Jenny Wen, head of design at Claude and former Director of Design at Figma where she led FigJam and Slides, says the classic discovery-to-mock-to-iterate design process is obsolete. She left a director role at Figma to return to individual contributor work at Anthropic. That career move alone tells you something about where the action is.
The original piece covers what actually replaced the old process, what Wen's daily AI tool stack looks like, and the 3 specific designer archetypes she is hiring for right now. It also makes a counterintuitive case: chatbot interfaces may be more durable than the industry assumes, and AI may not surpass human taste and judgment as quickly as most people predict.
The question worth reading for is not whether design is changing. It is whether designers who mastered the old process are building the wrong skills entirely. Wen has a specific answer, and it is more concrete than the usual takes on this topic.
[READ ORIGINAL →]