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

Designing an AI product increasingly requires trying the working model with real use cases. Jenny Wen, a design leader at Anthropic, explains why static mockups cannot anticipate every response. She describes spending more time alongside engineers, examining early implementations and polishing them directly in code. Her team still conducts research and makes prototypes and mockups; the allocation of effort has changed. Shorter-term prototypes also give rapidly moving teams a shared direction, which helps faster implementation add up to a coherent product.

“This design process that designers have been taught, we sort of treat it as gospel, that's basically dead.”

Jenny Wen

“You as a designer actually do not have the time to make these beautiful mocks anymore.”

Jenny Wen

“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%.”

Jenny Wen

“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?”

Jenny Wen

“the way that you really lose trust around quality and releasing something early is if you release it early and then nothing ever happens.”

Jenny Wen