whatnot. Again, super hard to find. And I feel very lucky that, working at some of these places, folks like these, you can sort of afford to hire them and actually bring them on board.
And then my last one is probably the one that I think we're all overlooking, which is what I call the crack new grad. It's just somebody who is early career and feels kind of wise and experienced beyond their years, but is also just very humble and very eager to learn. I think this person is really interesting right now because I think most companies are just hiring senior talent, 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 a blank slate and is just a really quick learner and is really eager to learn new tactics and stuff like that, and doesn't have all these baked-in processes and rituals in their mind, that's super valuable. So I think those are the folks that a lot of us are just overlooking, but I'm really excited about.
This is awesome. On the deep T shape, what's an example of someone in design that has a, what's a skill that they're really good at?
Sometimes there's designers who are just really technical in a way where they could be 50%, they're basically a software engineer. That's really interesting, especially because right now a lot of it, at least for us, you're working directly with the model, so it helps when you have deep engineering expertise. But another kind of deep specialist T is, maybe they're just really good at visual design or just designing icons or something, where, given that anybody can make anything, having that deep specialist slant feels like, oh yeah, they can really help differentiate the things that we're building.
Awesome. Okay. And then this block shape, we had Marc Andreessen on the podcast. We kind of called it the F shape or E shape, where there's multiple T's. Sideways F, sideways E, I guess. Is that what you're describing, where there's many things you're really, really good at?
Yeah. And basically, I don't know, if you almost had their skill set, it would look like a block, you know.
There's so many skills that the T is spread out. Okay. And the crack new grad. So this is just someone that is eager, open-minded, gritty, very smart, I imagine, is a big part of it.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Yeah.
If someone's a new designer, like a young designer trying to break in, trying to be successful, what would your advice be to them to help them have a shot at ending up joining Anthropic, for example?
I would just say build a bunch of stuff, try a bunch of stuff out, build actual things. I don't really know what the state of design education or education is these days, but at least back when I was in school, everything was very theoretical, and like, here we're going to teach you some approaches and whatnot. But the best kind of crack new grad folks I know are just people who use the technology, build actual things, don't feel limited by how little experience they might have. I think sometimes they're actually unburdened by that, because we have expectations of ourselves after being in industry for so long, but they actually don't, and they sort of feel like anything is possible. And so just building a bunch of stuff and sharing it with people and finding a community of folks that also do that.
I think my one call-out here too is, I went to a school that started something called Socratica a while after I graduated, and basically their whole thing is building stuff and showcasing it, almost like a science project. And I think there's just been a really cool movement there of folks who just build things and do things. For example, somebody built this Claude robot project, this was a few years ago too, where they were just assembling robots that were running on Claude. And then somebody else did something where she just wanted to put googly eyes on a bus in Boston or something. And there's just a sense of both agency, in terms of, yeah, we can just do stuff, but then also this community where people were just trying and building things and sharing things with each other. So whatever that looks like, given the school that someone's from or graduating from, doing that kind of stuff is the stuff that will make people stand out.
For current designers that are mid-career or senior, do you think you need to get technical and learn to code, or at least build, or do you think you could be really successful and just not lean into that and get better at other stuff?
I think it definitely helps, maybe not to learn how to code so much that you're building something from scratch, but it does feel like more and more of the designer vocabulary right now is implementing some stuff. I wonder though, as both the models and the products get better, we probably will continue to move up the abstraction layers and you won't have to actually know how each single line of code will work. But I think what I would say is, start to bring the coding tools into your toolkit, whether or not you're actually becoming technical. I think any designer should just be really aware and know how to use the tools that are out there, as opposed to maybe going off and learning React, etc.
How good of a designer is Claude, would you say, or Claude Code, however you want to frame it? Would you hire Claude as a designer, or is it not 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 crack 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 special and hirable yet.
Which is good news for designers, that it sucks at this for now. [laughter] And I'm so curious to see how good it could get at this. That's such a big open question: can it pump out amazing, novel, unique, creative experiences, or is it just never going to be as good as a human designer?
I mean, it's gotten a lot better in the last year or so even. So, yeah.
There's a couple management, I don't know, rituals or takes you have that I've heard from folks that you work with that I want to touch on. One is that you have this hot take that low-leverage time for a manager is just not a thing, that there's a lot of benefit you can get out of things that people consider low leverage. Can you talk about that?
Yeah. I remember first becoming a manager, and I think one of the pieces of advice that I either got from a course or a book or something is, now that you're a manager, you have to really prioritize your time and categorize your work. And there was this two-by-two, I don't remember what was in it, but you essentially say, oh, these are the things that only I can do, these are the things anybody else can do, and everything else is low leverage and you shouldn't do that anymore. And a lot of the low-leverage things were just things that are really nitpicky and in the weeds, or literally, yes, probably somebody else could do those tasks.
But when I think about the leaders and managers that I respect the most, I actually think some of their best traits is that they choose low-leverage tasks that they take on themselves, and that actually ends up being a very high-leverage thing because it's them who's doing it.
So one example is whenever you have senior leaders who just test the out of the product and they're just so in tune with it. They dogfood it, they repro the bugs, they spend a bunch of time with engineers sharing the logs and nitpicking and stuff like that. And I think that ends up being actually super high leverage, even though it's a lot of nitty-gritty time, because it creates this familiarity with the product, which I think is really good. It also creates this vibe where it's like, oh yeah, this senior leader really cares deeply and they actually know the ins and outs of the product, and they're rolling up their sleeves and giving this feedback and working with the team on it.
And similarly too, what I've seen is when a senior leader is able to fix a bug now. I think I've actually seen Mike Krieger put in PRs himself before. And it's really nice, because it's like, okay, cool, we're all on this team together and nothing is below this person.
And another thing that I love that's a little bit more cultural is when somebody goes out of the way to make somebody's anniversary card or something, and vibe codes them something super nice or makes them a super nice card. Because I think it just shows that, yeah, an EA or somebody can put together the card, but this leader is just somebody who cares so much about their team that they put in the effort. So that's something I try to embody: choosing the seemingly low-leverage tasks that are worth my time.
Yeah, that is so interesting. What you're saying there is, in a sense, the low-leverage stuff is often the stuff that has the most impact, because your reports wouldn't expect you to spend time on this thing, and the low leverage ends up being high leverage.
Yeah. And I think it's what makes your style of leadership stand out or feel special to a certain person.
Amazing. Another, I don't know, ritual and way of running teams that I heard about you is you encourage team members roasting each other, which on the surface doesn't sound like a wonderful environment, but on the other hand, I hear constantly that the teams that you've built are just the happiest, the highest-performing teams. Talk about this idea of roasting and encouraging that, and just what you've learned about building awesome teams.
Yeah, I think it's not that I'm like, "Yo, you should roast each other." I'm not forcing it in that way or anything. But when I think about the sort of psychological safety in teams, and people that just get along with each other, like when you think about your friends, you're always sort of willing to push the boundaries a little bit and roast them. You're roasting your friends a lot, but you actually might not be roasting your co-workers a lot, because it's all just about comfort and safety, right?
So, it's not that I'm like, "Oh, I want my teams to roast each other." But I think it can be a really good sign when the people on your team feel comfortable just poking fun at each other a little bit. And I think that also can be a good sign when folks feel the same way about you as a leader, where there's just an element of, they don't fear you as much, and they feel like there's a sense of safety where if they say something, they're not going to get fired.
So an example of this is, with my last team, I feel like they would make fun of things that I would say at crits sometimes, like certain phrases I would say.
What's an example of that?
Oh, I would always be like, "Okay, what are next steps?" and "How do we follow up on this?" And then they'd be like, "Okay, what are next steps?" And they would sort of channel me in that way. I just think it shows a level of, okay, these people are not necessarily afraid of me. They know that they can trust me. And they sort of know enough about each other and me personally, in our personal lives, to be able to know where those boundaries are.
But at the same time, I think the thing that you sort of err into in that territory is, are you as a manager friends with your reports? Which I think is the thing people tell you not to do. And so
The way I think about balancing this out is like, you have to create this sort of baseline of psychological safety, and people feel comfortable both with each other and with you, but you also have to make sure that they know that you have really high standards. And I think these two things can feel like they're at tension, but I think they actually work really well together, because once you have that psychological safety, you have people trusting each other, and applying the high standards actually, I think, becomes potentially easier because you can do it without fear. And I sort of think about this from the approach of kind of being a tough parent a little bit, you know? It's like, oh yeah, my team, I work with them in a way where they know I'm always going to be there, and I'm not just going to fire them on a whim or something, but at the same time, they also know that I want the best for them, you know, and that I have high standards and that I'm working with them to make the best work possible. And so yeah, that's the balance I need to strike: can you create this environment where your team feels comfortable roasting you, but at the same time they know they have to be doing great work, and they will do great work with you.
That is awesome advice. It's interesting how often this management style comes back, or good management, it comes back. Reminds me of, what was it, Radical Candor, just this combination of caring deeply and challenging directly.
Yeah.
And that's kind of what I hear here, is just make sure people know that you care deeply about them, but also be very direct and have high standards.
Yeah. Yeah.
So interesting. Okay. Maybe a final question. I'm always looking for interesting frameworks and methods and processes that people have found useful in their work, 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 maybe last year or something, and it was Evan Tana, who is a partner at SPC. He's a VC. So it basically is this 2x2. I don't think it got so much attention, but once I started seeing it, I actually couldn't stop thinking about it. So on the 2x2, PBS has founders: founders can be either illegible or legible, and then ideas can either be illegible or legible. And basically he was saying that, okay, if both the founder and idea are super legible, the idea is probably not that novel, and somebody's 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 the idea itself is illegible. And by illegible he means, oh, it's sort of really, you know, on the frontier, people might not get it yet, or the way it's being told just isn't 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 part of the role of the designer, 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 transform it, whether it's through storytelling or whether it's through the actual UX and the form factor, and put it out there. And I think when I mentioned going through Slack and looking at all the stuff that people are making, that's kind of what I'm doing. I'm trying to see, oh yeah, what are the ideas that there's some energy around but might not make sense yet, that are worth me thinking about more in my work.
There's one good example actually that ties to Cowork, where there was this internal prototype that we called Claude Studio that I think somebody built partway through last year. And it essentially was just this really kind of dense, powerful interface that was built on top of some agentic harness. It might have been Claude Code at that point in time too. And it had all these displays showing you all this knowledge and all these skills and things Claude was doing, and previewing its outputs. And I think as a designer, I looked at it and I was like, I don't know what's going on. I don't really get it. But then I sort of saw the folks in research, the folks building it, and just folks internally, there's just a lot of energy around it, and I was like, cool, I think there's something here, but I just don't understand it yet.
And I think that really was an example of an illegible idea. And ultimately what came from it was the skills framework, the sort of markdown files that instruct Claude on how to do something. So that came out of that specific prototype. That was not something I was directly involved in; that was more of, you know, the folks working on this prototype extracted that out of it. But when it did come to working on Claude Cowork, and I was thinking about, oh yeah, what is the form factor for those things, seeing that prototype and seeing the kinds of information that people found really helpful, like seeing Claude's plan and to-dos, seeing Claude's context and the files that it was going through, those kinds of things are things that I ended up pulling out of that prototype into Claude Cowork. So yeah, I think about how can designers almost be more like VCs in this way, internally, only when we're looking at prototypes.
This is super interesting. I did a research project recently with this guy Terrence Rohan, a VC actually. We looked at what are patterns across people that have joined companies very early that ended up being massive successes, like Palantir and Stripe and Linear and Notion, all these companies. People that have joined many of these companies early, what were they looking for? And one of the factors was the idea is so crazy that everyone's laughing at it: this is impossible, you're never going to do this, this is the craziest thing, why would you even think... OpenAI actually was one of them, just some research lab doing some stuff. So it's interesting that, and it's not like every time this will work, and it's not like every crazy idea that makes no sense will be good, but I think what you're saying is pay attention to stuff that's interesting to you and isn't totally clear. Maybe you can be the person that helps pull it together.
Yeah. Yeah. That, but also if there is some energy around it, but I don't quite always understand what the energy is, to dive deeper and try to understand what that is. Yeah. Because I think people who often gravitate towards these early ideas, they can't always articulate why, and it's sort of up to you to dive deeper and understand that.
That was one of... So there's three patterns we found. One of the other ones was just pay attention to people getting very excited about this thing, even if you don't get it.
Mm. And it's like, sounds crazy. That's so interesting. Okay. And then what was the other one? Oh, the founders are just top 1% was the other piece there, which everyone had Anthropic radius. So, you got that one.
Oh, man. Jenny, what a crazy time we're living through. So much change.
Okay, before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that I should have asked you, that you want to leave listeners with, that you want to double down on?
I think I just want to call out the Anthropic Design team and shout them out, just because it's a team of folks that are just really humble, and they're not always as loud on social, but they're doing a lot of really great work, and especially through this time where our jobs are changing so much, the team is so resilient. And they sort of span this whole spectrum of people who are really technical and prototypy, all the way to folks that are really high craft and delivering stuff that's going out the door and is fabulous. And we are hiring throughout the year. So I just wanted to call that out, if I didn't scare you with the way that we work internally at Anthropic. If that sounds more exciting than terrifying, would love to connect.
What sounds exciting is getting access to these Slacks, or all the features being built?
Yeah, that's the core benefit.
Let's talk to superintelligence right now and tell me where I should invest. I'm just joking. And then in terms of hiring, is there anything specific that people should think about if they want to apply?
Think a little bit about the archetypes that I mentioned, especially the strong generalist and the deep specialist. Those folks we're really excited about. But generally, folks who are...
The block and the deep T.
The block, the block and the deep T. What could we be talking about? Yeah, folks who feel like those archetypes resonate with them, but also folks that are just really excited about the technology, have been building a lot, and sort of want to be on the frontier.
Amazing. Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round, and we've got five questions for you. Jenny, are you ready?
All right, I'm ready.
Here we go. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
The first one is The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which is an incredibly aggressive recommendation given that it's like 1,100 pages. But I think in this era when our attention spans are so short, I think this is actually worth reading end to end. Because I think there are very few collections or memoirs where it spans through someone's entire life and you sort of see how somebody changes throughout those decades. And it's also somebody who's really controversial too, and it's nice to read a really nuanced view of somebody, Robert Moses. And I think we just lose out on some of this long-arc thinking because we're thinking so much about right now. So it's just an important reminder that careers are long, and it's also really good for kind of understanding how somebody just gets things done really well. So, Power Broker.
The second one that I recommend to a lot of people is a book called Insomniac City, which is written by Bill Hayes, who was the partner of the scientist Oliver Sacks around the time that Oliver Sacks died. And it's just this really beautiful, kind of ethereal memoir of Oliver Sacks' last days and their sort of love story. I think this has very little to do with the stuff on your podcast, Lenny, but it's just a book that I really love, and it just makes you think about mortality, but also love and life and stuff like that. So that's one of my favorite books.
My goal here isn't, you know, I'm trying to create, we're trying to create Renaissance humans. So all of this other stuff is excellent.
Cool. Interestingly, I saw Julie Zhuo, famed design leader, was reading The Power Broker recently. I don't know what's going on over here, spreading in design. Okay. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed?
I watched Sentimental Value recently. I watched it on a plane, which is, you know, how directors want you to watch their films. But it's a Norwegian film by the same director who did The Worst Person in the World. I think just the pacing, the writing, the relationship between the characters is just really subtle and beautiful. It's basically about this family, sort of a family drama, but also about this house that they lived in their entire lives. It's beautiful because the house is sort of a character. So, I don't know what else to say about that, but that was a really good movie. And then I would also recommend, obviously, The Pitt season 2. You know, we're on that. We're on that. I think everybody just likes to watch people who are really competent at their jobs do something. So yeah.
Imagine being an actor on that show, just how much you have to learn and memorize all these terms.
Yeah. Yeah. It just also seems really fast-paced too. They do so much stuff in one shot, and there's just so much movement and stuff like that. Seems really, really hard to be an actor.
And I only recently realized Noah Wyle was in ER as a younger person, and now he's the head of this.
Yeah. Yeah.
Oh man. Okay. Favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Cannot be Cowork.
Not one that I actually discovered recently, but Retro. I've been using it for basically two years now, since it came out, and I think I discovered new benefits of it recently. So for folks who don't know about Retro, it's sort of this small community photo-sharing app in which you can only share photos from a given week, as opposed to all time. And it basically has none of the social media stuff. You can't really see counts, there's no ads, etc. But one really nice thing is, now that I've been using it for two years, I can now look back at each year and see, oh yeah, this week two years ago I was doing this. And it's become this really special way to live through each week of my life, basically.
Wow. And it's also a beautifully crafted app, if you're looking for building your own taste in design.
Yeah. Designers love Retro.
I could see that. Okay. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?
Yeah. Not sure if it's my favorite life motto, but one thing I do catch myself saying a lot is just: it is what it is.
My dad says that all the time. I love...
Yeah. Yeah.
It sounds super defeatist, but I promise it's not. I think just given how much stuff is going on in the world right now, and especially with the industry and whatnot, you can't control everything, and so sometimes "it is what it is" just brings the levity you need to move forward.
I did a 10-day meditation retreat a while ago, and I came back from it and it's like, Dad, you've been right all along. This is the answer to it all. It is what it is. Don't cling, don't try to change. Just, it is what it is.
It is what it is.
There's so much depth to that. I was like, "Okay, smarter than I even thought."
Okay, final question. Coming back to Cowork, is there, I don't know, a mind-blowing use case, something just like, "Wow, that's so cool that Cowork can do that," either something you use it for or you've heard somebody using it for?
One thing I really like is just introspection. And so I have this folder basically of local notes that I use iA Writer for, and I basically just write whatever, and over the years have collected a bunch of different notes, and they span all different things, like one-on-one notes, random thoughts, kind of tiny memos, interview notes, etc. And my favorite, what's cool to me, is just using Cowork to analyze that and have insights out of it and actually create things out of it. So anytime I can learn something new about myself, I love that. But I think a very practical thing I did with it the other day was, along the lines of hiring, I was like, "Oh yeah, I want to sort of articulate what it is that I look for in design craft, because I think actually a lot of people struggle to articulate that." And I just
had it read through all of my notes, both like interview notes and other things that I cared about and memos and stuff like that I've written in the past, and then it made me this rubric for evaluating that. So that kind of introspection where it's like, "Oh, I wouldn't have realized even these things about myself that I've been putting out there implicitly," that's been really cool for me.
That is so cool. So, just to make this very clear for people, you have a folder with all these things you've written, one-on-ones, meetings, like you could do, I don't know if you all are allowed to use Granola, something like that, like meeting transcripts, and ask it. And I was gonna ask what prompt you use, but it's just like read all these things I've written and help me probably just like understand how I feel about what is design.
Yeah, basically I think it was like, hey, I have a bunch of interview notes and a bunch of notes related to design craft in this folder. Read it and then help me craft a memo rubric for how I assess craft in interviews.
So cool.
Yeah.
Jenny, this was awesome. What a time to be alive.
What a time.
Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, and how can listeners be useful to you?
Yeah. I'm on Twitter/X is what we're calling it these days. It's jenny_wen. That's probably the best place. Not really on LinkedIn as much. So that's the best place. And how can folks be helpful to me? Send us your product feedback. You know, like we're working on Cowork or anything Claude-related really. Just send us your feedback. We'd love to make it better for you.
Jenny, thank you so much for being here.
Yeah, of course. It was great chatting with Lenny.
It was wonderful. Jenny, thank you. Bye, everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Article published · Updated