Jenny Wen, head of design for Claude at Anthropic, discusses how AI is transforming the design process, the new role of designers alongside rapidly shipping engineers, and what skills matter most in this new era. From Lenny's Podcast.
Featuring: Lenny, Jenny.
Introduction to Jenny Wen
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. A few years ago, 60 to 70% of it was mocking and prototyping. But now I feel the mocking up part of it is 30 to 40%. 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 judgment 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 Co-work. 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, 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.
Jenny, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Yeah, excited to be here.
Why the Traditional Design Process Is Dead
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. I think we've actually seen 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 "Don't Trust the Design Process" where I basically just said, 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 diverge, you converge, diverge, converge, and it's 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 engineers can go off and spin off their 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 starts to feel pretty — it kind of feels outdated to me, which is a little embarrassing. But especially with the big shift of Opus 4.6 and a bunch of folks just really discovering and using Claude Code over the holiday break, I think we're seeing this force to change our process happen even more.
The Two New Types of Design Work
The way I sort of see it now is there are basically two types of design work, and design work is kind of becoming really stratified in this new world. So there's the first one which is really just supporting the implementation and execution. So this is the one where engineers are using their seven Claudes to create all these features and anybody can put an idea out there and you can just 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 kind of lead in this way.
And then I think there's the second kind of work that feels also really important, which is 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 2-year, 5-year, whatever, 10-year vision even, and we're going to point us towards something. But the way that the technology is changing now, we actually don't know what's going to happen in 2 years. There's too much changing, and it usually becomes a vision that's 3 to 6 months out and isn't necessarily something that is creating this beautiful deck that's beautifully story-told. It's sometimes just 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 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 efficient — if we're all working towards something that has one greater cause, it's much more efficient to do that than just random things. And so that's the big shift that I'm seeing, and I think I have opinions about it now, but ask me in 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 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. I don't think there is one unifying voice that's like, "Designers, we need to change right now," but there is sort of 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 behind that. 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. I'm doing a lot of last mile stuff where I'm implementing all the polish and working with engineers really closely to get the feature across the line, and also prototyping stuff in actual code as opposed to relying on engineers to do that again.
How Widespread This Shift Will Be
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, they're at the bleeding edge, for one, and two, it's developer-focused 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 ServiceNow or wherever. So 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 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 backlash. People clearly have invested their entire careers in learning, teaching, using this really stable design process, and I think there was a lot of discrediting like, "Oh yeah, 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. And a big part of this is, you could argue 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 engineer, 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 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 when to actually ship something. But I think the ability to execute, try something out, and try it with real data and a real user mindset in the product — I think that does lead to a better product, especially as we're all working with these new developing AI models that are non-deterministic. You just can't mock up all the states, and you can't theorize, and you can't even make a clickable prototype with it. You sort of have to use the actual models underneath, and you have to see people try it out with their use cases. Because with these models, 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 you don't know what people will do with AI. You don't know how good it'll be at certain things, the non-deterministic 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 Co-work came from and probably even Claude Code at the beginning.
Day-to-Day Life as a Designer at Anthropic
And so what's it just like to be a designer at Anthropic? Just 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 catching up on what's happening at the company. I think this is the company where — I've worked at a few other companies around this size where I think there's just a lot of information and a lot of things going on, but I feel really compelled to keep up with it. You know, 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 code names and stuff like that. And a lot of time I'm just trying to navigate and figure out what those projects are, because I think I'm just trying to spot and see, hey, what's coming up ahead for me, because there's stuff from both the research team but also some of our labs teams that are closer to research and trying out and prototyping stuff. And then there's just stuff I want to try out. 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 really interesting to read because a lot of these are 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 really interested in keeping up with. And then aside from that sort of keeping 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. And I think part of it is just curiosity. 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. I'm just excited to read through the things that people are working on and saying.
I never thought about how 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. It's like, I think the best AI news is probably internally if you're ever at one of these companies, in the Slack.
Damn. Yeah. The problem just 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 the traditional — let me think about what's happening in the future and let me 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, we have been in a lot of execution mode for Co-work and now I want to set aside some time to think about, hey, what do the next 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. A lot of it is just a conversation or 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 consulting. And then I spend a part of my day in code, 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, just like the whole thing you described?
Yeah, we're still doing all of that to some extent. We have a user researcher on the team who is putting together both traditional studies as well as surveys, and the whole team is reading those studies and that feedback. We are still prototyping stuff. 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 has just changed.
Got it. Okay. So that's a really interesting takeaway. It used to be — 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 maybe 60 to 70% of it was mocking and prototyping stuff up, and then spending the last 20 or so doing the sort of jamming with engineers, consulting with them, and the last 10% maybe doing coordination, meetings, etc. But now I feel like the mocking up part of it is 30 to 40%, and then there's that other 30 to 40% that is now jamming and pairing directly with engineers, and then there's a slice of it that is now implementation as well. Yeah, like actually building and shipping. Amazing.
Jenny's AI Stack
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 IC also. What's in your AI stack? What tools are you using in your role?
What is in my AI stack? Well, we're working on the products. So we're going deep on the Claude stack. I am using obviously Claude chat, but increasingly more and more Claude Co-work. I've basically shifted all of my chat use cases over to Co-work because I've been finding that it's sort of 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 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, "Oh yeah, this one icon's off or something," and you just @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.
Why Figma Still Matters for Exploration
Are you still using Figma as a designer?
I am still using Figma. 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. Figmates. Okay, so I know there's this big debate on Twitter — 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 — 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 one, 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 eight to ten different ways to do something. I think the best design happens when you're able to just 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 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 really fine 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 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 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 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 while engineers have moved on.
Yeah, maybe.
Advice for Working with Engineers
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, 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 — 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 a consulting basis, I do just try to explain why I'm thinking the way that I'm thinking to help them 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 try to point engineers to our design system and stuff like that in code, because right now Claude is writing a lot of the code and it's not always picking up stuff in the design system. 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. I think it's really hard right now. And I see this a lot from actually 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 do we keep up with all our agents? Our seven agents we're constantly running. Yeah.
How to Maintain Craft, Quality, and Trust in the AI Era
Okay, so then as a designer where 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 there's — 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 in the cycle of adoption versus 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 Co-work 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 similar to our models — this is the worst it's ever going to be, but we're going to put it out there because we believe, 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 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, 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 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 what 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 if there's anything anyone 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 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 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.
Will AI Ever Have Taste?
Okay, so another big question that people are asking — that I ask a lot on this podcast — is around what skills become valuable. And 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 development process is slowly getting eaten up by AI.
So the question is just where will human brains still be useful, at least until we have super intelligence? 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. I think we might be holding on to that a little bit too much and saying, "Oh yeah, a designer or somebody will always know the best thing to ship or the best version of this." And I do think AI's sense of taste will get better. But at the end of the day, someone has to decide what is actually going to get built and what actually matters.
And when I think about people saying, "Oh, AI is just going to build this software for us," a lot of the hard parts of building software are actually not building it. If you think about the hardest times that you've had at work, honestly, it's probably things like you and some other person disagreeing about 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 deciding what actually goes into the things we build, which I guess is taste in some way but maybe not taste in the way we think about aesthetic taste. There's some sort of 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. That's where we are. 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 just — 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. 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 and judgment layer which feels like maybe one day we won't have to do that, but it still falls on us.
Yeah, that makes 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.
The Future of Chatbot Interfaces
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 gotten even further, and just terminals. Do you have thoughts on where — 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 — 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, 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 UI. And I think 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 I think 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 OpenAI, Claude, chatbots — 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 — we as humans are doing it. And so 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.
Kevin Weil, who works at another AI lab I won't mention, he 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 — 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.
Moving from Director Back to IC
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 something 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 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 — is this going to be a job that persists into the future, or should I try something else and get my hands dirty?
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 love 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 just gave me a lot of skills that I don't think I would have gained if I was just managing throughout this year. 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 knew 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?
At the max I probably had 12, 15 designers or so, and I had a few managers as well.
So cool. And then yeah, 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 IC?
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 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 — I think pure people management, like just somebody to sort of 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." If the team needs somebody to give the team direction and set up the team, 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 a lot of in the engineering disciplines, when they hire engineering managers or even sometimes directors, 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. And just getting criticized. Yeah, getting criticized. It is hard to get critical feedback 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.
The 10-Day Build of Claude Cowork
So currently you're leading design on Co-work, is that right?
Yeah. Awesome. So Boris, he was on the pod recently, talked about how there's a lot of debate about what Co-work 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, and 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 Co-work? I have it here on my monitor, by the way, looking at it.
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 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 just had prototyped little parts of the different interactions that ended up in Co-work.
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, it was just sort of like, whatever we had, let's put it out there and then let's 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 Co-work today that you're either most proud of or just can't wait to fix and improve?
Honestly, I think 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 when you work on something and you work on it so long, especially as a designer, you're like — 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 airs.
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's 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 Co-work announcements, that it only took 10 days. But there have just been so many different explorations and people that have worked on different pieces of Co-work — yeah, it was not just 10 days and there was 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 Co-work — the way I think about it is like Claude with hands, where it could do stuff on your computer. Is that how you would 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 Claude, but Claude is really good at taking all your garbage and then turning it into something nice. I think one of my favorite use cases out of Co-work 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.
Hiring: The Three Archetypes
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 about — 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 in this era it feels especially important.
So the first one I would call strong generalists. Not just regular generalists where they're kind of good at a lot of things, but people that are almost block-shaped, 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, as we've already seen, is kind of stretching and spanning. 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 sort of 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 — someone who's T-shaped but the tip of the T goes down farther than most other people. So folks that are maybe the top 10% in the industry. Again, super hard to find. And I feel very lucky that working at some of these places, 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 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 — they're basically 50% software engineer. That's really interesting, especially because right now, at least for us, you're working directly with the model, so it helps when you have deep engineering expertise. But another deep specialist T is, maybe they're just really good at visual design or just designing icons or something. Things like that — 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 things. 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, if you almost mapped out their skill set, it would look like a block. There's so many skills that the T is spread out.
Okay. And the craft 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.
Advice for New and Senior Designers
If someone's a new designer, 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, say, joining Anthropic?
I would just say build a bunch of stuff. Try a bunch of stuff out, build actual things. I think that can feel — I don't really know what the state of design education is these days, but at least from back when I was in school, everything was very theoretical, like, "Here, we're going to teach you some approaches and whatnot." But the best craft 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. Yeah, I think my one call here too is I went to a school that started something called Socratica a few years 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 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 this sense of both agency — 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 maybe career-wise already senior, do you think you need to get technical and learn to code, 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 to maybe not 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 the models and the products get better, if we will continue to move up the abstraction layers and you won't have to actually know how each single line of code works. But I think what I would say is, start to bring that into your toolkit — the coding tools — 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 available, as opposed to maybe going off and learning React or whatever.
How good of a designer is Claude, would you say, or Claude Code? 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 craft 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, for now — that it sucks at this for now. 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 this just never going to be that good compared to a human designer? I mean, it's gotten a lot better in the last year or so even.
The Value of Low-Leverage Tasks for Managers
There's a couple management 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, "Yeah, now that you're a manager you have to really prioritize your time and categorize your work." And there was this 2x2 of — 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, in the weeds, or literally, yes, probably somebody else could do those tasks.
But when I think about 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 hell out of the product and they're just so in tune with it. And 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 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 they're giving this feedback and working with the team on it."
And I think similarly too, what I've seen is when a senior leader is able to fix a bug now — even like, I think I've actually seen Mike Krieger put in PRs himself. 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 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 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 the stuff that often 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.
Why the Best Teams Roast Each Other
Amazing. Another ritual and kind of 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. But when I think about psychological safety and teams and people that just get along with each other — 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 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 kind of feel comfortable just 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 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 — certain phrases I would say.
What's an example of that?
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 to be able to know where those boundaries are.
But at the same time, I think the thing that you sort of veer into in that territory is, as a manager, are you friends with your reports, which is the thing people tell you not to do. And so the way I think about balancing this out is, you have to create this 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 in tension, but I think they actually work really well together, because once you have that psychological safety, you have people trusting each other, and you applying the high standards actually becomes potentially easier because you can do it without fear.
And I sort of think about this from the approach of being a tough parent a little bit. It's 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 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 you 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. Reminds me of Radical Candor — this combination of caring deeply and challenging directly. And that's kind of what I hear here — make sure people know that you care deeply about them, but also be very direct and have high standards.
The Legibility Framework
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 Tan who is a partner at SPC. He's a VC. 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, he says 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, 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 it's sort of on the frontier, people might not get it yet, or the way it's being told just doesn't make 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 like 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, 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 Co-work, where there was this internal prototype that we called Claude Studio that I think somebody built partway through last year. And it essentially was 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, to 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 and the 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 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 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 Co-work.
So yeah, I think about how can designers almost be more like VCs in this way, internally, 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 this. "This is impossible. You're never going to do this. This is the craziest thing. Why would you even think--" Like Palantir, all the — 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. 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 can't always articulate why, and it's sort of up to you to dive deeper and understand that.
That's 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. 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% — that was the other piece there. Which everyone had. Anthropic, right? Yes.
Lightning Round and Final Thoughts
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 out there on social, but they're doing a lot of really great work, 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, to 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 where all the features are being built.
Yeah, that's the core benefit. Let's talk to super intelligence 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 — the block and the deep T. But generally, 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, and it's nice to sort of 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 is also really good for 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 all 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 — 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 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 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 Pit, season 2. 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. 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 on that show. And I only recently realized Noah Wyle was in ER as a younger person and now he's the head of this.
Okay. Favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? Cannot be Co-work.
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 2 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.
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 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 brings the levity you need to move forward.
I went to 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 whole answer to it all. It is what it is." You can'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 Co-work, is there a mind-blowing use case, something just, "Wow, that's so cool that Co-work 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. 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 I've collected a bunch of different notes, and they span all different things — one-on-one notes, random thoughts, kind of tiny memos, interview notes, etc. And my favorite thing, what's cool to me, is just using Co-work 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, what 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 interview notes and other things that I cared about and memos and stuff 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 even realized 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, you could use something like Granola or meeting transcripts, and ask it. And it's like — I was going to ask what prompt you use, but it's just, "Read all these things I've written and help me understand how I feel about what is design."
Yeah, basically it was, "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. Jenny, this was awesome. What a time to be alive. 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, which 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. We're working on Co-work and 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 you, Lenny. It was wonderful. Jenny, thank you. Bye, everyone.
