Lenny's Podcast — Complete Transcripts

Jenny Wen (2026-03-01)

Jenny Wen (00:00:00): This design process that designers have been taught, we sort of treat it as gospel. That's basically dead. You as a designer actually do not have the time to make these beautiful mocks anymore.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:10): A big part of the design role now is helping engineers and teams execute, not just telling them, "Here's the design."

Jenny Wen (00:00:15): 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%.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:23): You're better off not blocking that, letting them cook.

Jenny Wen (00:00:26): It's not just designers who are feeling like, "Oh yeah, we have to keep up with engineers." I think even engineers are like, "How do we keep up with ourselves?"

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:32): How to keep up with all our agents, our seven agents who are constantly running?

Jenny Wen (00:00:35): The result of engineering changing a bunch is that design is sort of forced to change. We used to go off and make this two-year, five-year, 10-year vision even. Now it becomes a vision that's three to six months out, and isn't necessarily creating this beautiful deck, sometimes just creating a prototype that points people in the right direction.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:52): Boris on the podcast recently was saying Claude Code is now helping him come up with ideas.

Jenny Wen (00:00:55): And we'll get better at taste and judgment and design. We might be holding onto that a little bit too much.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:01): Where will human brains continue to be valuable?

Jenny Wen (00:01:03): At the end of the day, someone has to decide what is actually going to get built and what actually matters. Someone still needs to be accountable for the decision.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:10): What do you now look for when you're hiring designers?

Jenny Wen (00:01:13): There's probably three archetypes of folks that are really interesting to me right now.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:20): Today's guest is Jenny Wen. Jenny was head of design for Claude, is now leading design for Claude Cowork. Prior to that, she was director of design at Figma, where she led the design teams behind FigJam and Slides. She was also a designer at Dropbox and Square and Shopify. And what I love about this conversation is that Jenny is living in the future of where design as a profession is heading, and she's here to give us a glimpse into what that looks like, and how much things are going to be changing for designers. It is pretty wild and extremely interesting. A huge thank you to Noah Levin and Emily Lynn Hasham for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Don't forget to check out Lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.

(00:02:08): Jenny Wen (00:04:21): Yeah, excited to be here.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:04:22): I've been looking forward to this conversation because I spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the future of software engineering, how much that role is changing, the role of product management, how much that role is changing. I even spent a lot of time on how design is changing. Clearly, it is also changing in a really big way. And you have such a front row seat to where things are heading. I also know you have a lot of very strong opinions about where things are heading, so there's a lot of stuff I want to talk about. I want to just start with just this broad question. How is the design process changing with the rise of AI?