AI is putting Anthropic product organisation under pressure.

The fact that all product functions are not impacted by AI in the same way creates organisational unbalance.

This is the message hiding behind "The design process is dead".

Jenny Wen declared, at a Berlin conference and in Lenny's interview, that exploration rituals have been replaced by direct AI prototyping. I think there's another read.

A few things don't fully add up.

In that same interview, Jenny also explained "why Figma still matters for exploration": "exploring a lot of different options, that is still an important part of the design process."

And when you look at Anthropic's UX Researcher job descriptions, you find:
- "Identify the highest-leverage research questions"
- "Lead research initiatives that inform strategic product decisions"
- "Gather context and prioritize the most important research opportunities"

A strong signal that exploration is more alive than the headline suggests. At least the intention.

So what's the real tell?
Not all functions benefit from AI in the same way.

Coding can be heavily accelerated by AI: Arthur Mensch recently said Mistral-AI developers now work as AI-agents managers, they don't code anymore.

But for design (not yet), and even more for user research, it is different. AI can help you for large quantitative surveys. But for the qualitative part: talking to customers, observing behaviour, the AI leverage is much lower.

So when Jenny says everyone is building first, it might be less a new process and more an organisation under stress:
- Researchers can't keep up with the speed of the software team.
- Huge fundings create pressure that shifts the focus away from strategy to shipping.

The real lesson of this interview might be a broader organisational question:
- How do we build a Product Operating Model where functions with different AI leverage can co-exist? How do we make the structure evolve as the technology matures?
- How do we protect strategic thinking when the pressure to ship is this high?