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Claude Cowork Tutorial from Cowork's Design Lead

Mar 29, 2026· 40 min· 70K views·Watch on YouTube

Speaker

Jenny Wen, design lead at Anthropic, shows Peter Yang how she uses Claude Cowork and Claude Code and discusses Cowork’s design, development, and changing work practices.

Design through prototypes and collaboration

Wen describes a flexible workday spent across several projects, often reviewing working prototypes with engineers and product teammates. She still uses Figma for polish, but specs and planning documents are usually brief, with prioritization captured in a few bullet points.

Turning feedback into product ideas

Wen uses Cowork for most tasks, reserving Claude Code for detailed production code work. She demonstrates gathering themes from interview transcripts, social media, Reddit, and reviews, then producing a presentation and feature ideas in parallel. She suggests scheduling this process for Mondays at 10 a.m. to help the team start the week with insights and options.

From insights to team decisions

Wen asks Cowork to draft wireframe options for a step-by-step progress interface, then describes taking a promising direction into Figma or code for iteration. The team can use the resulting insights and artifacts as a shared starting point, while people contribute prototypes and ideas. She emphasizes that people still need to judge and curate what to build.

How Cowork took shape

Wen says Cowork grew from a year of prototypes and technical experiments, although the decision to ship came together in a 10-day sprint. Increased use of Claude Code for nontechnical tasks suggested demand for an agent product aimed at knowledge workers. Earlier Cowork designs felt too structured, so the shipped interface moved toward chat and a shared task list.

Planning and adapting as tools change

Wen describes monthly planning with a short list of priority projects, each assigned a directly responsible individual, alongside looser quarterly or half-year direction setting. She says useful visions now cover roughly three to six months and can take the form of prototypes that help teams align. Her advice to designers is to adapt as tools and roles change, taking inspiration from engineers who have already adjusted their work.

Takeaways

  • Use AI to turn scattered feedback into artifacts and options that help a team decide what to explore.
  • Keep people responsible for choosing which generated ideas are worth building.
  • Make planning documents concise when prototypes and ongoing discussion carry more of the detail.
  • Use short-term visual prototypes to align teams when technology and product direction change quickly.
  • Treat changing tools as a reason to question existing workflows and adapt.

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