Adobe: Figma’s Dev Mode & Growth Beyond Designers
Former Product Manager at Figma
inpractise.com/articles/adobe-figmas-dev-mode-and-growth-beyond-designers
Former Product Manager at Figma
Interview Transcript
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Could we start with Adobe and then move into Figma? During your time at Figma, when you talked to customers who overlapped with Adobe's customers, what was your sense of Adobe's historical mission criticalities? Have they been strengthening or weakening, and how has that changed over the last five years compared to the previous ten?
One distinction to make is that even though Figma and Adobe operate in adjacent markets, their exact markets are quite different. Figma is a vector-based editing software, which is more native to digital screens and UI design. In contrast, many products in the Adobe suite, like Photoshop, are pixel-based, not vector. This means the use cases for Adobe Creative Cloud are fundamentally different from Figma's use cases today.
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Could we start with Adobe and then move into Figma? During your time at Figma, when you talked to customers who overlapped with Adobe's customers, what was your sense of Adobe's historical mission criticalities? Have they been strengthening or weakening, and how has that changed over the last five years compared to the previous ten?
A lot of Figma's traction and momentum come not only from creating a great product but also from a longstanding resentment against Adobe's market position. Many people using Figma today grew up or started their careers using Adobe products. Around 10 to 15 years ago, UI and UI UX design work was done using Adobe tools, not because they were purpose-built for UI or UX, but because they were the available tools on the internet.
This is a snippet of the transcript, sign up to read more.
Could we start with Adobe and then move into Figma? During your time at Figma, when you talked to customers who overlapped with Adobe's customers, what was your sense of Adobe's historical mission criticalities? Have they been strengthening or weakening, and how has that changed over the last five years compared to the previous ten?
The market has shifted from Adobe, primarily Photoshop in 2010 and 2011, to Sketch around 2016 and 2017, and eventually to Figma in 2019.
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