Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:15:42 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[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? [00:15:48] S0: 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 Cowork, and now I want to set aside some time to think about, hey, what does the next three 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 white boarding, or going through something that they built and giving them feedback on it and being a designer in that kind of way, we're really 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. [00:16:59] S1: Are you still doing elements of the traditional design process? Prototyping, user research, panels, I don't know, just going out and the whole thing you described?
00:16:59 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[00:16:59] S1: Are you still doing elements of the traditional design process? Prototyping, user research, panels, I don't know, just going out and the whole thing you described? [00:17:09] S0: Yeah, I think 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 just has changed. [00:17:40] S1: Got it. Okay. So that's a really interesting takeaway. It used to be that was a huge ... I guess 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 feedback and execution and out, today? [00:17:58] S0: 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 some of the last 20 or so doing the sort of jamming with engineers, consulting with them, and the last 10% maybe doing coordination meetings, et cetera. But now I feel like the mocking up part of it is 30 to 40%. And then there's that other 30 to 40% there that is now jamming and pairing directly with engineers. And then there's a slice, I don't know how much I have left, but there's a slice of it that is now implementation as well. Yeah. [00:18:44] S1: Actually building and shipping? [00:18:45] S0: Yeah.