Inside Anthropic: Claude Cowork Tutorial from Cowork's Design Lead (40 Min) | Jenny Wen
A rare inside look at how Cowork's design lead uses Cowork to ship products, plus the real origin story behind Cowork's development
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Jenny Wen.
Jenny is Cowork’s design lead. She gave me a rare inside look at how Anthropic operates — including how she uses Cowork to design and build products and the real story behind how Cowork was built. Anthropic is shipping new features every day and it was fascinating to see how they do it.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Jenny and I talked about:
(00:00) How design work has changed at Anthropic
(04:30) "My secret is that I actually use Cowork for most things now"
(05:19) Cowork demo: From messy user feedback into product insights
(14:41) "Every Monday Cowork gives me 3 vetted product ideas"
(23:09) The real story behind Cowork's development (10 days?)
(27:18) Exclusive look: Cowork prototypes that didn't ship
(34:01) How product planning works at Anthropic
(38:10) "If you feel like the ground is shifting, it's because it is."
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Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode
Jenny shared a lot of great insights so I’ve organized the takeaways into two sections:
How Jenny uses Cowork at Anthropic
How the Cowork team designs and ships products
How Jenny uses Cowork at Anthropic
Set up Cowork to deliver a product priorities deck every week. Jenny demoed using Cowork to summarize user feedback from customer calls and social posts. She then asked Cowork to use that feedback to create a product priorities deck. Finally, she scheduled a workflow to share an updated deck in Slack every Monday for her team to review.
Here’s a 1,500+ character Cowork prompt that I created to do all of the above in one-shot. Please make sure to replace [folder] with your local folder where you’ve pasted user feedback files and replace [product name] with your product name: