Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:07:18 · Jenny Wen
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's very much changing, because I think we used to go off and say, "We're going to do this design vision. We're going to go off and make this two-year, five-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 don't know what's going to happen in two years. There's too much changing, and it usually becomes a vision that's three to six 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 kind of direction or in 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 three months and it might actually change even more.
00:08:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[00:08:43] S1: 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 this mode of helping them along as they ship, bring it together, make sure it all connects, guide them a little bit. [00:09:15] S0: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I don't think there is one unifying voice that's like, "Designers, we need to change right now." But yeah, there is 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 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 prototype stuff in actual code as opposed to relying on engineers to do that again.
00:09:15 · Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:09:15] S0: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I don't think there is one unifying voice that's like, "Designers, we need to change right now." But yeah, there is 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 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 prototype stuff in actual code as opposed to relying on engineers to do that again. [00:10:02] S1: How true do you think this is at all companies, at say AI companies, non-AI companies? Someone may be hearing this, okay, Anthropic Claude, okay, they're at the bleeding edge, for one. Two, it's developery a little bit, but I think people might be feeling like, "Okay, this is not going to happen at Salesforce. This is not going to happen at, I don't know, ServiceNow, wherever." So I guess, do you feel like this is where all teams are heading? Is it mostly AI, bleeding edge companies? How widespread do you think the design process shift is going to be?
00:10:02 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[00:10:02] S1: How true do you think this is at all companies, at say AI companies, non-AI companies? Someone may be hearing this, okay, Anthropic Claude, okay, they're at the bleeding edge, for one. Two, it's developery a little bit, but I think people might be feeling like, "Okay, this is not going to happen at Salesforce. This is not going to happen at, I don't know, ServiceNow, wherever." So I guess, do you feel like this is where all teams are heading? Is it mostly AI, bleeding edge companies? How widespread do you think the design process shift is going to be? [00:10:32] S0: So the talk that I did last year has really 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. 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. [00:11:28] S1: Yeah. [00:11:29] S0: Yeah.
00:11:29 · Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:11:29] S0: Yeah. [00:11:29] S1: And a big part of this is you could argue ... the question is what leads to the best, most successful products in companies? And you could argue it's spending time doing discovery, user research, mocks, iterating, beta testing, or it could be just engineer shipper stuff that's okay, not amazing, good enough. We learn, iterate, build, iterate. Is your sense that that second path, not only is that just what everyone's doing, but that actually leads to the better product at this point? [00:11:58] S0: 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's kind of 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 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 actually discover use cases as you see people using them. So yes.
00:11:58 · Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:11:58] S0: 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's kind of 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 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 actually discover use cases as you see people using them. So yes. [00:12:43] S1: The other thing I always hear, and building on what you just said is just you don't know what people will do with AI. You don't know how good it'll be at certain things, the 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 Cowork came from, and probably even Claude Code at the beginning. And so what's it just like to be a designer at Anthropic? Just give us a day in the life of working at Anthropic, at the center of the storm.