The design process is dead. Or is it?

The (non)sense of design processes.

Jenny Wens talk on the design process last year at Hatch (link) and more recently on Lenny’s podcast (link) has been doing its rounds online and understandably so. A take such as “the design process is dead” is not one you can just make without getting a bunch of raging designers on your neck.

I find Jenny’s perspective on the design process and its limitations today quite refreshing. Not because it’s new or revolutionary, but because it’s honest. I can relate strongly with her point that this idea of slowly discovering and then iterating customer problems through extensive research, persona artifacts, customer journeys, low fidelity prototypes etc. is not realistic. But agreeing that the rigid, step-by-step version of the process is unrealistic is different from considering it to be “dead”. I think disregarding the design process loses the foundation that makes craft, intuition, and speed possible in the first place.

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The design process is dead. Or is it?

Wens overall stance during her talk at Hatch last year is that the design process is too rigid and outdated for today’s tools and tech and therefore can no longer be trusted. Jenny poses the design process as a step-by-step formula that designers tend to follow religiously, focusing more on building artifacts like persona’s and journey maps rather than the actual end result.

It made people worship this process and spend a lot of time on these process artifacts, not the end result.

The focus on artifacts over end results becomes a problem in today’s age where AI tools enable non-designers to quickly prototype, engineers to ship without the need for low-fidelity mockups and designers to implement features on their own. Responsibilities aren’t so clear anymore (where they ever?) or rather: multiple roles now share the same responsibility. Prototyping (“vibecoding”) is the clearest example of that.

Jenny states:

“…the reality is like the user doesn’t give a … about the process artifacts you made or whether you made the perfect user journey. They care about the end experience that they’re feeling and seeing.”

This isn’t a hot take, it’s common sense. But also something that is easy to forget when you’re in the midst of your design work and creating a prototype or journey map is something tangible whereas “shaping a users feeling” or “making a user smile” is not.

However, I don’t think this is something that only came to light with the emergence of AI tools. For years already there has been a lot of pushback from designers against the idea that the design process requires be a step-by-step, linear approach. I even wrote about exactly this issue I have with design thinking back in 2022.

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My reality of actually working as a designer is that I genuinely can’t remember when (if ever) I followed the standard double diamond design process to a tee. Starting my work with plenty discovery and based user insights is a luxury, not a given. A deep understanding of your customer seems obvious, but is by far not standard. Slowly working out your concepts from low fidelity to highly interactive prototypes is an illusion because most of us find ourselves embedded in cross-functional teams that work in 2-week sprints.

Diamonds and spiderwebs

The reality of working as a designer is that everything you do is a compromise. You’re compromising an ideal user experience for an experience that can actually be shipped in time. The design process in real life reflects these complexities.

Let’s take a real example. I recently designed a new feature for Typeform. This particular feature was a new question type which required me to design something from scratch.

Figuring out what and why

Together with my PM I discuss and shape upcoming features by describing how they should work and what value they add. We base decisions on existing user research and if time allows, we might do another research round to fill knowledge gaps. This isn’t a rigid process where we create persona’s and maps just for the sake of it. It is a deliberate effort to understand the problem space before jumping to solutions.

Start design work fast and early

With a rough idea of what the feature should offer, I jump into design work. Sometimes this is a single-screen Figma mockup, sometimes a quick prototype in Bolt. The goal is to have something that I can share as early as possible. Jenny argues that PMs can now get to a prototype faster than you can write a problem statement. That’s fair enough, but I’m not spending a lot of time on writing problem statements either. I’m using the process flexibly, choosing the right fidelity for the moment. That’s not abandoning the design process, but rather adapting it to what we know and don’t know at a given moment.

Refining, compromising, iterating

Once the feature takes shape, I’m in constant conversation with my PM and engineering to scale back scope, push capabilities into future releases, and laser-focus on what truly offers value. Jenny champions “caring ruthlessly about details” and I agree with that. But that ruthless care doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens inside the constraints that a process helps you navigate, like timelines, technical limits, business needs. The process is what turns taste into something shippable.

As you can tell, I don’t follow the diverging-converging movement of the double diamond process step by step. Rather my process is a spiderweb where steps follow and cross each other. My process isn't the rigid double diamond Jenny critiques but it's not the absence of process either. It's something in between. It is structured enough to navigate complexity but flexible enough to adapt.

Solutions and smiles

Jenny Wen poses an alternative to the rigid design process. She presents three principles for how great work actually gets made:

1. Start with the solution to uncover problems worth solving

2. Operate on intuition.

3. Do something to make people smile.

The first take is an obvious one once you know that Jenny works as design lead at Anthropic. Thanks to AI tools we’re in a position where we can explore all problems and explore solutions for each of them to arrive at the problem that’s actually worth solving. Starting from a solution works when you're building on top of a rapidly evolving technology like her team is doing at Anthropic. But most designers aren't working at AI lab, instead they're designing checkout flows for e-commerce or dashboards for enterprise tools. In those contexts a solution without context is just a guess. There's a difference between starting fast and starting uninformed. My early design work is fast because I've already built context, not because I skipped it.

I agree with Wen that a strong design intuition is valuable, but designers don’t just magically have design intuition. Jenny says about intuition:

You have to use another part of your intuition in this new world to know how to get through a project. No one’s going to hand you this manual that’s going to solve all your problems.

But a design process is exactly that manual for new designers. It’s one of the fundamental things that help you build an intuition. The same way you learn how to drive a car and first learn about the correct way to hold your steering wheel, check your mirrors, learn all traffic signs and theory. Once you’re actually driving a car, you’re not frantically checking every mirror or making sure you hold the steering wheel the exact way your driver instructor taught you. Heck, you might have even forgotten half of the theory you learned. But you know how to drive a car safely because you’ve learned ‘a right way’ in the past. That intuition didn't come from nowhere. It’s the same for design. My design intuition came from years of working within a process, learning what matters at each stage and gradually internalizing it.

Jenny's third principle (“make people smile”) is less a method than an aspiration and therefore sounds as empty as statements like “You should bring delight to customers.” That’s neat, but for that you do need to know what and how to bring a smile to your customer’s face. Knowing what makes users smile and what’s feasible to ship requires the kind of deep understanding that a process supports. Delight isn’t a principle you can start from. It’s an outcome of understanding your users well enough to know what will land. Simply relying on technology or tools to inform you which solutions are possible and which problems are worth solving isn’t a method. In my work, the moments that would make a user smile came from understanding their frustrations first before setting out to delight them.

All three of Jenny's principles share the same blind spot. They assume a divide between process, strategy and craft. As if the process pulled us too far toward strategy at the expense of quality. I see strategy as part of your design craft. The “rigid” process she denounces is exactly what enables the kind of craft she's advocating for. It’s grounding work in deep customer understanding, exploring concepts, testing and improving. You can't double down on craft by abandoning the foundation it's built on.

There’s a place for process

Jenny Wens arguments why the design process is dead is threefold: the old “sequential” process can't keep up with AI-enabled speed, solutions should come before problem statements and the process focused too much on artifacts rather than end results. If AI raises the floor of what anyone can produce, the real differentiator lies in taste, iteration on details and intuition. Her answer is not a new process but a belief that every project needs its own process that’s guided by intuition, craft and a willingness to skip or remix steps.

While I find Jenny’s honesty here very refreshing, I think the idea that “there is no one size fits all” is an obvious insight that many designers have came to realize even before AI tools changed our roles, expectations and practice.

Your value as a designer is in honing that process to get to the best results,
not following one.

- Jenny Wen

Jenny is right in her observation that the roles and expectations of PMs and engineers are changing and because of that the role and expectations of designers changes and evolves too. For years designers have fought for a “seat at the table” and now that PMs and engineers are eating into our domain, our existence is questioned. But there's an uncomfortable undercurrent to her argument: that we should let the capabilities of AI tools dictate what problems are worth solving. That the technology comes first and the understanding follows. I think that's backwards. Tools should serve your understanding of the problem, not replace it.

I don’t think we should disregard the design process entirely as some kind of nonsense ritual that’s old-fashioned in today’s AI era. Quite the opposite: when everyone can do everything all at once, when every problem can be explored from every angle with little time cost, when the real differentiator is that “craft” (that vague word that’s everywhere but no one can fully grasp it), it becomes all the most important to take pause. To reflect. To have guiding principles that can be the foundation of your design intuition.

What about you?

I’d be curious to know: if the design process is dead, what exactly are we teaching the next generation of designers?

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