Why does the Figma acquisition *actually* matter?

also featuring: a short history of Experience-led transformation!

The takes

#DesignTwitter has feels…

And. People. Have. Takes.

But mine is the one to listen to. Why? People talking about Figma as “Multiplayer Design Software” kinda gets me going. Because that is such an easy thing to say, and it belies the actually really large-scale changes that the phrase masks.

The key thing is to think of Figma as the kind of tool that fundamentally shifts the way that people work together. It makes some work, that was previously very difficult and cumbersome, much easier to do. And not only does it change how certain things get done, it also alters people’s mindsets about what can be done.

Consultants are fond of saying that Digital Transformation is as much about Culture as about Digital – “it’s a mindset, not a new tool” – but this is exactly what a tool like Figma can do.

Figma is a favourite tool of consultants and design thinkers who promote digital transformation, but it also IS a digitally transformative tool in itself. What is happening right now in Marketing teams, Digital teams, Customer Service teams, Sales teams and IT teams is digital transformation, and in this respect Figma is just as interesting as Salesforce, SAP, Hubspot, or Adobe.

Why? In the next section I’m going to vastly oversimplify (and probably butcher!) some quite complicated org design / process design / change management concepts. Ad agencies and consulting firms will probably pick at it from opposite angles (but I’ve been at both, so let them), but take it from me that it’s the nub of the matter when it comes to thinking about what damage Figma was in the process of dealing to Adobe.

Let’s start with an exploration of the existing paradigm, where Adobe is king.

How the work is done – teams & Adobe’s clouds

There are broadly two categories of people who are involved in delivering marketing and digital materials to consumers – the Designers / Creatives, and Tech / Business people (let’s call the latter Operational folk). They each have their own tools that they use, and all of those tool categories with leading, or contending, products from within the Adobe suite (see “Teams & Tools”)

The way that these tools are organised is into Adobe’s “Clouds” – the Creative Cloud, the Experience Cloud, Advertising Cloud (see image “Creative Activities & Operational Activities”)

The operational people (the blue folk) live in Experience Cloud and Advertising cloud – the creatives will tut tut that they don’t actually care about “the craft” and are only chasing numbers:

the Direct / Digital Marketer lives in Advertising / Marketing Cloud (Adobe DSP, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target)
the Direct Sales team manages the Commerce storefront (Adobe: Hybris)
the Data people are looking at Analytics and building segments in DMP (AAM, AA) and
the webmaster manages site content with the CMS (AEM).

The creatives (in red), on the other hand, are generally thought of by the operational folk as sitting on their hands, waiting for a brief that they’re just waiting to criticise:

the Designers all use Photoshop and Illustrator (the digital ones Sketch)
anyone who ever went near flatplanning still use InDesign (writers didn’t will use a Markdown editor or Word), and
Video Editors use AfterEffects / Premiere.

Adobe’s role, and gaps in the system

Adobe’s coverage of all of these areas is quite incredible. What’s even more incredible is that relatively few people realise it. This is because the people on the left are – by and large – not interested in the tools used by the people on the right, and vice versa.

Adobe bundles Creative Cloud products together, so each side doesn’t generally even have login access to the tools they don’t use – if you ever want to confuse a IT person, try saying “I would like Adobe access, please” to them.

And in their day to day work, the two sides of this picture generally spend a lot of time waiting for instructions and deliverables from the other side, and feeding back (read: complaining) when the outputs aren’t to expectation.

Enter Figma.

So what does Figma do? Figma, and tools like it, bridges the gap between the two sides of the org, and makes it possible to speed up how they work together.

And the imperative for organisational agility is increasing. The reason is Experience Design.

Because smart people at smart analyst firms like Forrester tell brands that – in order to win in the modern economy – it’s not enough to produce cool ads that tell people how awesome your brand is. It’s only good enough if the entire Experience (capital E) of dealing with your brand is positive and consistent.

You saw an ad? Let’s hit you again but not with the same one. You walked in a store? The store assistant better be using the same vocabulary as your customer sales team. You bought an item? Better recommend the “next best purchase” - many of the business cases write themselves.

What does this do to organisations? It means that marketing has to talk to sales. Sales has to talk to after-sales. CRM data becomes more important as customers expect to be spoken to in more personalised and relevant ways. The applications of that data become more multi-faceted as it becomes possible to express personalisation across previously monolithic surfaces, like a website.

In short, a whole lot of conversations need to happen a whole lot more quickly than they were happening previously.

What tends to happen is people (often Consultants, or Digital Product people) start talking about empathy, as “providing a better experience to end-customers” becomes the anchor point and the raison d’être for all of these conversations (or it should, anyway). Design thinking happens. Workshops happen. People start talking about “agile” and “second operating systems” and “cross-functional.”

It’s no longer good, or fast, enough to let designers be designers and technologists be technologists.

In many cases your technology team is overseas – in Manila, Mumbai or Minsk. You’re trying so many new things every day, testing and learning, that attaching web design documents to emails just isn’t cutting it. Versioning issues crop up. You need a source of truth in the cloud. You need something with a built-in, in-line comment function where designers can clarify technical requirements, and technologists can clarify design requirements. These comments need to be placed in-situ with the design composition (like redlining on paper). You need something that can be viewed together in real-time OR asynchronously, not screen-shared.

You need a higher organisational metabolic rate.

Visualising that shift

What happens when you start using a tool like Figma is, you go from this…

… to this …

This is a pretty fundamental shift. Figma is not something like Photoshop or Word. It becomes part of the infrastructure - like email, plumbing, the phones, or meeting rooms. Among organisations that have gone some way on a transformation journey, the only comparably crucial SaaS product is probably Teams / Slack. And Adobe missed the boat with XD.

Figma may be tiny compared to Adobe’s market cap or recurring revenue (I haven’t looked this up, but it’s probably a few percentage points at best), but Figma was making progress faster than Adobe XD at becoming the “crux” (or the 3rd Culture, if you will!) between Design x Technology x Business.

At becoming “something to enable teams to work better together.”

Which sounds similar but is quite different from “a better tool for professionals to do their jobs” – Adobe’s zone.

And what’s more, the VERY people advocating for the important of Experience / Design Thinking are Accenture, Isobar, Huge, IDEO, and Forrester – traditionally Adobe’s strongest allies.

The fact that Figma breaks down organizational silos (rather than sitting within them), the increasing importance of this more convergent and collaborative type of work, and the speed with which that importance is growing, meant that it was only a matter of time before Figma became the most important tool in a larger and larger proportion of marketing / sales orgs.

So, no. Figma is not a “Multiplayer Design Software.”

It is (was) a business that poses a, on some timescale potentially existential, threat to Adobe’s centrality to creative/marketing teams. And a likely Christensenian Disruption story in the making.

Adobe simply had to buy them. For self-preservation, not for the revenue.