Wen: Design time spent mocking dropped from 70% to 35% with AI
Jenny Wen · The design process is dead. Here’s what’s replacing it. | Jenny Wen (head of design at Claude) · Mar 1, 2026 · at 17:59
Jenny Wen, Head of Design for Claude at Anthropic and former Director of Design at Figma, breaks down how the day-to-day time allocation for software designers has fundamentally shifted.
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“I think as a designer a few years ago, I would say, like, maybe 60 to 70% of it was, like, mocking and prototyping stuff up, and then spending, you know, the last 20 years, some of the last 20 or so, like, doing the sort of, like, jamming with engineers, consulting with them, and the last, like, 10% maybe doing, you know, coordination meetings, et cetera. But now I feel like the mocking up part of it is, like, 30 to 40%, and then There's that other 30 to 40% 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.”
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