YouSaid · the spoken record

Jenny Wen

lines on the record: 88
first: 2026-03-01
most recent: 2026-03-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I'm on Twitter slash X is what we're calling it these days. It's at jenny underscore when. 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 co-work or anything cloud related really. Just send us your feedback. We'd love to make it better for you.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 slash rubric for how I assess craft in interviews.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 don't even, I wouldn't have realized even these things about myself that I'd been putting out there implicitly. That's been really cool for me.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I really like is just like introspection. And so I have this folder basically of like local notes that I have from that I use IA writer for. And I basically just write whatever and over the years have collected it with a bunch of different notes. They span like all different things like one-on-one nodes, like random thoughts, like kind of like tiny memos, interview notes, et cetera. And my favorite, like it makes it's cool to me is just like using cowork to like analyze that and have insights out of it and actually create things out of it. So like anything I anytime I can like learn something new about myself, like I love that. But I think a very practical thing I did with it the other day was like along the lines of hiring, I was like, oh yeah, I want to sort of articulate like what it is that I look for when I look for a 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.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dad says that all the time. I love it. 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 like brings the levity you need to move forward.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not one thing I'd 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 like this small community photo sharing app in which you can only share photos from each week from a given week as opposed to like all time. And it basically has none of the social media stuff. Like you can't really see like counts. It's not there's no ads, et cetera. 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 like, oh yeah, this week, two years ago, I was doing this and it's become this really special way to like live through each week of my life, basically.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it just also seems really fast paced too. Like 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 on.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I watched a 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 like the house is sort of a character. 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 pit season two item. We're on that. I think everybody just likes to watch people who are really competent at their jobs do something.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Sachs, around the time that Oliver Socks died. And it's just this really beautiful kind of ethereal memoir of all of our Socks Lost Days and their sort of love story. I think this has very little to do with the Sun on your podcast, Lenny, but it's just like It's just a book that I really love and just like makes you think about mortality, but also like love and life and stuff like that. So that's one of my favorite books.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first one is the power broker by Robert Carro, 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 sort of like read a really nuanced view of somebody, Robert Moses. And I think we just lose out on some of this like long arc thinking because we're so much, we're thinking so much about right now. So it's just an important reminder that careers are long and is also really good for kind of understanding how somebody just gets things done really well. So power.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The deep tea of the deep tea. What could we be talking about? Yeah, folks who feel like they, you know, 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.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a little bit about the archetypes that I mentioned, especially the strong generalists and the deep specialists. Those folks were really excited about. But generally folks who are...”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 allowed us on social, but they're doing a lot of really great work. And especially through this time where jobs are changing so much, the team is so resilient and they sort of”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, that, but also, like, if there is some energy around it, but I don't quite always understand what the energy is. It's to like dive deeper and try to understand what that is. Yeah, yeah. Because I think people who often gravitate towards these earlier ideas, they can't always articulate why.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the sort of like markdown files that sort of instruct Claude on how to do something. So that came out of that specific prototype. That was not something I was directly involved in. And that was more of like, you know, the folks working on this prototype extracted that out of it. But when it did come to working on Claude Co-Work and I was thinking about like, 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, like those kinds of things are things that I ended up pulling out of that prototype into Claud Co-Work. So yeah, I think about like how can designers almost be more like VCs in this way internally when we're looking at prototypes?”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like part way through last year, and essentially was this really kind of like dense, powerful interface that was built on top of some agentic harness. It might have been clod code at that point in time too. And it had all these like displays where it's showing you like all this knowledge and all these skills and things Claude was doing and like previewing its outputs. And I think to a designer I looked at it and I was like, this is 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 of folks building it and just folks internally. There's just a lot of energy around it. And I was like, cool. Like, I think there's like something here, but I just don't understand it yet. I think that really was an example. Illegible idea. And ultimately what came from it was like the skills framework.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are worth me thinking about more in my work. There's one good example, actually, that ties to co-work, where there was this internal prototype that we called like Cloud Studio that I think somebody built.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, like the way it's being told, it just doesn't, it's not like being told in the way that makes this most sense to people. And I think this is obviously a good way for a VC to operate because you try 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 least at a frontier lab at Anthropic is kind of spotting the ideas that are illegible and trying to understand what's there and how to take that and like transform it whether it's through storytelling or whether it's through like the actual UX and the form factor and and put it out there. And I think there's like like when I mentioned going through Slock and like looking at all the stuff that people are making, like that's kind of what I'm doing. I'm trying to see like, oh yeah, what are the ideas that are really that like there's like some energy there around but like might not make sense.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this framework, I think it on Twitter of maybe last year or something, and it was Evantana, who was a partner at SPC. He's a BC. So it basically is this two by two. 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, he basically has like founders. Founders can be either illegible or legible. And then ideas can either be illegible or legible. And basically he was saying that like, okay, if both the founder and idea is like super legible, the idea is probably not that novel and somebody's already like, they're already going to implement it or do it and you're actually not finding something new. But then where it gets really interesting is where like the idea itself is illegible. And by illegible, he means like, oh, it's sort of like really, you know, on the frontier, people might not get it yet.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of like being a tough parent a little bit, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, like 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, you know, I'm working with them to make the best work possible. And so, yeah, that's the balance I think you just write is like, can you create this environment of one where your team feels comfortable roasting you, but at the same time like they know they have to be doing great work and they and they will do great work with you.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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're actually. Work really well together because it's like once you have that psychological safety, you have people trusting each other and you applying the high standards actually, I think, becomes potentially easier because you can do it without fear, I think. And I sort of think about this from the approach of like,”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An example of that, I don't know, like, I oh, I would always be like, okay, like, what are next steps? And like, how do we follow up on this? And then they'd be like, okay, like what are next steps? And they would sort of channel me in that way. Yeah, I just think it shows a level of like, okay, these people are not necessarily afraid of me. They know that they trust me. They could trust me. And it's, and then it sort of like know enough about each other and me, like personally in our personal lives to be able to know sort of where those boundaries are. But at the same time, I think that you sort of air into in that territory is like, are you as a manager? Are you friends with your reports? Which is, I think, a thing people tell you like not to do. And so the way I think about balancing this out is like this creates like the you have to create this sort of like baseline of psychological safety and feel comfortable.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's not that I'm like, yo, you should roast each other. You know, like, I'm not forcing it in that way or anything. But when I think about the sort of psychological safety and teams and like people that just get along with each other, like when you think about your friends, you know, you're always sort of willing to push the boundaries a little bit and like roast them. You're roasting your friends a lot, but you actually might not be roasting your coworkers a lot because it's all just about like 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 kind of feel comfortable just like kind of poking fun at each other a little bit. And I think that also can be a good sign when folks also feel the same way about like you as a leader where it's like there's just an element of like they don't they don't fear you as much but they and they feel like there's a sense of safety where if they say something they're not going to get fired”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's really nice because it's like, okay, cool. Like, we're all in this team together and nothing is like below this person. And I think 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 like vibe code them super nice something super nice or make them something a super nice card because i think it just shows that yeah it's like an ea or somebody can put together the card but this later is just somebody who cares so much about their team that they put in the effort so that's something i try to embody as like choosing the like the seemingly low leverage tasks that are like worth my time”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing because it's them who's doing it. So one example is whenever you have like senior leaders who just like test the shit out of the product and they're just like so in tune with it and they dog footed it, they repur the bugs, they spend a bunch of time with like engineers like sharing the logs and like nitpicking and stuff like that. And I think that ends up being like super actually high leverage even though it's a lot of time of like nitty gritty time because it creates this like 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 out of the product and they're rolling up their sleeves and they're giving this feedback and working with the team on it. And I think similarly too what I've seen is like when a senior leader is able to like fix a bug now, you know, even like I think I've actually seen like Mike Krieger before like put it put in PRs himself.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. 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 like, yeah, now that you're a manager, you have to like really prioritize your time and categorize your work. And there was like this two by two of like, I don't remember what it was in it, but you essentially say like, oh, these are the things that only I can do. These are things anybody else can do and everything else, you know, like it's low leverage and you shouldn't do that anymore. And a lot of the low leverage things were just like, you know, like things that are really nitpicky in the weeds or just like literally, yes, probably somebody else could do those tasks. But when I think about like leaders and managers that I have respect the most, I actually think some of their best traits is that they choose like low leverage tasks that they take on themselves. And that actually ends up being actually a very high leverage.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think Claude is there yet. I don't think Claude is there yet in terms of a designer you would hire. I think it is not yet the strong generalist or the deep specialist or the cracked Newgrad. I think it's pretty good at a first pass and at presenting a bunch of different ideas to you, but nothing there quite feels like special and hirable yet.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it definitely helps to maybe not like learn how to code so much that you're building something from scratch, but it does feel like more and more of the designer's vocabulary right now is implementing some stuff. I wonder, though, as the models, both the models and the products get better if like. I mean, we probably will continue to move up the abstraction layer and 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 like start to bring that into your toolkit, the coding tools, whether or not it's like you're actually becoming technical, I think any designer should just be really aware and know how to use the tools that are at hand as opposed to maybe like learning and like going off and learning React or et cetera, et cetera.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My one call it here, too, is like I went to a school that started something called Socratica a few years after, actually 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 like build things and do things like for example somebody builds this like Claude robot project this was like 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 like a sense of both like agency in terms of like 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 you know the school that someone's from or graduating from”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try a bunch of stuff out, build actual things. I think that is that can feel, I don't really know what the state of design education or education is these days, but at least from back when I was in school, everything was very theoretical. And like, here we're going to teach you some approaches and whatnot. But like the best kind of like cracked new grad folks I know are just like people who just like use the technology build actual things don't feel like limited by you know how little experience they might have I think sometimes they're actually unburdened by that because like 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 like building a bunch of stuff and and sharing it with people and finding a community of folks that that also do that um yeah i think my”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And like basically, like, I don't know, if you almost had their skill set, it would look like a block, you know, like instead of so many.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes there's designers who are just like really technical in a way where they could be like 50%. They're basically a software engineer. That's really interesting, especially because right now a lot of it is, at least for us, it's like, you know, you're working with directly with the model so it can, it helps when you have just like deep engineering expertise. But another like deep kind of like specialist he is just, you know, maybe they're just really good at like visual design or just like designing icons or something where things like that given that everybody can anybody can make anything you know having that deep specialist slant feels like, oh yeah, they can really help differentiate the things that we're building.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And stuff like that, and doesn't have like all these baked processes and rituals in their mind, that's super valuable. So I think those are the folks that I think a lot of us are just like overlooking, but I'm like really excited about”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel very lucky that working at some of these places, like 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 craft new grad. It's just somebody who's like early career and feels kind of like wise and experienced beyond their years, but is also just like very humble and very eager to learn. I think this person is really interesting right now because I think most companies are just hiring like senior talent, like folks that have done things before are super experienced. But given how much the roles are changing and what we're expected to do is changing, I think having somebody who almost has like a blank slate and is just like a really quick learner and is really eager to learn new tactics.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Skills like 80th percentile good. I think this is like pretty rare and hard to hire for, to be honest. But I like this because the design role we've already seen is kind of like stretching and spanning, right? Like we're all becoming more PM shape, 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 sort of like 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, like a deep specialist, like someone who's t-shaped, but like the tip of the t probably is like goes down farther than most other people. So folks that are maybe like the top, you know, like 10% in the industry and whatnot. Again, super hard to find.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I do think working specifically in the kind of environment that I do, there's just like a sense of resilience and role with it kind of thing that I think is really important because yeah, 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 like be stuck in the old processes and the old ways. But then I think about also there's probably three archetypes of folks that are really interesting to me right now. And I think there's folks who are already interesting to me before, but I feel like is in this era feels especially important. So the first one I would call is like strong generalists. So not just like regular generalists where they're like kind of good at a lot of things, but like people that are like almost like block shaped, you know, in that T-shaped framework where it's like they're really good at like a few core.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's like a good description. I actually haven't heard that, but I like that. I might use it more often as clawed 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. Like I think one of my favorite any sort of use case that I really like out of cowork is just like 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.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think for some reason that became like the viral thing that got taken away from all of the sort of coworkments is 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 co-work that it was not just 10 days. And there's a lot of different people involved. It's one of those things where it's like the idea kept coming back and it's like never the right moment or there's like different variations of it. And then all of a sudden it's the right moment and it feels like, oh, so obvious all along, but there was a long, long journey to get there.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see Yeah, yeah. And then so when you actually start to work with Claude on stuff, it feels more like a to do list. Like 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 just a, 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, yeah, like what is the actual true form factor of this? Like, is it stuck in the screen always? Or how does this sort of like reach out to the different surfaces that is working with?”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'm just most proud of us actually just like shipping it to be honest and putting it out there. And yeah, I don't know if there's like 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 if I, you know, all I can do is see flaws in it. But I think there's a lot of stuff that I'm excited about. Like we have been iterating especially on the homepage and to make that something where it feels more like, hey, these are like tasks you can give Claude and tasks that Claude are working on. And so that should be rolling out. It might already be rolled out by the time this.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like 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.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was 10 days of building. Yeah, it was definitely longer than that, like overall. It was like 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 like the actual format it was going to take. And so the way it got there is actually there was a lot of different other explorations that we had internally on top of different agent harnesses and whatnot. And we just had prototyped little parts of the different interactions that ended up in co-work. So things like when Claude gives you 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 like.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With co work 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 we, I think we weren't really sure like when it was actually going to be ready to ship. And then it's sort of like everything all at once. Like we were like, okay, we're going to ship it soon.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, getting criticized. You're like, oh, yeah, like 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 like it's a pretty vulnerable exercise to share work and present it with your team and then also just get a lot of critical feedback and take that all the time.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, and I think traditionally, at least what I've seen, a lot of like the engineering disciplines, like when they hire EMs or even sometimes like directors there, they actually make the EMs 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 like people management oriented.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I finally fell. I probably will. I think I really just love helping a team build the best product possible. And my motto there is like whatever it takes. If it's somebody that if the team needs somebody to give the team direction and like set up the team and whatnot, that can be me if the team just needs somebody to execute on it. That could be me as well.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 kind of like 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 like, I think pure people management like oh like just somebody to sort of set you up, help you in your career, have one-on-ones, make sure you're feeling like good at work. I think that that is kind of not a thing as much anymore, but I think somebody who can really function as like giving the team direction as well as doing some of the people management stuff like that tied together I think is the future of what managing looks like at least for now like somebody who can really engage with a team in terms of like the work and giving direction there as well as like creating the environment for them to do their best work.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Processes changed. And I think that's actually a really important thing right now because, yeah, 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, like 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 like.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or should I, you know, try something else and like get my hands dirty and kind of thing. And to be totally fair, like, I actually love both sides of the coin. Like, I loved, I love managing people. I love setting up teams and being at that level. But I also just really loved IC work. Like I was sort of like a reluctant manager when I did it. And I was like, okay, I'll do it. So I love both sides of these coin like pretty equally. But I think actually what being an ICO across this past year has taught me is that it actually just like gave me a lot of skills that I don't think I would have gained if I was just managing throughout this year. Like the design, like I mentioned, the design process has changed so, 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 that's afforded me. And I think at any point, if I'm like managing a team again, I think it will give me the empathy and understanding of how the design.”
2026-03-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source