David Elgena

I’m honoured to be joining 𝕏 to lead design. I believe this is the most important platform in the world, and I can’t think of a more exciting place to help shape the future. I’m looking forward to working closely with @elonmusk, @nikitabier, and the rest of the team. I’m grateful for the opportunity, humbled to be part of it, and can't wait to get started!

Introducing the new @stitchbygoogle, Google’s vibe design platform that transforms natural language into high-fidelity designs in one seamless flow. 🎨Create with a smarter design agent: Describe a new business concept or app vision and see it take shape on an AI-native canvas. ⚡️ Iterate quickly: Stitch screens together into interactive prototypes and manage your brand with a portable design system. 🎤 Collaborate with voice: Use hands-free voice interactions to update layouts and explore new variations in real-time. Try it now (Age 18+ only. Currently available in English and in countries where Gemini is supported.) → stitch.withgoogle.com

My biggest takeaways from @jenny_wen (design lead at @AnthropicAI): 1. The traditional design process is breaking down. The classic discover-diverge-converge loop that designers have relied on for years doesn’t work when engineers can spin up seven coding agents and ship a working version before a designer finishes exploring options. 2. Design work is splitting into two distinct modes. The first is supporting execution: consulting with engineers as they build, giving feedback, polishing in code. The second is setting short-range vision, now scoped to three to six months instead of multi-year roadmaps. The vision work is still critical because when everyone can build anything fast, someone needs to point the team in a coherent direction. 3. Build trust through speed, not perfection. Anthropic ships products early, labels them research previews, and then iterates publicly based on real feedback. Jenny argues that what actually degrades a brand isn’t launching something rough; it’s launching something rough and then going silent. If you ship fast, respond to feedback visibly, and keep improving, users will trust you more, not less. 4. The most overlooked hire in design right now is the cracked new grad. Most companies are hiring senior designers with deep experience. Jenny argues that early-career people with blank slates, fast learning curves, and no attachment to legacy processes may be uniquely suited to this moment. They don’t carry baked-in rituals that are now obsolete, and their lack of expectations can actually be an advantage. 5. Chat as an interface isn’t going away. Despite expectations that chatbots were a temporary stop on the way to richer UIs, Jenny sees chat as a permanently valuable interface because it offers infinite flexibility. But she expects a hybrid future where models increasingly generate UI elements on the fly for specific tasks (like the interactive widgets Claude recently shipped) while chat remains the connective tissue between them. 6. Jenny went from design director (12 to 15 reports) back to IC. She questioned whether middle management had a safe future and wanted hands-on time during a period of rapid change. The IC time is giving her hard skills she wouldn’t have gained while managing. 7. AI will likely get better at taste and judgment. Jenny says designers may be holding onto “taste” as a moat too tightly. But someone still has to be accountable for what ships, the same way an engineer is accountable for AI-generated code. 8. Hire three archetypes: strong generalists, deep specialists, and “cracked new grads.” Strong generalists are “block-shaped” (80th percentile across multiple skills). Deep specialists are top 10% in one area. Cracked new grads—the most overlooked—have no baked-in processes and learn new tools fastest. 9. Figma is still essential, but for different reasons than before. Jenny says Figma remains the best tool for rapidly exploring 8 to 10 different design directions on a canvas, something that coding tools handle poorly because they’re too linear and create investment bias toward one direction. For micro-level visual and interaction decisions, spatial exploration still beats sequential iteration. 10. Low-leverage work is often the highest-leverage thing a manager can do. Jenny pushes back on the conventional management advice to ruthlessly prioritize only high-leverage tasks. She points to leaders who obsessively dogfood the product, repro bugs, and personally fix small issues—activities that seem “below” a senior leader but create deep product familiarity, set a cultural tone of care, and earn trust from the team in ways that strategic planning never can. Watch our full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=eh8bcB…