Don’t Trust the Process — Trust Your Process

Reflections on Anthropic Designer, Jenny Wen’s talk at Hatch

Source: Jenny Wen, The design process is dead

Jenny Wen’s talk at Hatch came with a provocative premise: intuition has been unfairly maligned in product and UX work, and the rigid, end-to-end UX process most of us were trained on is, for all practical purposes, dead.

She’s not entirely wrong. But I think the message needs a careful read — because in the wrong hands, “trust your intuition over the process” is exactly the kind of quote that gets cherry-picked to justify skipping UX altogether.

The Case for Intuition (and It’s a Good One)

Wen argues that intuition isn’t some mystical gift, you have to deliberately build it. She describes building hers through regular reviews of feature usage data, and by watching and rewatching user interviews and usability tests — not just from features she owned, but from ones she didn’t, to understand the user base.

This is a compelling and honest account of how senior practitioners actually develop their instincts. The longer you do this work, the more a poorly-designed flow or a misaligned feature assumption triggers a felt sense before you can even articulate why. That’s real, and it deserves more credit than our field typically gives it.

The Process She’s Calling Dead Might Be a Straw Man

Here’s my honest reaction to the “traditional process is dead” part of the argument: I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen that process implemented the way she describes it—beginning to end, step by step, no shortcuts, no adaptation. I’ve certainly used the methods. Note-and-votes, crazy 8s, personas, journey maps, stakeholder workshops— I’ve reached for those tools at various times. But always selectively, always calibrated to the project’s timeline, its stage of development, and what we already knew walking in.

The bookish, trust-the-process version of UX she describes may be less a lived reality than a useful foil. And Wen’s critique lands harder if you’ve experienced that foil as dogma — endless research artifacts, gorgeous deliverables that informed no decisions, brainstorming sessions that never closed.

What She’s Actually Saying (If You Listen Carefully)

Here’s the thing: Wen still watches user interviews. She still prototypes. She still looks at usage data to see if what she designed is actually being adopted. She hasn’t abandoned all the tools. It seems she’s just abandoned a certain relationship to many of them.

The nuance that I don’t think came through clearly enough in the talk is this: you need to know the rules before you can break the rules. The intuition she’s describing isn’t generic life experience. It’s not “I’ve worked in finance for ten years, so I can build software without ever talking to a user.” It’s pattern recognition built from many of the very methods she’s saying not to be enslaved by.

So maybe the real message isn’t “don’t trust the process.” It’s “trust your process” — the one you’ve built through years of doing the work, learning which tools fit which problems, and developing the judgment to know when a usability test is essential and when your gut, backed by a solid prototype, is enough.

The same applies to craft. Years of giving and receiving design critiques on colour, typography, hierarchy, visual weight, and interaction patterns. They’ve emmbeded something in you that’s hard to name but easy to feel when it’s missing. That’s not magic; it’s accumulated exposure to what works and what doesn’t, sharpened by the particular discipline of having to defend your decisions and absorb feedback on them. It’s one more reason “use your intuition” only means something coming from someone who’s put the reps in.

AI Changes the Calculus.

The traditional process she describes is, at its core, designed to get you to something testable as fast as possible. Discovery, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, all of it is in service of that moment where you can put something in front of a real user and find out if you’re right.

AI compresses that dramatically. You can sketch an idea, have a stakeholder conversation, craft a prompt, and have a testable prototype in a fraction of the time it once took. That changes the math on how much upfront process you need to justify before you start learning from real feedback.

But (and this is the part that matters) the underlying loop doesn’t change. Build, measure, learn, repeat. That’s not a UX artifact from a methodologies textbook, its always going to be the only way to learn. AI makes each iteration faster but it doesn’t eliminate the need to iterate.

UX Isn’t Dead. The Ritual Is.

The takeaway I’d offer is this: what’s dying isn’t UX (granted she never makes that claim) but the performance of UX is. The ritual of full research reports and journey map workshops and multi-week synthesis sprints as proxies for rigour and professionalism.

What Wen is pointing toward, is a more direct relationship between the designer and the user. Less ceremony, more contact. Less artifact production, more pattern recognition. Less note-and-votes and more joyfulness in the output. And yes, more trust in the hard-won intuition that comes from doing this work seriously over time.

That’s what UX has always been striving for.