The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude)

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. A big part of the design role now is helping engineers and teams

execute not just telling them here's the design few years ago.

60 to 70 percent of it was mocking and prototyping.

But now I feel the mocking up part of it is 30 to 40 percent. You're better off not blocking that, letting them cook. 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?"”

How to keep up with all our agents. They're seven agents or constantly running. The results 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 depth. Sometimes just creating a prototype. That points people in the right direction. Boris on the podcast recently was saying cloud code is now

helping him come up with ideas. We'll get better at taste and judgment and design. We might be holding on to that a little bit too much. Where will human brains continue to be valuable? 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.

“What do you now look for when you're hiring designers?”

There's probably three archetypes of folks that are really interesting to me right now. Today's guest is Jenny Wen. Jenny was head of design for cloud. Is now leading design for cloud co-work prior to that she was director of design at Figma, where she led the design teams behind Fig Jam 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 11 and Emily Lin Hasham for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation.

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Learn more at workis.io/lany. That's Orkis.io/lany. Jenny, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Yeah, excited to be here. I've been looking forward to this conversation because I spent 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've been 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 this just this

“broad question. How is the design process changing with the rise of AI?”

It's changing a lot. I think it's still also got a lot a long way to go in terms of the way it's

while than design actually has, but I think the result of engineering change about changing a bunch

“is that design is sort of forced to change. I think some context around this is I did a talk”

at a conference in Berlin a few months ago in September, and I called it like don't trust the design

process where I basically just said like hey you know this design process that designers have been

taught where you go and you go off and you do a bunch of research to discovery, and then you like diverge, you converge, diverge converge, and it's like this process that we sort of treated as gospel and and try to hard to preserve and we were like trust the process. That is that's basically dead. I think it was sort of dying before the age of AI, but given now that you know engineers can go off and spin off their like seven clouds, I think as designers we really have to let go of that process,

and I think that's the big thing that's changing, but I think even in the past three to four months since I did that talk that talk actually starts to feel pretty kind of feels outdated to me, which is a little embarrassing, but especially with the big shift of like Opus 46 and a bunch of folks

“just like really discovering and using cloud code over the holiday break. I think we're seeing”

this like force to change our process happen even more. The way I sort of see it now is like

there are basically two types of design work and design work is kind of like becoming really

stratified in this new world. So there's like the first one which is really just like supporting the implementation and execution. So this is the one where you know engineers are using their seven clouds to decorate all these features and anybody can like put an idea out there and you can just like talk about an idea and somebody using actually an engineer because they're still better at implementing the stuff than we are. They will just make us happy version of it and

you can try it out and you as a designer actually like do not have the time to make these beautiful mocks anymore or to like kind of lead in this way. And then I think there's that the second kind of work that feels also really important, which is like creating the sort of vision or direction

for things. This one feels like the hardest to make time for and it's one that like we we still

did before, but I think the shape of it's very much changing because I think we used to go off and say, you know we're going to do this design vision. We're going to go off and make this like two year or five year whatever ten year vision even and we're going to like point us towards something. But the way that the technology is changing now like we actually don't know we don't know what's going to happen in two years there's too much changing and it usually becomes a vision

that's like three to six months out and isn't necessarily something that is like creating this like beautiful depth that's like beautifully story told it sometimes just like creating a prototype that points people in the right direction. And I think this kind of work is like still really important in this world because in a world where people can spin off their seven clouds make whatever features they want and any direct at any kind of like direction or or in implementation,

“you need to point them towards something and in order to make sure that we're all making”

something that makes sense together and is also done in a way where it's like efficient right like if we're all working towards something but has one greater cause it's like much more efficient to do that than than just random things. And so that's like the big shift that I'm seeing and I think I've opinions about it now but ask me in like three months and it might actually change even more. So what you're saying here is it's not like you or the design field is like we

need to change it's engineering and the fact that you can build so quickly just forces the role of a designer to change because as you said engineers can just ship ship ship ship ship ship ship ship and what you're finding here is like you're better off not blocking that letting them cook as they say and and then there's kind of this mode of helping them along as they ship bring it together make sure it all kind of connects guide them a little a little bit.

Yeah I think so yeah I don't think there is like one unified voice it's like designers we need to change right now but they're yeah there is sort of like the the follow-on effects of engineering tooling really changing I think we'll probably see design tooling change in this next year or so as well but it a lot of it right now is trailing that and I think it's also really empowering for us too because as designers we also now have access to a lot of these

coding tools and we can be a part of the process in a way where we're implementing stuff like it's like I'm I'm I'm doing a lot of lost last mile stuff where I'm implementing all the colors and like and and and sort of like working with engineers really closely to get the feature across the line and also prototype stuff in actual code as opposed to relying on engineers to do that again. How true do you think this this is at all companies at say AI companies on AI companies you know

for one to it's like develop very a little bit but I think people might be feeling like okay

this is not going to happen at Salesforce this is not going to happen at I don't know service now or whatever so I guess do you feel like this is where all teams are heading is it mostly AI bleeding edge companies how white spread do you think the design process shift is going to be so the top that I did last year has really been like the most resident talk that I've done

“and I so I think it's something that people are starting to feel across the industry where they're like”

oh yeah we can't do the old design process anymore you know we are using tools like cloud code and B0 what not to to start to spin up prototypes and PMs are starting to spin up prototypes and stuff like that as well so I think there's something they're emerging but the other interesting observation with that talk too was there was actually also a decent amount of like backlash like people were people clearly haven't invested their entire careers in learning teaching using this

like really stable design process and they were I think there was a lot of like discrediting like oh yeah like we can't do without discovery we can't do without these pieces of process so I think there is still a piece of the industry that is not quite there yet in terms of this way of working if that makes sense yeah yeah and a big part of this is like you could argue like the question is what leads to the best most successful products in companies and you could argue

it's spending time doing discoveries research, mock, iterating, beta testing or it could be

just engineer ship of stuff that's okay not amazing good enough we learn iterated build iterated

is your sense that that second path is not only is that just like whatever it's doing but that actually leads to the better product at this point I think you sort of have to choose and use your discussion as to like when to actually ship something but I think the the ability to execute try something out and try it with like real data and and a real users like kind of mindset in the product I think that does lead to a better product especially as we're all working

with these like new developing AI models that are non-deterministic you can't you just can't we can't mock up all the states you know and you can't theorize and you can't even make like a clickable prototype whether you sort of have to use yeah from models in any of the new have to sort of see people try it out with their use cases because with these models like you discover you can

“design them for different use cases but you don't you have to discover use cases as you see”

could please in them so yes the other thing I always hear and building on which you just said is just

you don't know what people will do with AI you don't know how good it'll be of 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 completely different way which is where coworking came from and probably even caught code at the beginning and so so what's it what's it just like to be a designer at Endropic just like give us a day in the life of working at Endropic in the at the center of the storm a good

amount of time at Endropic is actually just like catching up on what people what's happening at the company I think this is the company where I've worked out a few other companies around the size where I think there's just a lot of like information and a lot of things going on but I feel really compelled to keep up with it you know like there's there's stuff that is like 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 like 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 like hey what's coming up ahead for me because there's stuff from both the research team but also some of our like labs teams that are closer to research and try out and prototyping stuff and then there's just like stuff I want to try out you know like we have a bunch of like we have a bunch of like 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 industries going and some of those are just like really interesting to read because a lot of these are like 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 I don't really care as much where here I

think it's both the volume and the kinds of things that are happening that I'm like really interested in keeping up with and then aside from that sort of keep up but that's not a huge part of my job but I do think it's a really interesting part of it. Well it connects to the point you made earlier or a big part of the design role now is helping engineers and teams execute not just telling them here's the mark 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 yeah yeah and I think

happening in the industry and so a lot of it is like yeah our slack is a gold nine you know like I'm just excited to to read through the things that people are working on they're saying

I never thought about how like 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 yeah yeah that is the the best AI news is probably internally if you're ever at one of these companies in the slack damn yeah yes it's just problem keeps getting harder just keeping keeping track was going okay so okay so that's part of the job well there is still some of the traditional like let me think about what's happening in the in the future

and let me like make some designs for that that's something that for example this week I've a lot of some time to where I'm like oh my cool like we have been in a lot of like execution mode for co-work and now I want to set aside some time to think about hey what is the next like three months so it's like a and and where does that actual worker that actually go given where the market's at

“where the models are at and what could that be because I think it's 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 like a lot of it is just a conversation or like white boarding or going through something that they built and giving them feedback on it and being a designer in that kind of way were really consulting and then I spend a part of my day in code you know like 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 and that's a really fun part of my job that I think didn't exist as much a few months ago are you still doing elements of the traditional design process prototyping user research panels up and I would just like going out and you know like the whole thing you described

“yeah we're still do I think we're still doing all of that to some extent like we we have a user”

researcher on the team who is putting together both like traditional studies as well as surveys and the whole team is reading that that the those studies and that feedback we are still we are still prototyping stuff we are still 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 got it okay so that's a really interesting takeaway it used to be that was a huge like 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 like feedback and execution and out today yeah I think it's a

designer a few years ago I would say like maybe 60 to 70 percent of it was like mocking and

prototyping stuff up and then spending you know the last 20 or some of the last 20 or so like doing the sort of like jamming with engineers consulting with them and the last like 10 percent maybe doing you know coordination meetings etc but now I feel like the the mocking part of it is like 30 to 40 percent and then there's that other 30 to 40 percent there that is now jamming and pairing directly with engineers and then there's like a slice I don't know how much I

have left but like there's a slice of it that is now like implementation as well yeah like actually building and shipping yeah amazing so kind of falling that thread what's in your AI stack what do you as a design I know your manager and I want to talk about how you actually are I see also what's in your AI stack what tools are using in your role this is my AI stack um well we if we're going to draw thanks so of course we're going deep on the Claude stack um I am

using obviously like chats uh Claude chat and then but increasingly more and more Claude coerca I basically shifted all of my chat use cases over to coerca because I've been finding that yeah well it sort of is better at these longer run any tasks and most of the things I was asking Claude for are these these longer running tasks and then there's Claude code of course I use it mostly in the with with the S code and the IDE because I'm usually tweaking front end stuff and it helps

to just like be able to see the code and then talk to Claude as well I've been trying to actually use Claude code more uh remotely like through both mobile and through Slack as well it's really fun for somebody to say like oh yeah this this one icons offer something and you just at mentioned Claude and Claude does it and then you pick up the PR and it's done that's been

“really really fun too and yeah I think that's it like I think we're a fully Claude house here so”

yes that's basically my stock are you still using Figma as it's okay I am still using Figma yes yes okay I was waiting to hear okay so Figma is still part of the year your life being a former

just like it's code the future of design that we needed like many more do we need a design what's

your what's your sense Figma still important I mean as a Figma I'm maybe in bias in that way but I I think there is still like when I use Figma I'm like yes this is what I should be using and it still fills a very good gap for me um I think a lot of that is actually just like one

“is exploring a lot of different options I think that's a really important part of the design process”

to be able to just think about like eight to ten different ways to do something um I think the best design happens when you're able to just like throw a bunch of ideas up the wall and curate and just like and push yourself to to come up with a bunch of these different directions right now coding or or right now working with some of these coding tools doesn't lend itself super well to that because it's super linear you'd super invest in one direction and you just iterate with a lot

on them for example um so I think Figma has been really great at just like exploring all these different options and I think it's still gonna exist that way to some extent and then I think there's like really fine sort of visual and interaction details that are also really great to to to be able to just try out in Figma again it's a lot of different directions but it's micro directions it's being able to think about like different typography or styles having those in a

canvas where you can just explore that specifically is still so so helpful and is not something that

I always want to like go directly to code in. It's interesting you still use an IDE

because in engineering it's clearly shifting to uh command lines agents, ideas are kind of moving moving uh to not be cool anymore so it's and it makes a lot of sense you just want to add it some CSS to things some like color stuff and so I could see why not just telling the agent hey just come on change this one hex value just changing it so much easier. Yeah it's really going to be like can you change this to this class when you can just go in and change it to a

different class. So it's interesting to wonder if IDE is now become the useful for designers and PMs and engineers are moved on. Yeah maybe yeah. Okay so a lot of your time you spend working with engineers giving a feedback kind of nudging them in the right direction there's a sense I feel

“of just like like your advice is like let go don't feel like you need to be this gatekeeper”

but there's this piece of okay help them move in this direction that is cohesive and is creating products we're product a lot of designers I think are in this boat right now just like oh my god I can't keep up with all these engineers shipping stuff all day what's something you learn about just either how to help your engineers get better at design so that it just ends up being better or just kind of keeping on top of this and not going crazy. Whenever I do work with engineers

on products and it's more on the consulting basis I do just try to explain you know why I'm thinking away that I'm thinking to help them like extract principles as opposed to me just being like no I don't think this would go here it's like no I think we should have a button here because not everybody realizes you can prompt this and and here's an example where it comes from research and whatnot so I also just like try to point engineer store design system and stuff like that in

code because right now cloud is like writing a lot of the code and it's like not always it's not always

like picking up stuff in the design system and whatnot so as much as I can sort of equip them with stuff that they can use in the future without me that's helpful and then on your point

“of trying not to go crazy I think it's hard you know I think it's really hard right now and”

I see this a lot from actually both engineers and designers where it's like now that we're sort of capable of doing so much we want to do more and and so I think 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 right now so that's something I'm hearing a lot. So true. Yeah man how to keep up with all our agents or seven agents for constantly running. Yeah. Okay so then as a designer

where in this profession craft and good experience and quality and trust are such a core part of the job to help instill that in the products because that in theory leads to really successful products and companies how do you just think about maintaining craft quality trust as your products are just shipping a thousand times a day and you're not able to stand top of them and there's no designer involved. It's not that there's no designer involved it's more just like

there's it's almost there's too much for one designer to handle but I think with this I think about where the features or products are that like where they are sort of in the cycle of adoption versus like kind of early preview. So for example like we sometimes will launch things and we will say hey this is a research preview it's it's early it's gonna have a bunch of these laws and when we

research preview and we put it out there knowing that hey this is like similar to our models you know this is the worst it's ever gonna be but we're gonna put it out there because we believe you

know internally we've tried it a bunch and there's something really powerful here that some people

will benefit from it might not yet be the easiest to work with it might not be the highest quality it might have some issues with it but we're gonna put it out there because we believe the benefits out way the cons. I think that is like okay to do especially when there is something really valuable with the product already and it's worth putting it out there but I think the promise you sort of have to make your users is like hey we're gonna put it out there but we're gonna we're gonna we're

gonna iterate we're gonna take your feedback and we're gonna iterate and we're gonna make it better

“and you have to sort of commit that you to show that to the world you have to respond to”

people's feedback and you have to show that you are continuously shipping and improving it because I think the way that you really lose trust around quality and really since something early is if you're released early and then nothing ever happens that that is what something that degrades a brand but whenever you put something something out early like it's it's possible to do that and like maintain the brand of your company and I think I think that's something that we've been

doing pretty well and and I think if there's anything anyone's listening to anyone's listening can take away from it is like yeah we're continuing to do that and and I think that is actually really fun for me as a designer because you put something out there and you actually learn and you get feedback about it immediately and you know what to do next. The way I've heard you describe this is building trust through speed.

Yeah for sure it's yeah it's building trust through speed but also just like making people feel like they've been heard and that we're fixing things based on what they're trying to use it for and their feedback is actually appreciated and used. Yeah it's clear when when the labs launched stuff and y'all are very good at this everyone on team is tweeting and just like responding to tweets and comments and and then shipping hey we fixed this yesterday this is happening

so there's a clear sense of this is just today and we know this is broken and we will fix it and and then because cloud code can code very quickly the fixes come very fast. Okay so another big question that people are asking that I ask a lot of this podcast is around just like what skills become valuable and like another way I've been thinking about it likes put it this way recently is where will human brains continue to be valuable as AI gets smarter.

So we've gone through this progression of tap completing Ella segments of code to a hundred percent of code is written by AI now like it's crazy to now AI's reviewing its own code Boris on the podcast recently was saying cloud code is now helping him come up with ideas and decide what to build which is like okay wow look at that look at it go the whole product work flows the product dome process slowly get eaten up by AI so the question is just like where will

human brains still be useful at least until we have super intelligence do you think like do you think AI is going to get very very good at taste judgment design I think it will get better at taste and judgment and design yeah like I think we we might be holding on to that a little

bit too much and saying like oh yeah like you know a designer or somebody will always know

“the the best thing to ship or the best version of this and I but I do think AI that like AI”

sense of taste will get better I think like someone has to decide like what is actually going to get built and and what actually matters and and when I think about people saying like oh you know like AI is just going to build this software for us a lot of the hard parts of building software actually like not building it you know if you think about the hardest times that you've had at work letting it's probably things like oh you and some other person like disagreeing about like what

should go into this feature or what shouldn't go into this feature and those things still feel like yes AI can weigh in but it can't necessarily solve this dispute between you and somebody else and so there is something about like deciding what actually goes into the things we build which I guess is taste in some way but maybe not taste in like the way we think about like a static taste or or whatnot there's some sort of like it's like judgment around what to do next

“just watching how quickly AI had took over coding which I think a year ago definitely two years”

ago most people are like I don't think so I don't think AI will get this good and that the best engineers in the world trusted so much they're not even looking at that code anymore like that's where we got it just made me reevaluate all these assumptions I've had about

okay AI will never be as good as really good PM's designers at judging what is great

and deciding what to build but I'm just like starting to think I think it will get there like even an example you share like it could give these two people trying to make a decision here's all

and I'll go ahead and build it so I think we're just yeah to your point I think we undervalue

just how good it'll get at the stuff okay so your sense is it'll get better but your senses will still need awesome designers to be involved as some PM's to help make these decisions engineers of course

“yeah yeah I think someone will still have to decide like oh we want to build this kind of product”

or like given what the AI is presenting us like someone still needs to be accountable for the decision you know the same way that like even though clock can write all this code for you today it is still an engineer who's accountable for like does that code actually work does this actually make sense in the product so I think there's that decision making such judgment layer which feels like maybe one thing we want to do that but it's it still falls on us yeah it doesn't make sense it makes

me think about the radiology example where there's always the sense that AI is going to take over

that field of radiology and tell you what is going on but like the human is mostly useful for signing off on the decision just so it needs to be liable if they're on which isn't the best job in the world but but that's a different game is helpful yes code yeah okay another ongoing question in AI and design is just like if it's like chat bots and terminals are just like like I don't think anyone expected this to be the lasting user interface to AI like chat bots okay

no no this is just like a temporary stop along the journey but how it's like kind of in further and just terminals um you have thoughts on just I don't know where like you think there will be a next step of how we interface with AI or do you think chat bots and terminals are mostly where we end up there will likely be a combination of both like both you eyes and interfaces that you are interacting with clicking with and and that feel like more tactile we are already

seeing this and playing with this within cloud like the chat but um so we recently really is so a bunch of these widgets that let cloud sort of elicit and ask you questions and also show

“you you know things like the weather and stocks and whatnot in interactive ways and I think that's”

a fact of really good reception because people still like to see you eyes and touch them and and click them and they are much more efficient than you know typing something to to cloud but at the same time when we really really lean to this like chat bot paradigm like I think that just gave us this whole world of flexibility that we didn't get with these sort of like baked in you eyes um so my read here is like I don't think chat is ever going away because this

opened up this like new way of like infinite ways to to work with the model and to sort of like talk to the computer that we just didn't have before but I think that it will still be most direct for very specific things to exist in this UI and I think that we'll probably happen here is that a lot of those UIs will be generated more and more often by the models as opposed to something that we're like hand-coding each instance but I think we yeah we're in this space where

I don't I don't think chat and and and and maybe even like talking to the terminals is going to go away it's interesting that like with open claw, plot, mall plot all the names the innovation one of the big innovations is like another way to chat with it through WhatsApp and tell like raminess of us just like another format chat bud but that just like that was a big unlock oh like it just chat with it through WhatsApp yeah and it's like you like chatting and talking to someone is

still like you know we as humans are doing it and so and it's a way for us to interact in a really

rich way and now we just have this other medium to like interact with the computer basically.

Yeah so Kevin Wheel who works at another AI lab I won't mention he had this great point on the podcast that talking is such a beautiful way to handle every level of intelligence we can talk to people that are very very smart and not so smart and it's talking and this scale so well across the spectrum we can talk to people at 200 IQ 300 like it's talking still works

“so that's why it's been this beautiful way to deal with the growing intelligence of models”

that you continue to work yeah that's totally nice that's yeah this episode is brought to you by Omni many product teams today are in the process of debating how to ship AI analytics. The hard part is obvious having an LLM gas at SQL in production is a huge mess and just a bad idea Omni takes a different approach they have a semantic layer built in so that when you embed their analytics the AI actually knows your business definitions not just your raw tables you can

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okay I'm going to come back to this whole idea of management and I see so so you've spent you've kind of put yourself back into the I see roll in a lot of ways talk about that and if you think that's just like a thing design managers need to be doing

yeah it takes on this yeah so this past year at inthropic I joined as an I see at first and then

I managed a team for a few months in in like an orchestra for that sort of needed it and now I'm actually back to doing full-time I see work and I joined in topic as an I see because I was just really excited about the kind of work that there was to be done as an I see here but also because I was

“feeling like you know I I sort of want to be closer to the work and I think this feels like”

a really important time to do it before I like send the corporate ranks you know and and as having these like questions and doubts about like is is middle management like is that safe in the future like it's is is is the way that we're working actually is this going to be a job that persistence in the future or or should I you know try something else and like get my hands

dirty and kind of thing and and to be totally fair like I actually love both sides of the coin

like I loved I love managing people I love like setting up teams and and being at that level but I also just really loved I see work like I sort of like a reluctant manager when I did it and I was like okay I'll do it so I love both sides of these coins the coin like pretty equally but I think actually what being an I see across this past year has taught me is that it actually just gave me a lot of skills that I don't think I would have gained if I was just managing throughout this year uh

like that as I like I mentioned the design process has changed so so much in this past year and I feel like I've just picked up so many hard skills that I wouldn't have necessarily had

“the time to do if I was just managing a team um so that's actually the best thing that's afforded”

me and I think at any point if I'm like managing a team again I think it will give me the empathy and understanding of how the design process has changed and I think that's actually a really important thing right now because yeah the teams are working so differently I think it's actually

pretty hard to empathize if you are not working in that way or you're like not always like

testing the tool and trying stuff but yeah like it's it's an interesting time to be designer and if I had not worked in this environment I don't know if I would have totally understood it or like knew what to do or how to guide my teams so that that's sort of what this year really gave me and so you were previously a director of design at big memory yeah because you're seeing like how large was your work can just take your people off reference at the max I probably had I think 12 15

designers or so and and I had a few managers as well so and then it was like an opportunity yeah okay so you've had the sense that middle management might not last what's your current feeling do you think management design management is a thing that persists long term or do you think everyone

“turns into icy I think as long as there is a team of people it helps to have somebody who is”

managing a team like I think there is others like real value in managers it depends kind of like what the shape of the manager is and what they actually do but the way I think about like of what a helpful manager is these days is somebody who is not just like I think pure people management like oh like just somebody to sort of set you up help you in your career have one-on-ones make sure you're feeling like good at work I think that that is kind of

not a thing as much anymore but I think somebody who can really function as like giving the team direction as well as doing some of the people management stuff like that type together I think is the future of what managing looks like at least for now like somebody who can really engage with the team in terms of like the work and giving direction there as well as like creating the environment for them to do their best work and do you see yourself going back into

management long term I thought I thought I probably will like I think I I really just love you know helping a team like build the best product possible and my my motto there is like whatever it takes you know if it's somebody that's if the team needs somebody to give the team direction and like set up the team and whatnot that could be me if the team just like needs somebody to execute on it that could be me as well so the advice I'm hearing for people in

design that are especially managers is you almost need to move back into I see in order to truly understand what is happening and how much it's changing so that you can be a better manager. I think so and I think traditionally at least what I've seen a lot of like the engineering disciplines like when they hire EM's or even sometimes like directors there they actually make the EM's like take a rotation for a few months and pick up a few tasks and really understand how the technology

works before they become a full-time manager and I think design probably needs to do some is similar to where I think in the past design has been much more like people management oriented.

Actually doing crits you know and just getting criticized yeah getting criticized you're like oh yeah

like it is hard to get it is hard to get critical feedback and to hear it and to hear on such

“a regular basis because that's the thing you have to do as a designer is like it's a pretty”

vulnerable exercise to share work and present it with your team and then also just get a lot of critical feedback and take that all the time. So currently you're leading design slash I see designing on co-work is all right. Awesome so Boris he was on the spot recently talked about how there's like a lot of debate about what co-work should be and there's all these big ideas and he's like in the end let's just make it like a terminal basically in the product and just kind of fancy

terminal is there anything you could share about just the process of landing on where he's landed for that experience of co-work I have it here on my monitor by the way looking at it. With co-work specifically we have had a bunch of different prototypes internally of what that could look like and it's one of those things where we try to a lot of things and then I think we weren't really sure like when it was actually going to be ready to ship and then it was sort of like everything

all wants like we were like okay we're gonna we're gonna ship it soon. Yeah it was definitely longer than that like overall it was like 10 days to get it from what we had internally to something that we were ready to ship externally. So we'd been building it for a while but we weren't really sure about like the actual form it was gonna take. And so the way I got there is actually there was a a lot of different other explorations that we had internally on top of different agent harnesses

and what nods and we just had prototypes, little parts of the different interactions that ended up in co-work. So things like when cloud gives you to do less we'd try to a bunch of different form factors for that. We try to a bunch of different form factors for the way it presents you different multiple choice questions. We try to a bunch of different ways to teach people what the use cases are and whatnot and I don't know if we like land it on the best form factor ever but

essentially it was like stuff that was sort of already working internally that people liked

“that we just thought we were gonna get some more signal on by by releasing it. So I think”

forcing ourselves to release it within that 10 days that we did. It was just sort of like whatever we had let's put it out there and then let's go out there and iterate from that which is what we're done. And it blew up the internet when you launched it so we worked out. Yeah. Is there a feature of co-work today that you're either most proud of or just like can't wait to fix and and improve? I'm just saying I think we're I'm just most proud of us actually just like

shipping it to be honest. I'm planning it out there and uh yeah I don't know if there's like one specific thing yet because like I think when you work on something and you work out so long especially as a designer you're like I don't know if I think you know I all I can do see flaws and it's but I think there's a lot of stuff that I'm excited about like we have been iterating especially on the homepage and to make that something where it feels more like

hey these are like tasks you can you've clawed and the tasks that clawed are working on. So a lot of things should be rolling out it might already be rolled out by the time this this this is like this little randomizer thing where you click it and give you all these different ideas. Yeah yeah and then so when you actually start to work with clawed on stuff it feels more like a to-do list like it feels more like these are things clawed working on these are things

“that clawed these are tension on and I think there's just a there's an opportunity here to make”

it feel much more like this I shared to do list between you and clawed so instead of to iterate on that and then I'm also excited to think more about yeah like what is the actual true form factor

of this like is it stuck in the screen always or how does this sort of like reach out to the

different surfaces that it's working with. I love that you shared that it wasn't just 10 days to do this thing there's like these numbers that people throw out there we build it in 10 days and your point is like there was time spent thinking about what direction it should go and prototyping, mocking, trying stuff and then it's like okay now we know what we want it to be let's build it and ship it. Yeah I think for some reason that became like the viral thing

that got taken away from all of the the sort of co-work announcements is that it only took 10 days but I think there there have just been so many different explorations and people that have worked on different pieces of co-work that yeah it was it was not just 10 days and there was a lot of different people evolves it's it's one of those things where it's like the the idea kept coming

back and it's like never the right moment or there's like different variations of it

and then all of a sudden it's the right moment and it feels like oh so obvious all along but there's a long long journey to get there. And by the way for people that don't know much about co-work is like the way I think about it's like clawed with hands or could do stuff on your computer

description. I actually had a heart that but I like that and my using more often is clawed with hands. I also think about it as like it's like clawed but clawed is really good at taking all your garbage and then turning it into something nice. Like I think one of my favorite and like any sort of use case that I really like out of co-work is just like giving it a folder of my stuff and it doesn't really matter what's in that folder but I'm able to extract something good

out of it. I've done that many times. Okay. Coming back to managing and being a manager and the role of a designer, I want to talk about hiring for a little bit. So seeing how much just change it in the role of a designer, what do you look for that's maybe new? Like what do you now look for when you're hiring designers that you think is really important for them to be successful in this new world? I will I do think working specifically in the kind of environment that I do there.

There's just like a sense of like resilience and like roll with it and kind of thing that I think

“is really important because yeah so much is changing around us and you have to be really”

willing to adapt to try out new methods, to try out new tools and learn stuff as opposed to just like be stuck in the old processes in the old ways. But then I think about also there's probably three archetypes of folks that are really interesting to me right now and I think these folks were already interesting to me before but I feel like is in this era feels especially important.

So the first one I would call is like strong generalists. So not just like regular generalists

where they're like kind of good at a lot of things but like people that are like almost like block-shaped you know that T-shaped framework where it's like they're really good at like a few core skills like 80th percentile good. I think this is like pretty rare and hard to hire for to be honest but I like this because the design role we've already seen is kind of like it's stretching and spanning right like we're all becoming more PM shape or be all becoming engineering shaped

and so if you already have strong skills in a few different buckets it's really easy for you to sort of like flex around and expand your expand your role. So that's really exciting to me it's just somebody who is really good at a bunch of things again a huge ask and then the other person that's really exciting to me is in that T-shaped framework like a deep specialist like someone who's is T-shaped but like the tip of the T you probably is like goes down farther than most other people.

So folks that are maybe like the top you know like 10 percent of the industry and whatnot.

Again super hard to find and I feel very lucky that like you know working at some of these places like folks like these you can sort of afford to hire them and actually bring them on board

“and then my last one is probably the one that I think we're all overlooking which is what I call”

the craft new grad. It's just somebody who is like early career and feels kind of like wise and experienced beyond their years but is also just like very humble and very eager to burn. I think this person is really interesting right now because I think most companies are just hiring like senior talent like folks that have done things before at our super experienced but given how much the roles are changing and what we're expected to do is changing. I think having somebody who

almost has like a blank slate and it's just like a really quick learner and it's really eager to learn new tactics and stuff like that and doesn't have like all these baked in processes and rituals in their mind that's super valuable. So I think those are the folks that I think a lot of us are just like overlooking but I'm like really excited about this is awesome. On the deep tea shape, what's an example of someone in design that has like what's

“what's the skill that they're really good at? Sometimes there's designers who are just like”

really technical in a way that they could be like 50% of software. They're based on their software and so they're like that's really interesting especially because right now like a lot of it is well at least for us is like you know you're working with directly with the model so it helps when you have just like deep engineering expertise but another like deep kind of like specialist tea is just you know maybe they're just really good at like visual design or just

designing icons or something where things like that given that everybody can anybody can make anything you know having that deep specialist land feels like oh yeah they can really help differentiate the things that we're building. Awesome okay and then there's block shape. At Mark Andrews in the podcast we kind of called it the FF shape or E shape or there's like multiple tea things sideways sideways yeah I guess is that what you're describing where there's like many things you're really

really good at? Yeah yeah and like basically like I don't know if you almost had their skillset it

would it would look like a block. Because there's so many skills that like the tea is spread out.

eager like open-minded, gritty, very smart imagine as a big part of it. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. If someone's like a new design like a young designer trying to break in, trying to be successful. What would your advice be to them to help them have a shot at and enjoy joining in the topic for example? I read to say there's like build a bunch

“of stuff like try a bunch of stuff out build build actual things. I think that is back and feel”

I don't really know what the state of like design education or education is these days but at least from like back when I was in school like everything was very like theoretical and like here we're gonna teach you some approaches and whatnot but like the best the best kind of like cracked new grad folks I know or just like people who just like use the technology build actual things don't feel like limited by you know how little experience they might have. I think

that sometimes they're actually unburdened by that because like we have expectations of ourselves after being industry for so long but they actually don't and they sort of feel like anything is possible and so just like building a bunch of stuff and sharing it with people and finding a community folks that also do that. Yeah I think my one call here too is like I went to a school that started something called Socrataica like much a few years after actually a while after I graduated and

basically their whole thing is like building stuff and showcasing it almost like a science project

“and I think there's just been a really cool movement there of folks who just like build things”

and do things like for example somebody builds this like Claude Robot project this was like a few years ago too where they were just assembling robots that were running on Claude and then somebody else did something where she just wanted to put Google Y eyes on a bus and boss and or something and there's just like a sense of both like agency and terms of like yeah we can just do stuff but then also this community where people were just trying and building things and sharing

things with each other so whatever that looks like given the you know the school that someone's from or graduating from yeah doing that kind of stuff is is the stuff that will make people stand out

for current designers that are an academic career ultimately senior do you think that you need

to get technical and learn to code at least build or do you think you could be really successful and just not lean into that and get better other stuff. I think it definitely helps to maybe out like learn how to code so much that you know you're building something from scratch but I it does feel like more and more of the designers will calculate right now is implementing some stuff. I wonder though as you know the models but the models and the products get better if like

well I mean we probably will continue to like move up the abstraction layer and layers and you won't have to actually know how you know each single line of code will work but I think what I would say is like start to bring that into your like toolkit the coding tools whether or not it's like you're actually becoming technical I think any designer should just be really aware and like know how to use the tools that are at hand as opposed to maybe like learning and like going off

and you know learning reactor or etc etc. How good of a designer is is Claude would you say or Claude would have everyone just like would you hire Claude as a designer is like not there yet. I don't think Claude is there yet I don't think Claude is there yet and her is a designer you would hire I think it is it is not yet the strong generalist or the deep specialist or the crack new grad I think it's it's pretty good at a first pass and presenting a bunch of different ideas

to you but nothing there quite feels like yeah a special and hireable yet which is good news for designers for example it sucks for now and I'm so curious to see how good it could get at this that's like such a big open question is can it pump out amazing novel unique creative

experiences or is this it's just never going to be that good as a human designer I mean it's gotten

a lot better in the last year or so even so yeah there's a couple of management I don't know rituals or takes you have that I've heard from folks that work with that I want to touch on one is that you have this hot take that low leverage time for managers is just not a thing that there's a lot of benefit you can get out of things that people consider low leverage you talking about that yeah yeah

“I remember like first becoming a manager and I think one of the pieces like of advice that I”

either got from a course or a book or something is like yeah now that you're a manager you have to like really prioritize your time and categorize your work and there's like this two by two of like I don't remember what it was in it but you essentially say like oh these are the things that only I can do these are things anybody else can do and everything else you know like it's low leverage and you shouldn't do that anymore and a lot of the low leverage things were just like

probably somebody else could do those tasks but what I think about like leaders and managers that

I have respect the most I actually think some of their best traits is that they choose like low leverage tasks that they take on themselves and that actually ends up being actually a very high leverage thing because it's them who's doing it so one example is whenever you have like senior leaders who just like test the shit out of the product and they're just like so in tune with it then a dog put it every pro the bugs I spend a bunch of time with like engineers like sharing the

“logs and like nitpicking and stuff like that and I think that ends up being like super”

actually high leverage even though it's a lot of time of like nitty-gritty time because it creates this like familiarity with the product which I think is really good. It also creates this vibe where it's like oh yeah the this senior leader really cares deeply and they actually know the incident of the product and they're rolling up their sleeves and they're giving this feedback and working with the team on it and I think similarly to what I've seen is like when a senior

leader is able to like fix a bug now you know even like I think I've actually seen like my career before like put it put in PRs himself and it's it's really nice it's like okay cool like we're all in this team together and nothing is like below this person and I think similar another thing that I love that's a little bit more cultural is when somebody like goes out of the way to like make somebody as like anniversary card or something and like vibe code them super

not something super nice or make them something a super nice card because I think it just shows that yeah it's like an EA or somebody can put together the card but this later is just somebody who cares so much about their team that they put in the effort so that's something I try to embody is like choosing the like the seemingly low leverage tasks that are like worth my time. Yeah that is so interesting which you're saying there is in a sense like the low leverage stuff

is the one is the stuff that often has the most impact because your reports wouldn't expect you to spend time on this thing and there's like the low leverage ends up being high leverage. Yeah and I think it's what makes like your solid leadership stand out or feel special to a certain person. Amazing. Another I don't know ritual and kind of way of running teams that I heard about you is you encourage team members roasting each other which on the surface doesn't sound like a

wonderful environment but on the other hand I hear a conceit that the teams that you've built are just the happiest, the highest performing teams. Talk about I guess this idea of roasting and encouraging that and just what you've learned about building awesome teams. Yeah I think it's

“not that I'm like yo you should roast each other you're like I'm not like forcing it in that way”

or anything but when I think about the sort of circulate watch will safety and teams and like people that just get along with each other like when you think about your friends you know you're

you're always sort of willing to like push the boundaries a little bit and like roast them like

you're roasting your friends a lot but you actually might not be roasting your co-workers a lot because it's all it's about like comfort and safety right so it's not that I'm like oh I want my teams to roast each other but I think it can be a really good sign when the people on your team kind of feel comfortable just like kind of poking fun in each other a little bit and I think that also can be a good sign when folks also feel the same way about like you as a leader where

it's like there's just an element of like they don't they don't fear you as much but they and they feel like they're just like since the safety where they if they say something they're not going to fire um so an example of this is like with my last team I feel like they would make fun of things that I would say at crits sometimes like certain phrases I would say what's

an example of that I don't know like oh I would always be like okay like what are next steps

and like how do we follow up on this and then leave you like what are next steps um and there's sort of channel me in that way yeah I just think it shows a level of like okay these people are like not necessarily afraid of me they know that they trust me they could they could trust me and it's it's and then they sort of like know enough about each other and me like personally and our personal lives to be able to like know sort of where those boundaries are but at the same

time I think the the thing that you sort of air into in that territory is like are you as your man as a manager are you friends with your reports which is like I think the thing people tell you like

“not to do and so the way I think about balancing this out is like this creates like the you have to”

create the sort of like um baseline of psychological safety and people feel comfortable both with each other and with you but you also to make sure that you they know that you have really high standards and I think these two things can feel like they're at tension but I think they're actually they work really well together because it's like once you have a psychological safety you have people trusting each other and you applying the high standards actually I think becomes potentially

like kind of like being a tough parent a little bit you know it's like oh yeah like they my team

I work with them in a way where they know I'm always going to be there and I'm not just going to

fire them on a whim or something but at the same time they also know that I want the best for them you know and that I have high standards and that you know I'm working with them to make the best work possible and so yeah that's the balance that you just write is like can you create this environment of one where your team feels comfortable like roasting you but at the same time like they know they have to be doing great work and they and that it will do great work with you

that is awesome advice it's interesting how often this this just like management style comes back or management uh good management it comes back reminds me of what was a candid red-it-rackle candor just this combination of caring deeply and challenging directly yeah and that's kind of what I hear here is just make sure people know that you care deeply about them but also be very direct and have high standards yeah yeah it's interesting okay maybe a final question

I'm always looking for interesting frameworks and methods and processes that people have

found useful in their work and I hear your big fan of something called the legibility framework

“mm-hmm talk about this talk about a user white survival yeah this framework I think I saw”

on Twitter of maybe last year or something and it was Evan Tana who was a partner at SPC he's a BC so it basically is this like two by two I don't think it like got so much attention but I once I started seeing it I like actually couldn't stop thinking about it so on the two by two he basically has like founders like founders can be either illegible or legible and then ideas can either be illegible or legible and basically he was saying that like okay if both the founder

and idea is like super legible the idea is probably not that novel and somebody's already like they're already gonna implement it or or do it and you're actually not finding something new but then where it gets really interesting is where like the idea itself is illegible and by illegible he means like oh it's sort of like really you know on the frontier people might not get it yet or like the way it's being told it just doesn't it's not like being told and then

“in the in the way that makes this the most sense to people and I think this is obviously a good”

way for a BC to operate because you're trying to look for the opportunity that people don't see and put them out there in the world but I also think that like part of the role of the designer at least at at a frontier lab at anthropic is kind of spotting the ideas that are illegible and trying to understand what's there and how to take that and like transform it whether it's their storytelling or whether it's through like the actual UX and the form factor and and and

and put it out there and and I think there's like like when I mentioned you know going through slog and like looking at all the stuff that people are making like that's kind of what I'm doing and trying to see like oh yeah what are the ideas that are really that like there's like some energy there around but like might not make sense yet that that are worse me like thinking about more in my work there's there's one good example actually that like ties to co-work where there was

“this internal prototype that we called like cloud studio that I think somebody builds”

like a part ways through last year and it essentially was just this like really kind of like dense

powerful interface that was built on top of some agent like harness that I it might have been

cloud code at that point in time too and it had all these like displays were showing you like all this knowledge and all these skills and and things cloud was doing and like previewing its outputs and I think to a designer I looked at it and it was like this is like I don't know what's going on I don't really get it but then I sort of saw the folks in research of folks building it and just folks internally there's just a lot of energy around it and I was like cool like I think there's

like something here but I just don't understand it yet I think that really was an example of an in it and it illegible idea and ultimately what came from it was like the skills framework and and like the sort of like markdown files that sort of that instruct cloud on how to do something so that came out of that specific prototype that was not something I was directly involved in and that was more of like you know the folks working on this prototype extracted the out of it but

when it did come to work on cloud co-work and I was thinking about like oh yeah what is the form factor for this thing seeing that prototype and seeing the kinds of information that people found really helpful like seeing clouds plan and to do's seeing clouds like context and the files that it was it was going through like those kinds of things are things that I ended up pulling out of that prototype into cloud co-work so yeah I think about like how can designers almost be

I did a research project recently where with this guy Terrence Rohan and VC actually we looked at what are patterns across people that have joined companies very early that ended up being massive successes like Palantir and Stripe and linear and notion all these companies like people that have joined many of these companies early what were they looking for and one of the factors was the ideas so it's like so crazy that everyone's laughing at this this isn't this is

impossible you're never going to do this this is the craziest thing I why would you even think like

Palantir like like Albany I actually was one of them just like it's a research lab doing some stuff so so it's interesting that and it's not like every time this will work and it's not like

“every crazy idea that sounds makes no sense will be good but I think what you're saying is”

an attention to stuff that's like interesting to you and isn't totally clear maybe you can be the person that helps pull it together yeah yeah that but also like if there is some energy around it but I don't quite under always understand what the energy is it's like dive deeper and try to understand what that is yeah yeah because I think people who often gravitate towards these early ideas they can't always articulate why and it's sort of

up to you to like dive deeper and understand that that's one of those the so there's three patterns we found one of the other ones was there's just pay attention to people getting very excited about this thing even if you don't get it and it's like sounds crazy that's so interesting okay and then was the other one oh the founders are just like top one percent was the other piece there which everyone had anthropic aridies so you got that one oh man Jenny what a crazy time we're living

through whatever is it how it's so much change okay before we get there very exciting lightning round is there anything else that I should have asked you that you want to leave listeners with you want to double down on I think I just want to call out the anthropic design team and shout them out just because it's a team of folks that are just really humble and they're not it was a lot of sun social but they're doing a lot of really great work and especially through

this time our jobs are changing so much the team is so resilient and they sort of span this whole spectrum of people who are really technical and prototyping to all the all the way to folks that are

“really high craft and and delivering stuff that's that's what we have the door and is fabulous”

and we are hiring throughout the year so I just wanted to call that out if I didn't scare you with the way that we work internally and drop it if that sounds more exciting than terrifying would love to connect what sounds exciting is getting access to these slacks or you ever hold the features being built let's talk to super intelligence right now and tell me where I should invest I'm just joking and then in terms of hiring is there anything specific that people should

think about to if they want to play think a little bit about the the archetypes that I mentioned especially the strong journalist and the deep specialist those folks were really excited about the block and the deep tea the block the deep tea what could we be talking about yeah folks who feel like they you know they those archetypes resonate with them but also folks that are just really excited about the technology have been building a lot and and sort of want

to be on the frontier you're amazing well with that we reached our very exciting lightning round

if we got five questions for you Jenny on rides I'm ready here we go what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most other people the first one is the power broker by Robert Carrot which is an incredibly aggressive recommendation given that it's a like 1100 pages

“but I think in this era when our our when our attention spans are so short I think this is”

actually worth reading and to end because there I think there are very few like collections or memoirs where it spans there's someone's entire life and you sort of see how somebody changes throughout those decades and it's also somebody who's really controversial too and it's it's nice to sort of like read a really nuanced view of somebody Robert Moses and I think we just lose out on some of those this like long arcs thinking there's so much we're thinking so much

about right now so it's just a important reminder that careers along and is also really good for kind of understanding how somebody just gets things done really well so power broker

the second one that I recommend to a lot of people is a book called Insomniac City which is written

by Bill Hayes who is was the partner of the scientist Oliver Sox around the time that Oliver Sox died and it's just just like really beautiful kind of like ethereal memoir of Oliver Sox last days and their sort of love story I think this has like very little to do with the seven-year podcast

mortality but also like love and life and stuff like that so that's one of my favorite books. My goal here is and you know I'm training great we're training great renaissance humans and all of this other stuff is excellent cool interestingly I saw Julie Zoo a famed design leader was reading the power broker recently and what's going on over here springing in design land okay do you have a favorite recent movie or tv show they you really

enjoyed um I watched a sentimental value recently I watched it on a plane which is you know how how directors want you to watch to the films but it's a it's an Norwegian film by the same director who did the worst person in the world's I think just the the pacing the writing

the relationship between the characters is just really subtle and beautiful um it's basically about

this family sort of a family drama but also about this house that they lived in their entire lives it's beautiful because like the house is sort of a character so I don't know what else to say about that but that was a really good movie um and then I would also recommend obviously the pit season two I know we're on that we're on that I think everybody just likes to watch people who are really competent other jobs do something um so yeah it should be an actor on that show just like how

“much you have to learn and memorize all these terms yeah yeah it just also seems really fast”

pace too like they do so much stuff in like one shot and there's just so much like movement and stuff like that seems really really hard to be an actor on and only recently realize no a while he was in ER as like a younger person and then he's like the head of the sun yeah yeah no man okay favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love cannot be co-work not like I

actually discovered recently um but a retro I've been using it for basically two years now since it

came out um and I think I think I discovered new benefits of it recently so for folks who don't know about retro it's sort of like this small community photo sharing app in which you can only share um photos from each week from a given week as opposed to like all time um and it basically has like none of the social media stuff like you can't really see like counts it's not there's no ads et cetera um but one really nice thing is now that I've been using it for two years

I can now look back at each year and see like oh yeah this week two years ago I was doing this and it's become this really special way to like live through each week of my life basically wow and uh it's also beautifully crafted app if you're looking for building your own taste and design designer's love retro I could see I could see that okay do you have favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life yeah um not your life it's my favorite

life motto but one thing I do catch myself saying a lot is just uh it is what it is my dad says that all the time my love oh yeah yeah it sounds super defeatist but I promise this is not I think just given how much stuff is going on in the world right now and especially with the industry and whatnot uh you can't control everything and so sometimes it is what it is

“just like brings the levity you need to move forward I went to I did a 10-day meditation”

treat a while ago and I came back from it and it's like dad you've been right all along this is the whole of the answer to it all it is you can't don't cling don't try to change just it is what it is there's so much depth then that's like okay smarter than I even thought okay final question coming back to cowork is there uh I don't know mind blowing use case something just like wow that's so cool that cowork can do that either something you use it for if you hurt somebody using it for

well one thing I really like is just like introspection and so uh I have this this folder

basically of like local notes that I have from that I use like I A right or four and I basically

just like write whatever and over the years have collected it with a bunch of different notes and they span like all different things like one-on-one notes like random thoughts like kind of like tiny memos, interview notes etc and my favorite like it makes it well it's it's cool to me it's just like using co-work to like analyze that and have insights out of it and actually create things out of it um so like anything I anytime I can like learn something new about

“myself like I love that but I think a very practical thing I did with it the other day was like”

all along the lines of hiring I was like oh yeah I want to sort of articulate like what it is that I look for what I look for and design craft because I think actually a lot of people struggle to articulate that and I just had it read through all of my notes both like interview notes and other things that I cared about and memos and stuff like that I've written in the past and then it made me this rubric for for evaluating that so that kind of interest faction where it's like oh I

don't even I wouldn't have realized even these things about myself that I'd been putting out there implicitly that's been really cool for me that is so cool so just to make this very clear for

and enough y'all are allowed to use granola something like that like meeting transcripts and ask it

and it's like I was gonna ask what prompts you but it's just like read all these things ever and and help me probably just like understand how I feel about what is design craft.

“Yeah basically I think it was like hey I have a bunch of interview notes and a bunch of”

notes related to design craft in this folder read it and then help me craft a

like a memo thought rubric for how I assess craft in interviews. So cool. Yeah. Jenny this was awesome. What a what a time to be alive. What kind of two final

“questions working folks finding online if they want to reach out and how can listeners be useful to you?”

Yeah I'm on Twitter slash x is what we're calling it these days. It's at Jenny under square

one that's probably the best place not really on LinkedIn as much so that's that's the best place.

“And how can folks be helpful to me send us your product feedback you know like we're working on”

co-work for anything cloud related really just send us our your feedback we'd love to make it better for you. Jenny thank you so much for being here. Yeah of course it was great chatting Jenny. It was wonderful Jenny thank you bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also please consider giving us a rating

or leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.