Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

The design process is dead

2 Mar 2026 · 0 min

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A designer argues the traditional design process of discovery, divergence, and convergence is obsolete. AI tools that generate countless alternatives instantly have made the old workflow irrelevant. Designers need to abandon rigid processes and adapt to working with AI instead.

Don't trust the design process. This design process that designers have been taught where you go off and you do a bunch of research and discovery and then you diverge, you converge, diverge, converge. This process that we sort of treated as gospel and tried so hard to preserve, and we were like, trust the process that is. That's basically dead. I think it was sort of dying before the age of AI. But given now that engineers can go off and spin off their seven clods, I think as designers, we really have to let go of that process.