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

Jenny Wen, head of design at Claude/Anthropic, argues the classic discovery-mock-iterate design process is obsolete and designers must shift to execution-support and short-horizon vision work.

• Mocking/prototyping dropped from 60-70% to 30-40% of Jenny’s time; engineer-pairing and direct implementation now fill the gap.
• Design visions have compressed from 2-5 year decks to 3-6 month prototypes because model capabilities change too fast to plan further.
• AI can’t replace strong design judgment yet: Claude is good at a first pass but not hireable as a generalist, specialist, or creative.
• Jenny uses the Evan Tana legibility 2x2 internally: spotting illegible ideas with energy (like the Claude Studio prototype) and helping translate them into shipped products like Co-work.
• Figma survives because code tools are linear — they commit you to one direction — while Figma enables 8-10 parallel explorations cheaply.
• IDEs may become the designer’s tool as engineers move to agents and command lines; Jenny still uses VS Code for frontend polish.
• Low-leverage manager tasks (dogfooding bugs, personal anniversary cards) are actually high-leverage because they signal deep care and set cultural tone.

2026-03-01 · Watch on YouTube