About Jenny Wen
Jenny Wen is the head of design for Claude Co-work at Anthropic, where she leads the design of Anthropic’s flagship agentic product. She previously served as head of design for Claude’s core product. Before joining Anthropic, Jenny was director of design at Figma, where she led the design teams behind FigJam and Slides — two of Figma’s major product expansions.
Her career spans some of the most influential product companies in tech, including Dropbox, Square, and Shopify, giving her deep experience across collaboration tools, payments, and e-commerce design. At Anthropic, she sits at the intersection of AI capability and user experience, navigating the unique challenge of designing for non-deterministic AI models.
Jenny is known for her candid perspective on how AI is fundamentally transforming the design profession. Her talk “Don’t Trust the Design Process” at a Berlin conference in late 2025 resonated widely across the design community, arguing that the traditional discover-diverge-converge process is incompatible with the speed of AI-augmented engineering teams.
Career Highlights
- Head of Design for Claude Co-work at Anthropic (current)
- Head of Design for Claude at Anthropic
- Director of Design at Figma (FigJam, Slides)
- Designer at Dropbox
- Designer at Square
- Designer at Shopify
Notable Positions
On the Death of the Design Process
Jenny argues that the traditional design process — research, discovery, diverge, converge — is dead, killed not by design tools but by the transformation of engineering. When engineers can run seven Claude agents simultaneously and ship features in hours, designers can no longer act as gatekeepers with month-long mock-up cycles. Instead, designers must shift to real-time collaboration, working alongside engineers as they build.
On Designing for Non-Deterministic Systems
Traditional design relies on specifying all states in advance through mockups and prototypes. But AI products powered by language models are inherently non-deterministic — you can’t mock up every possible state. Jenny advocates for designing with real models and real users, discovering use cases through observation rather than specification.
On the Legibility Framework
Borrowing from VC Evan Tana’s framework, Jenny argues designers at frontier labs should act like internal venture capitalists — spotting “illegible ideas” that have energy behind them but can’t yet be articulated, then translating those into coherent products. Claude Co-work’s skills framework emerged from exactly this process.
Key Quotes
- “This design process that designers have been taught, we sort of treat it as gospel. That’s basically dead.” (on design process evolution)
- “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%.” (on changing time allocation)
- “In a world where people can spin off their seven Claudes, make whatever features they want, you need to point them towards something.” (on the vision role of design)
- “You have to use the actual models underneath and you have to sort of see people try it out with their use cases.” (on non-deterministic design)
Related Reading
- Agentic Coding - The engineering paradigm shift forcing design to evolve
- Knowledge Work Disruption - The broader trend of AI transforming professional roles
- Claude Co-work - The product Jenny is designing at Anthropic
Video Mentions
Death of the traditional design process
The design process that designers have been taught, we sort of treat it as gospel. That's basically dead. Engineers are using their seven Claudes to create features and designers don't have time to make beautiful mocks anymore.
How time allocation has shifted for designers
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%.
Three designer archetypes for the AI era
There's probably three archetypes of folks that are really interesting to me right now — the strong generalist, the deep specialist, and the prototyper-builder.