Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:13:11 · Jenny Wen
[00:13:11] S0: 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. There's stuff that is 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's 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 in 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 that 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 keep up, that's not a huge part of my job, but I do think it's a really interesting part of it.
00:14:53 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[00:14:53] S1: Well, it connects to the point you made earlier, where 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. [00:15:08] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And I think part of it is just curiosity. It feels like I have this front row seat to so much that's happening in the industry. And so a lot of it is like, yeah, our Slack is a goldmine. I'm just excited to read through the things that people are working on, they're saying. [00:15:23] S1: 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. [00:15:33] S0: Yeah, yeah. I think that is the best AI news is probably internally, if you're ever at one of these companies in the Slack. [00:15:42] S1: Yeah. Just problem keeps getting harder. I'm just keeping track of what's going on. Okay. Okay. So that's part of the job. What else?