Why Designers Can No Longer Trust the Design Process
January 27, 2026
For years, designers have been told to trust the process.
Research first. Personas. Journey maps. Problem statements. Then solutions.In this talk from Hatch Conference, Jenny Wen, Design Lead at Anthropic and former Director of Design at Figma, explains why that model no longer fits the reality of modern design work.
With AI accelerating prototyping, smaller teams doing more, and craft becoming a key differentiator, rigid processes are failing designers. Jenny shares real examples from Figma and Anthropic that show how great work actually gets made today. Starting from solutions, caring deeply about details, building intuition, skipping steps, and designing for delight.
This is not a rejection of research or strategy.
It is a call to stop worshipping process artifacts and start trusting designer judgment again.
The field of design has developed and refined processes over the last 20 years or so for designing digital products. Here, Jenny Wen, the head of design at Anthropic, asks whether these well-known, tried and true, trusted techniques are still fit for purpose in an era when AI is so increasingly involved in our product development life cycles.
