Jenny Wen (Head of Design for Claude at Anthropic, formerly design director at Figma) went on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast (one of the best industry podcasts right now) and shared how AI is changing classic product design.
Here are the key takeaways:
– The classic cycle of "research first, then mockups, then hand off to dev" no longer works. Engineers now spin up AI agents (Claude Code alone can run several simultaneously under the hood). So it's faster for devs to build a rough feature in code with AI agents than to sit and wait for Figma mockups. The modern designer's job isn't to slow things down with long mockup approvals, but to step aside, let engineers cook, and polish the real frontend as they go.
– The share of actual design work has shrunk. A couple of years ago, 60-70% of a designer's time went to pixel-perfect mockups. Now it's 30-40% at most. A huge chunk of time is now pair-working with engineers, reviewing in production, and writing code yourself (with agents, of course).
– The tool stack inside Anthropic has changed: instead of endless browser chats, Jenny uses desktop Claude Cowork (for complex multi-step tasks) and Claude Code in IDE (VS Code) to fix CSS or frontend by hand. Figma is still used, but only for quick visual experiments — because coding with AI is still too linear, while in Figma you can scatter 10 variants on a canvas and pick the best.
– Neural networks will soon surpass us in aesthetics and "taste." We cling too much to this, but models are quickly learning to evaluate projects, including visually. However, (hooray!) humans are still needed — simply because someone has to take responsibility for what ships to production and resolve conflicts between people with different visions.
— I also liked her point about trying everything yourself now. Jenny left a senior director position at Figma to go back to IC (individual contributor), because middle management is in the risk zone right now. The design process is changing so fast that if you're not getting your hands dirty with new tools, you simply can't empathetically and effectively lead a team. All leads should consider going IC for a while.
– Who Anthropic is hiring (3 archetypes):
1. Generalists (can do everything) — people who are equally strong (80th percentile) across multiple areas (design, product management, code).
2. Ultra-specialists — top 10% of the industry in one very narrow niche (e.g., a designer-engineer who's half senior developer).
3. "Craft newgrad" — yesterday's juniors and graduates. They don't carry the baggage of "proper" corporate processes, but they have fearlessness and are ready to build projects with agents from day one, without looking back at "how things used to be done."
In short, the era of beautiful visionary presentations for 5 years ahead is over — the planning horizon has shrunk to 3-6 months, and those who adapt fastest and ship working code survive.