The idea for Claude Co-work, as a thinking partner for general knowledge workers, has been considered by Anthropic for approximately a year prior to its launch.

Jenny Wen uses Claude Co-work for most of her design tasks at Anthropic, excluding very nitty-gritty production code work.

Claude Co-work can be scheduled to perform tasks, such as generating product ideas and presentations, every Monday morning at 10 AM.

The initial shipped version of Claude Co-work, a few months prior to the interview, had a wizard-like experience and showed a lot of UI upfront to differentiate it from chat, but this was later stripped back due to competing visual elements.

The Claude Co-work team at Anthropic stays close to user feedback through traditional UXR, internal dogfooding, a running Slack channel, and monitoring social media and passionate users.

Internal sales employees at Anthropic were early users of Claude Code, using it to generate lead lists and call scripts, before transitioning to Co-work.