In 2010, Photoshop was ubiquitous. Whether you were editing a photo, making a poster, or designing a website, it happened in Photoshop.
2010年， Photoshop 无处不在。无论你是在编辑照片、制作海报，还是设计网站，这些都在 Photoshop 中完成。
Today, Adobe looks incredibly strong. They’ve had spectacular stock performance, thanks to clear-eyed management who’ve made bold bets that have paid off. Their transition to SaaS has been seamless, for which the public markets have rewarded them handsomely. And they’re historically one of the best companies at M&A; their product lineup is a testament to their ability to acquire new product lines and integrate them well into their multi-product ecosystem. Perhaps most importantly and least appreciated, they have dramatically sped up the cadence of their internal product development process and feedback loop. Like Microsoft, they have successfully shifted from a legacy company operating on an annual (or longer) release schedule to a truly cloud company shipping updates at a sub-weekly pace.
如今， Adobe 看起来非常强大。他们的股票表现非常出色，这要归功于目光敏锐的管理层，他们做出了大胆的赌注并获得了回报。他们向 SaaS 的转型非常顺利，公开市场也因此给予了他们丰厚的回报。而且，他们在历史上一直是并购方面最优秀的公司之一；他们的产品阵容证明了他们有能力收购新的产品线并将其很好地整合到他们的多产品生态系统中。也许最重要但最不被人们所欣赏的是，他们大大加快了内部产品开发过程和反馈循环的节奏。像 Microsoft 一样，他们成功地从一个按年（或更长）发布计划运营的传统公司转变为一个真正的云公司，以每周不到一次的频率发布更新。
Nevertheless, there are a few segments of design where they’re no longer the market leader. Companies like Figma, Sketch, and Canva are examples of products that have been able to become top products despite Adobe’s ubiquity in all things design. Figma showed up in Adobe’s annual report for the first time in 2019. They reprised in 2020, and I’m not uncertain they will continue to be in it going forward.
尽管如此，在设计的某些领域，他们不再是市场领导者。像 Figma、 Sketch 和 Canva 这样的公司是尽管 Adobe 在所有设计领域无处不在，但仍能成为顶级产品的例子。 Figma 首次出现在 Adobe 2019 年的年度报告中。他们在 2020 年再次出现，我不确定他们未来是否会继续出现在报告中。
How should we understand these market transitions and why these young companies are able to thrive, even against a strong incumbent like Adobe?
我们应该如何理解这些市场转变，以及为什么这些年轻公司能够在像 Adobe 这样强大的现有公司面前蓬勃发展？
These companies have distinct atomic concepts from Adobe. The primitives that their products are built around are fundamentally different from those of Adobe’s product lineup. It’s these different fundamental atomic concepts that turn Adobe’s advantage of an established product and existing userbase into a weakness that hinders their ability to counter these upstarts. The opportunity for these new atomic concepts to thrive is driven by the new use cases and types of users unearthed during market transitions.
这些公司与 Adobe 有着截然不同的原子概念。他们产品所基于的原始概念与 Adobe 的产品阵容有着根本的不同。正是这些不同的基本原子概念将 Adobe 既有产品和现有用户基础的优势转化为一种劣势，阻碍了他们应对这些新兴公司的能力。这些新原子概念得以蓬勃发展的机会是由市场转变过程中发现的新用例和用户类型推动的。
Understanding the phases of market transition and what drives them is a universal process worth examining.
理解市场转变的阶段及其驱动因素是一个值得研究的普遍过程。
New use cases: designing for digital
新用例：为数字设计
For most markets, there are advantages to being an incumbent. Markets converge as companies arrive at the preference frontier of customers. This leaves little potential energy for new startups to take advantage of.
对于大多数市场来说，作为现有公司是有优势的。随着公司到达客户偏好的前沿，市场趋于收敛。这为新创业公司留下的潜在能量很少。
Market entropy is good for new entrants.
市场熵对新进入者有利。
It’s not impossible to break into a market by brute force, but it’s hard. Very hard. Most successful companies, especially startups, have found tailwinds to harness that help pull them forward.
通过蛮力打入市场并非不可能，但很难。非常难。大多数成功的公司，尤其是初创公司，已经找到了可以利用的顺风，帮助他们前进。
Changing customer needs are the largest source of entropy in markets. When customer needs rapidly change, there is less advantage in being an incumbent. Instead, legacy companies are left with all the overhead and a product that no longer is what customers want.
客户需求的变化是市场中最大的熵源。当客户需求迅速变化时，作为现有公司就没有那么多优势了。相反，传统公司则留下了所有的开销和不再是客户所需的产品。
There are many causes of changing customer needs. Often there are new and growing segments of customers with different use cases. Existing products may work for them, but they aren’t ideal. The features they care about and how they value them are very different from the customers the legacy company is used to. Companies resist changing core parts of their product for every new use case since it’s costly in work, money, and attention. But every once in a while, what was once a small use case grows into one large enough to support its own company.
客户需求变化的原因有很多。通常会有新的和不断增长的客户群体，他们有不同的用例。现有产品可能对他们有用，但并不理想。他们关心的功能以及他们对这些功能的重视程度与传统公司习惯的客户非常不同。公司抵制为每个新用例更改产品核心部分，因为这在工作、金钱和注意力上都很昂贵。但偶尔，曾经的小用例会成长为足够大到可以支持自己的公司。
Other times the scale or dynamics of a market shift enough to make a product no longer work despite having been a great fit. Companies are often caught flat-footed by these situations because what they have done successfully for years suddenly starts to falter—and they aren’t sure why. Ebay is a good example of this. Their decentralized auction model was very good in a nascent internet economy when there was a scarcity of items being sold online. Once ecommerce became commonplace, price and speed became much more important factors and Ebay’s decentralized model was at a disadvantage. Amazon was much better at building economies of scale in this post-liquidity ecosystem.
有时，市场的规模或动态变化足以使产品不再适用，尽管它曾经非常适合。公司经常在这些情况下措手不及，因为他们多年来成功的做法突然开始动摇——他们不确定为什么。 Ebay 就是一个很好的例子。在互联网经济初期，在线销售的商品稀缺时，他们的去中心化拍卖模式非常好。一旦电子商务变得普遍，价格和速度就变得更加重要，而 Ebay 的去中心化模式处于劣势。 Amazon 在这个后流动性生态系统中更擅长建立规模经济。
Another source is when the customers themselves change. Often the function of a tool remains the same, but the type of user changes. These new types of customers often have different things they care about and resulting product needs.
另一个来源是当客户本身发生变化时。通常工具的功能保持不变，但用户类型发生变化。这些新类型的客户通常关心的事情和由此产生的产品需求不同。
The internet drove entirely new design use cases. Photoshop was built for editing photos and images. It’s a powerful tool that operates at the pixel level. However, many of these new uses weren’t about image manipulation. Images were a component—not the essence—of the job users were trying to accomplish.
互联网推动了全新的设计用例。 Photoshop 是为编辑照片和图像而构建的。它是一个在像素级别操作的强大工具。然而，许多这些新用途并不是关于图像处理。图像是用户试图完成的工作的一个组成部分——而不是本质。
For some users, this was designing digital products. Designers at software companies or any company with a website wanted to create the websites and software products they worked on. This is less about image manipulation and more about designing the UI and UX of these digital products. Vectors are more important than raster graphics. The complexity and process of designing these high-value designs also got increasingly more sophisticated. These designers worked with teams of other designers and non-designers. Their designs are part of a larger product development process and what mattered wasn’t just making a design, but how that the entire process could be improved to make collaboration easier and handoff of designs better. Iteratively.
对于一些用户来说，这是在设计数字产品。软件公司或任何有网站的公司的设计师都希望创建他们所工作的网页和软件产品。这与图像处理关系不大，而更多的是设计这些数字产品的 UI 和 UX。矢量比光栅图形更重要。这些高价值设计的复杂性和设计过程也变得越来越复杂。这些设计师与其他设计师和非设计师团队合作。他们的设计是更大产品开发过程的一部分，重要的不仅仅是制作设计，而是如何改进整个过程以使协作更容易和设计交接更好。迭代地。
The complexity of the designs and the components in the resulting code became more complex, too. The need for their tools to have a higher-level understanding of the components and variants became more important. It’s increasingly useful for designs to understand the same concepts and abstraction levels as the HTML and CSS in the resulting end product.
设计的复杂性和生成代码中的组件也变得更加复杂。他们的工具需要对组件和变体有更高层次的理解变得更加重要。设计越来越需要理解与最终产品中的 HTML 和 CSS 相同的概念和抽象级别。
For some users, this was designing content for social platforms, digital ads, or even wedding invitations. These were often made in Photoshop, but again, pixels are the wrong abstraction level. Images are not the sole component; they are just past of a larger design that includes graphics, text, and more. Similarly, the customers are very different. Many of the people now doing what is, in essence, design work don’t think of themselves as designers. They just have a very specific thing they want to create, with the least friction possible.
对于一些用户来说，这是在为社交平台、数字广告甚至婚礼请柬设计内容。这些通常是在 Photoshop 中制作的，但同样，像素是错误的抽象级别。图像不是唯一的组成部分；它们只是包含图形、文本等在内的更大设计的一部分。同样，客户也非常不同。现在做的本质上是设计工作的人中，许多人并不认为自己是设计师。他们只是有一个非常具体的东西想要创建，并且尽可能减少摩擦。
The internet dramatically scales up the volume and type of new use cases for design. In many ways, this helps Adobe. With platforms like Instagram, the number of people editing photos has expanded by many orders of magnitude. While editing on platforms like Instagram may have increased significantly, Adobe has been a huge beneficiary of the internet and the shift to cloud—and their stock price is a testament to this.
互联网极大地扩大了设计的新用例的数量和类型。在许多方面，这对 Adobe 有帮助。随着 Instagram 等平台的出现，编辑照片的人数增加了许多数量级。虽然在 Instagram 等平台上的编辑可能显著增加，但 Adobe 是互联网和向云转移的巨大受益者——他们的股价就是证明。
[KK Note: Platforms like Instagram strapping editors onto their social platforms and eating into Lightroom from the bottom up is well worth its own discussion. And perhaps someone will convince Mike Krieger to do the definitive piece on that.]
[KK 注：像 Instagram 这样的平台将编辑器绑在他们的社交平台上，并从底层侵蚀 Lightroom，这值得单独讨论。也许有人会说服 Mike Krieger 写一篇关于此的权威文章。]
Software may be eating the world. But it’s also building new worlds? I’m going to need a refresher on remembering the Andreessen Horowitz talking points
软件可能正在吞噬世界。但它也在构建新世界？我需要复习一下 Andreessen Horowitz 的谈话要点。
This is even more true in video. There are orders of magnitude more video creators as the ability to record video has become ubiquitous and the platforms where video is the default format have grown. Even more striking, many of the dominant video platforms—like Youtube—are purely distribution focused. They don’t even have any editing capabilities. Instead, companies like Adobe end up being large beneficiaries of this need.
在视频中更是如此。随着录制视频的能力变得无处不在，视频创作者的数量增加了许多数量级，更令人惊讶的是，许多主流视频平台——如 Youtube——纯粹专注于分发。他们甚至没有任何编辑功能。相反，像 Adobe 这样的公司最终成为这种需求的巨大受益者。
[KK Note: Platforms like Youtube still having not built any semblance of an editor into their platform is *also* well worth its own discussion. I’d say we’ll never know what could be, but then I look at TikTok and all is right with the world.]
[KK 注：像 Youtube 这样的平台仍然没有在其平台上构建任何形式的编辑器，这也值得单独讨论。我会说我们永远不会知道可能会是什么，但当我看到 TikTok 时，一切都变得正确了。]
But Adobe hasn’t captured it all. And in many of these new emergent use cases and customer types, Adobe has lost the lead to new startups.
但 Adobe 并没有全部捕捉到。在许多这些新兴的用例和客户类型中， Adobe 已经失去了对新创业公司的领先地位。
Tapping into the right level of abstraction
进入正确的抽象级别
The best products map to how customers think about their workflow. They match the abstraction level of their customers: not too high that it’s unusable, but not too low that it’s hard to use easily or extend in more complex ways.
最好的产品映射到客户如何思考他们的工作流程。它们匹配客户的抽象级别：不太高以至于无法使用，但也不太低以至于难以轻松使用或在更复杂的方式中扩展。
They choose the right atomic concepts.
他们选择了正确的原子概念。
These are the core concepts around which the entire product is built. They not only align with how customers think of their workflow, but often crystallizes for customers how they ought to. Great atomic concepts are honed and then extended and built upon in more complex compounds that…well for lack of a better word…compound.
这些是整个产品构建的核心概念。它们不仅与客户如何思考他们的工作流程一致，而且通常为客户明确了他们应该如何思考。伟大的原子概念经过打磨，然后在更复杂的化合物中扩展和构建……嗯，缺乏更好的词……化合。
Similar companies often have slightly different atomic concepts that end up making them meaningfully distinct. Photoshop is focused on pixels and images. Its focus is on editing images and pictures. And its functions operate by transforming them on a pixel level.
类似的公司通常有略微不同的原子概念，最终使它们在意义上有所不同。 Photoshop 专注于像素和图像。它的重点是编辑图像和照片。它的功能通过在像素级别上转换它们来操作。
Illustrator is similar, but it operates on vectors, not pixels. This is a higher level abstraction. Neither is better or worse, they are just more suited to different use cases. Photoshop is better for modifying images, while illustrator is built for designs where scale-free vectors are best.
Illustrator 类似，但它在矢量上操作，而不是像素。这是一个更高层次的抽象。两者都不是更好或更差，它们只是更适合不同的用例。 Photoshop 更适合修改图像，而 Illustrator 则是为无尺度矢量最适合的设计而构建的。
Sketch, like Illustrator, is vector based. But is designed for building digital products which means things like operating at a project level. It is not individual designs, but crafting entire products and user interfaces—and the needs for repeatability and consistency inherent to that.
Sketch 像 Illustrator 一样，是基于矢量的。但它是为构建数字产品而设计的，这意味着在项目级别上操作。它不是单个设计，而是制作整个产品和用户界面——以及与此相关的可重复性和一致性需求。
Figma builds on Sketch’s approach, but also includes a greater focus on not just projects but the entire collaborative process as the relevant scope. Similarly, it also treats higher level abstractions like plugins, community, and more as equally important concepts.
Figma 建立在 Sketch 的方法之上，但也更注重不仅仅是项目，而是整个协作过程作为相关范围。同样，它还将插件、社区等更高层次的抽象视为同等重要的概念。
Canva is similar to Photoshop and Illustrator, but its users aren’t designers who care about low level tools. Instead Canva’s core atomic concepts are around the different templates and components to help them easily accomplish the job they are doing. And the designs they are working on are not quite at the project level of making a digital product. They are canvases that include images and design.
Canva 类似于 Photoshop 和 Illustrator，但其用户不是关心低级工具的设计师。相反，Canva 的核心原子概念围绕着不同的模板和组件，以帮助他们轻松完成工作。他们正在制作的设计并不是数字产品的项目级别。它们是包含图像和设计的画布。
There are many more axes, but they don’t fit in this stupid 2D chart
还有很多轴线，但它们不适合这个愚蠢的二维图表。
Atomic concepts are fundamentally linked to the core loops of a company. Expanding or changing these loops often involves adding to a company’s vocabulary of atomic concepts or adding them together in more complex ways.
原子概念从根本上与公司的核心循环相关。扩展或改变这些循环通常涉及增加公司的原子概念词汇或以更复杂的方式将它们结合在一起。
Emergent use cases and new customer types lead to new ideal atomic concepts. These new workflows and different customers have different priorities than existing customers. How they think about their problems and weight possible solutions is different, even if often the end output has similarities. Of course, astute readers will pick up that causality is reversed here. New types of customers are a good proxy for where to pay attention. But it is actually the changed atomic concepts that are what make startups a compelling contender against incumbents in the space.
新兴的用例和新的客户类型引导出新的理想原子概念。这些新的工作流程和不同的客户比现有客户有不同的优先级。他们如何思考他们的问题以及权衡可能的解决方案是不同的，即使最终输出通常有相似之处。当然，敏锐的读者会发现这里的因果关系是颠倒的。新类型的客户是值得关注的好代理。但实际上，是改变了的原子概念使得初创公司在这个领域成为现有公司的有力竞争者。
Customers don’t care about your technical architecture or internal org structure. When these no longer align with the job they are trying to do, then all the sprawl of the company becomes harmful, not helpful. These are the core bedrock that are much more difficult for a company to change mid-flight. Everything that makes an established company strong is built on top of this foundation and will fight back against changing them. Take Blockbuster and its reliance on physical stores and late fees. People often fall into the easy narrative that incumbents are asleep at the wheel. That they are too stupid to see the coming threat. This can be true but it isn’t the most common reason. Contrary to popular belief, many execs at Blockbuster not only saw the threat Netflix posed, but also the opportunity for Blockbuster to have claimed the mantle Netflix now holds. They even spun up a team to take Netflix head on. But what made retail stores and late fees so powerful and profitable for Blockbuster is also what made them so hard to displace. Every move to prepare Blockbuster’s core for a digital future was resisted by execs who generated more revenue, store operators who were livid at being cut out, and Wall Street investors uncomfortable with turning a consistent business into a high risk venture.
客户不关心你的技术架构或内部组织结构。当这些不再与他们试图完成的工作对齐时，公司的一切扩展都变得有害而不是有益。这些是公司在飞行中更难改变的核心基石。使一个成熟公司强大的所有东西都建立在这个基础之上，并会反抗改变它们。以 Blockbuster 及其对实体店和滞纳金的依赖为例。人们常常陷入一个简单的叙述，即现有公司在方向盘上睡着了。他们太愚蠢了，看不到即将到来的威胁。这可能是真的，但这不是最常见的原因。与普遍看法相反，Blockbuster 的许多高管不仅看到了 Netflix 带来的威胁，还看到了 Blockbuster 可以占据 Netflix 现在所拥有的地位的机会。他们甚至组建了一个团队来正面迎战 Netflix。但使实体店和滞纳金对 Blockbuster 如此强大和有利可图的东西也是使它们难以取代的原因。每一个为 Blockbuster 的核心准备数字未来的举动都遭到了产生更多收入的高管、被排除在外的店铺运营商以及对将一个稳定的业务转变为高风险企业感到不安的华尔街投资者的抵制。
Rare is the company that can change its core atomic concepts. It’s why companies like Amazon are so impressive and so daunting. Startups thrive by finding asymmetric angles on incumbents that they are unable to follow. What is safe from a company with no sacred cows?
能够改变其核心原子概念的公司是罕见的。这就是为什么像 Amazon 这样的公司如此令人印象深刻和令人畏惧的原因。初创公司通过找到现有公司无法跟随的非对称角度来蓬勃发展。对于一家没有神圣不可侵犯的公司的安全是什么？
Understanding the core abstraction levels of a company is hard to understand from a distance. Which is why looking for emergent customer types with different needs is a useful substitute.
理解一家公司的核心抽象级别从远处很难理解。这就是为什么寻找具有不同需求的新兴客户类型是一个有用的替代方法。
Figma bet on collaborative product design
Figma 押注于协作产品设计
Sketch was the company to first understand the market opportunity in designing digital products. Launched in 2010, Sketch was built entirely for designing the UI and UX of these products. Its atomic concepts were those best for digital products: vectors and projects. These were also what made it hard for Adobe to compete with their pre-existing product line.
Sketch 是第一家理解设计数字产品的市场机会的公司。2010年推出的 Sketch 完全是为设计这些产品的 UI 和 UX 而构建的。它的原子概念是最适合数字产品的：矢量和项目。这些也是使 Adobe 难以与其现有产品线竞争的原因。
In a classic innovator’s dilemma, Sketch’s best feature against Adobe was that it dropped everything that wasn’t best for making digital products. This allowed it to focus only on creating the best experience for vector-based digital design. Unlike Photoshop, it was vector based. And unlike Illustrator it was built with larger complex projects as the focus rather than specific isolated designs.
在经典的创新者困境中，Sketch 对抗 Adobe 的最佳特性是它放弃了所有不适合制作数字产品的东西。这使得它只专注于为基于矢量的数字设计创造最佳体验。与 Photoshop 不同，它是基于矢量的。与 Illustrator 不同，它是以更大的复杂项目为重点，而不是具体的孤立设计。
In retrospect, Sketch stopped at a half measure. Designers creating digital products did need vector-based design tools. And Sketch also understood that they were working on more complex projects vs one off designs that needed better project-first features. But these designers were also often working on teams—both with other designers and, more importantly, with non-designers. They weren’t designing in isolation, but as part of a larger process.
回顾起来，Sketch 停在了半途。创建数字产品的设计师确实需要基于矢量的设计工具。Sketch 也明白他们正在处理更复杂的项目，而不是一次性的设计，这需要更好的项目优先功能。但这些设计师 也 经常在团队中工作——既与其他设计师合作，更重要的是与非设计师合作。他们不是孤立地设计，而是作为更大过程的一部分。
Sketch, like Adobe before it, lacked in this area. Everything from Sketch’s technical architecture and desktop based product to its pricing model and platform structure were a poor fit for this collaboration. The demand for these features could be seen in the messy ways that companies hacked together solutions to this and the many products that sprung up to fill these holes. Companies like Zeplin, Sympli, and Invision grew out of designers’ needs for better ways to coordinate with the other designers, PMs, and engineers they worked with. Sketch’s plugin system, like Adobe’s, felt more bolted on than core to the platform.
Sketch 像之前的 Adobe 一样，在这一领域缺乏一切。从 Sketch 的技术架构和基于桌面的产品到其定价模式和平台结构都不适合这种协作。对这些功能的需求可以在公司拼凑解决方案的混乱方式以及许多填补这些空白的产品中看到。像 Zeplin、Sympli 和 Invision 这样的公司是从设计师对更好方式的需求中成长起来的，以便与他们合作的其他设计师、PM 和工程师协调。Sketch 的插件系统，像 Adobe 的一样，感觉更像是附加的，而不是平台的核心。
When Figma first started, it was more directly a Photoshop competitor. Over its first two years, though, they shifted their focus specifically to designers working on the UI and UX of digital products as they talked to more potential users. Building out the product to enable collaboration uniquely was key to these designers. Doing this was non-trivial. The technical challenges to do so were very hard, though Figma was well set up due to Evan Wallace’s technical prowess and specific knowledge in new technologies like WebGL. Building for collaboration to its fullest extent has led Figma to rethink almost all of the company—leading to new pricing models, distribution models, and sharing form factors.
当 Figma 刚开始时，它更直接地是 Photoshop 的竞争对手。然而，在最初的两年里，他们将重点转向了专门为从事数字产品 UI 和 UX 的设计师，因为他们与更多潜在用户进行了交谈。为产品构建独特的协作功能是这些设计师的关键。做到这一点并非易事。尽管技术挑战非常艰巨，但由于 Evan Wallace 的技术实力和对 WebGL 等新技术的特定知识，Figma 设置得很好。为协作构建到最大程度使 Figma 重新思考了几乎整个公司——导致了新的定价模式、分销模式和共享形式。
For those interested in reading more on Figma, I have a prior post that can be found here so will avoid rehashing many of the same observations. Figma’s success came as it honed in on this growing use case of complex digital products built by larger teams of designers and non-designers—and in finding the atomic concepts that were uniquely needed for this new skew of users.
对于那些有兴趣阅读更多关于 Figma 的人，我有一篇之前的文章可以在这里找到，所以将避免重复许多相同的观察。Figma 的成功来自于它专注于由更大的设计师和非设计师团队构建的复杂数字产品的这一不断增长的用例——并找到了这一新用户群体独特需要的原子概念。
As discussed in Why Figma Wins, over the last few years this is most visible in their expansion into larger enterprise customers. Large companies have the same (if not greater) need for design tools that are built for the collaboration in their org as small startups or smaller teams within them. However, the set of features and tools they need around this look very different from a small team. When Figma started, it found its fit first with small teams, but as entire large companies started to look at it seriously it needed to understand how to think about collaboration and building a design tool not just at a team level—but at the scale of an entire company.
正如在为什么 Figma 赢中讨论的那样，在过去的几年里，这在他们向更大的企业客户扩展中最为明显。大公司对为其组织中的协作而构建的设计工具有同样（如果不是更大）的需求，就像小型初创公司或其中的小型团队一样。然而，他们需要的功能和工具集与小团队的看起来非常不同。当 Figma 开始时，它首先找到了与小团队的契合，但随着整个大公司开始认真对待它，它需要理解如何思考协作和构建一个不仅在团队层面而且在整个公司规模上的设计工具。
Canva bet on marketing design by non-designers
Canva 押注于非设计师的营销设计
With the rise of digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, marketing and advertising have increasingly shifted online. Online advertising has many differences from traditional advertising. Most notably, it is much faster paced—and often more targeted. Companies now do many small variations on the same campaign: testing which versions do best, making personalized versions for different customer cohorts, and adjusting them to the different required form factors of each ad platform. The traditional process of having a few large campaigns each year looks increasingly archaic. The cadence was a function of the primary channels being areas like TV and print, where campaigns are costly so only a few large campaigns can be run a year. As the channels shift, the campaigns, tools, and teams adjust to match the new dynamics.
随着 Facebook、Instagram 和 Youtube 等数字平台的兴起，营销和广告越来越多地转移到线上。在线广告与传统广告有许多不同之处。最显著的是，它的节奏更快——而且通常更有针对性。公司现在对同一活动进行许多小的变体：测试哪个版本效果最好，为不同的客户群体制作个性化版本，并根据每个广告平台的不同要求调整它们。每年进行几次大型活动的传统过程看起来越来越陈旧。节奏是主要渠道是电视和印刷等领域的一个函数，在这些领域，活动成本高昂，因此每年只能进行几次大型活动。随着渠道的转变，活动、工具和团队也会调整以适应新的动态。
The fast and the furious
速度与激情
Increasingly, marketing teams don’t need whole design teams working on each campaign. Rather, they want tools that made it easy for them to adjust their marketing designs in small ways—like being able to format it for both their instagram ad as well as their Youtube banner. The background of the person needed to do this changes, too. Instead of hiring design agencies, companies bring this work in house, both because more of the work can be done by non-designers and because the pace of iterations makes working with an external agency too slow.
越来越多的情况下，营销团队不需要整个设计团队来处理每个活动。相反，他们需要能够让他们轻松调整营销设计的工具——例如能够将其格式化为 Instagram 广告和 Youtube 横幅。需要做这项工作的人背景也发生了变化。公司不再雇佣设计机构，而是将这项工作带到内部，既因为更多的工作可以由非设计师完成，也因为迭代的速度使得与外部机构合作太慢。
Once again I am asking you to be impressed by my multimedia use of graphics, drawings, and logos
我再次请求你对我使用图形、绘图和标志的多媒体感到印象深刻。
Marketers and people posting on Instagram don’t think of the design work they want to do in terms of pixels. It’s the wrong abstraction level. They aren’t trying to directly edit the photos themselves. The photos are just an aspect of the specific goal they have in mind. They think of it in terms of the aesthetics and purpose of the design—not just the images but also the text and graphics and more.
营销人员和在 Instagram 上发帖的人不会以像素的方式思考他们想要做的设计工作。这是错误的抽象级别。他们不是试图直接编辑照片。照片只是他们心中具体目标的一个方面。他们从设计的美学和目的来考虑它——不仅仅是图像，还有文本和图形等。
Photoshop can do everything they want, but it is too low level. Photoshop’s atomic concepts are images and pixels. Editing at the pixel level is perfect for photos and image manipulation. Canva operates at a higher abstraction level—the one its users care about. Canva designs start with their purpose in mind, whether that’s designing a pitch deck, an Instagram post, or a wedding invitation. Canva has templates and layouts built for that specific purpose, while making it easy for users to add their own creativity, whether by putting in their own photos or using any of the many graphics and components made by the community.
Photoshop 可以做他们想要的一切，但它的级别太低。Photoshop 的原子概念是图像和像素。在像素级别编辑非常适合照片和图像处理。Canva 在更高的抽象级别上操作——用户关心的那个级别。Canva 的设计从他们的目的开始，无论是设计演示文稿、Instagram 帖子还是婚礼请柬。Canva 有为特定目的构建的模板和布局，同时使用户可以轻松添加自己的创意，无论是通过放入自己的照片还是使用社区制作的许多图形和组件。
This need is even more felt by SMBs and teams who can’t have a full design team work on every project. Canva’s lightweight editing with easy templates and process for making many small changes like formatting for different social platforms made it ideal for these customers.
这种需求在无法让整个设计团队参与每个项目的中小企业和团队中更为明显。Canva 的轻量级编辑与简单模板和流程相结合，使其成为这些客户的理想选择。
This also allows Canva to extend its platform around these molecular levels. Canva’s distribution is driven in large part by their SEO. Unsurprisingly, the very same use cases people use Canva for are what people looking for design tools want to do and search Google for. With their product and templates built around these use cases, it’s easy for Canva to expose that externally and have lots of templates and examples ready to go for potential new users looking to do a specific design. Everything about their user acquisition and onboarding is built around the specific use cases people have and Canva’s atomic concepts. They are built around the functional workflows people have, whether that’s making a Twitter background photo, a wedding invite, or a keynote presentation. And Canva is committed to making that as easy as possible.
这也使 Canva 能够围绕这些分子级别扩展其平台。Canva 的分发在很大程度上由其 SEO 驱动。不出所料，人们使用 Canva 的用例正是那些寻找设计工具的人们想要做的，并在 Google 上搜索的内容。随着他们的产品和模板围绕这些用例构建，Canva 很容易将其外部展示，并为潜在的新用户准备大量模板和示例，这些用户希望进行特定设计。他们的用户获取和入职的所有内容都围绕人们的具体用例和 Canva 的原子概念构建。它们围绕人们的功能工作流程构建，无论是制作 Twitter 背景照片、婚礼请柬还是主题演讲。Canva 致力于使这一过程尽可能简单。
There is something very illuminati about this pyramid and sun. You heard it here first
这个金字塔和太阳有点共济会的感觉。你是第一个听到的。
Defensibility through becoming a platform
通过成为平台来增强防御能力
As they’ve grown, Canva has expanded their ecosystem by creating marketplaces and communities around templates, layouts, fonts, and more. Most users don’t want to build from scratch. With Canva’s marketplaces there is an entire ecosystem of pre-built components they can use, both free and paid.
随着 Canva 的发展，他们通过围绕模板、布局、字体等创建市场和社区来扩展他们的生态系统。大多数用户不想从头开始构建。通过 Canva 的市场，有一个完整的预构建组件生态系统供他们使用，包括免费和付费的。
Canva having this strong ecosystem of add-ons is very powerful. Add-ons allow Canva to address the huge scale and varied needs of all its customers, far more than one company could ever do on its own. This makes it possible for each customer to use Canva in a way that will be personalized for exactly the use case and aesthetic they care about.
Canva 拥有这个强大的附加组件生态系统非常强大。附加组件使 Canva 能够满足所有客户的巨大规模和多样化需求，远远超过一家公司单独能够做到的。这使得每个客户都可以以个性化的方式使用 Canva，正好符合他们关心的用例和美学。
I did not repurpose the first chart. No one will believe you. shhhhh
我没有重新利用第一个图表。没有人会相信你。嘘。
There is nothing sadder than the fact that no one will build a Procreate x Figma integration JUST. FOR. ME.
没有什么比没有人为我单独构建 Procreate 和 Figma 集成更令人悲伤的了。
Creating free and paid add-ons have long been a staple for most design tools. However, they haven’t been tightly integrated into the product, adding friction for users. In contrast, Canva builds add-ons seamlessly and directly into the product, making it easy for users to access them directly and leading to higher usage. Treating these marketplaces as first parties has a number of additional benefits. Beyond increasing the value of the product, it also cements platform network effects for Canva. A growing community of creators monetizes by selling add-ons for Canva; this reinforces Canva as the tool to use with the most robust ecosystem.
创建免费和付费的附加组件长期以来一直是大多数设计工具的主打产品。然而，它们并没有紧密集成到产品中，增加了用户的摩擦。相比之下，Canva 将附加组件无缝且直接地集成到产品中，使用户可以直接访问它们，从而提高使用率。将这些市场视为第一方有许多额外的好处。除了增加产品的价值外，它还巩固了 Canva 的平台网络效应。一个不断增长的创作者社区通过销售 Canva 的附加组件来实现货币化；这强化了 Canva 作为拥有最强大生态系统的工具的地位。
There is entire category of ecosystem loops that no one seems to talk about. Ecosystem loops deserve love too
有一整类生态系统循环似乎没有人谈论。生态系统循环也值得关注。
This is just one example of how companies can use platform network effects to extend and defend their beachhead. There are few sources of defensibility stronger than the cross-side network effects of platforms. It makes it hard for any new competitors to get traction. Without a large enough user base, a new platform can’t attract developers to build on top of it. As a result, new competitors also lack the ecosystem of add-ons to meet all the needs of and attract users. This is why platforms are so enduring. They allow companies to scale the needs they meet beyond what’s possible for a single company and they create chicken and egg problems for any competitor hoping to follow.
这只是公司如何利用平台网络效应来扩展和捍卫其滩头阵地的一个例子。很少有比平台的跨边网络效应更强的防御来源。它使任何新竞争对手都难以获得牵引力。没有足够大的用户基础，新平台无法吸引开发人员在其上构建。因此，新竞争对手也缺乏附加组件的生态系统来满足所有需求并吸引用户。这就是为什么平台如此持久的原因。它们使公司能够扩展其满足的需求，超出单个公司可能实现的范围，并为任何希望跟随的竞争对手创造了鸡和蛋的问题。
Extending this playbook to other spaces
将此策略扩展到其他领域
Design isn’t unique among fields. All these same factors that are driving new and large use cases in demand are similarly arriving in most fields, especially in all forms of digital content. It’s inevitable we will see many of these same changes happen to video as they have in design and photography, though the specific use cases and needs that emerge will look different.
设计在各个领域中并不独特。所有这些推动新和大规模用例需求的因素同样出现在大多数领域，尤其是所有形式的数字内容中。我们不可避免地会看到许多这些相同的变化发生在视频中，就像它们在设计和摄影中一样，尽管出现的具体用例和需求会有所不同。
The most active area obviously undergoing this market transition right now is the broader productivity space. Over the last few years, many of these new companies (Airtable, Notion, Coda, Roam, Retool, Webflow, and Loom, to name a few) have seen remarkable early traction. But it’s also hard to delineate what the exact spaces are within productivity and collaboration and which companies cluster together in which buckets. Many of the companies have lots of product roadmap overlap as they each navigate the amorphous high-dimensional space of customer types and needs.
目前显然正在经历这种市场转变的最活跃领域是更广泛的生产力空间。在过去的几年里，许多这些新公司（如 Airtable、Notion、Coda、Roam、Retool、Webflow 和 Loom 等）在早期取得了显著的牵引力。但也很难划定生产力和协作中的确切空间以及哪些公司聚集在哪些桶中。许多公司在产品路线图上有很多重叠，因为它们各自在客户类型和需求的无定形高维空间中导航。
Even for those companies with early success, many have yet to crisply define the atomic concepts they’re betting on and to position themselves accordingly. Which are competitors with which? Who are their customers and which use cases will be the most important workflows to build around? What factors will determine which companies succeed and centralize their markets?
即使对于那些早期成功的公司，许多公司还没有清晰地定义他们所押注的原子概念并相应地定位自己。哪些是竞争对手？他们的客户是谁，哪些用例将是最重要的工作流程？哪些因素将决定哪些公司成功并集中他们的市场？
Companies have trouble navigating these questions because customers themselves don’t think precisely about what they really want. These companies have the opportunity to change how customers think about their own workflows. The best companies introduce better atomic concepts and help push their customers forward. Strong enough products will have ecosystems around them whether or not the companies actively manage it. The best companies don’t just benefit from these ecosystems, they build their platforms to enable and direct these ecosystems in ways that empower their customers more.
公司在解决这些问题时遇到困难，因为客户自己并没有准确地思考他们真正想要什么。这些公司有机会改变客户对自己工作流程的思考方式。最好的公司引入更好的原子概念并帮助推动他们的客户前进。足够强大的产品将拥有围绕它们的生态系统，无论公司是否积极管理它。最好的公司不仅从这些生态系统中受益，他们还构建他们的平台，以使这些生态系统能够并引导这些生态系统，以更好地赋能他们的客户。
Figma is beginning to expand its scope with new initiatives like plugins and communities. These are not the only ones I expect we’ll see (and there’s one that I’m particularly excited to see how they tackle) but they are core ones. As discussed more in Why Figma Wins, if these work they help expand the ecosystems around Figma, enabling users with new abilities and ways to engage with each other. An ecosystem also creates both defensibility and extensibility for Figma.
除了设计和生产力之外，今天许多公司正处于这些决策的关键点。让产品的核心循环工作是一个巨大的努力，非常罕见。对于那些做到这一点的公司，他们接下来面临的问题是接下来会发生什么。
Beyond design and productivity, many companies today are right at the crux of these decisions. Getting a product’s core loop to work is a tremendous effort and very rare. For those who do, they are then faced with the question of what comes next.
这些公司可以（并且已经）在其核心产品上轻松获得数十亿美元的估值。如果他们想要上市或被收购，他们可以这样做。但他们也处于可以喘口气、退一步思考他们未来十年轨迹会是什么样子以及如果他们有雄心壮志，他们的路线图的下一个步骤会是什么的地步。对于他们中的大多数人来说，这将涉及其原子概念的根本扩展。多产品或成为平台是成为更有意义的公司的关键。
These companies can (and have) comfortably gotten to single digit billions in valuation on their core products. If they want to go public or be acquired, they can do that. But they are also at the point where they can catch their breath, take a step back, and think about what the next decade of their trajectory looks like and what would be next in their roadmap’s sequencing if they were ambitious. For most of them, it will involve fundamental expansions of their atomic concepts. Going multi-product or becoming a platform is the key to compounding into significantly more meaningful companies.
尽管有关于战略的所有讨论，实际运营初创公司往往更多是对战术和执行的考验，而不是战略。对此的少数例外之一是公司在其最核心的循环中进行新添加时。产品市场契合前是这些时刻中最常见的。但从单一产品到平台（或多产品）的过渡是大多数成功公司经历的另一个常见过渡。
For all the discussion on strategy, running an actual startup is often more a test of tactics and execution than strategy. One of the few exceptions to this is when companies are making new additions to their most core loops. Pre-product market fit is the most common of these moments. But the transition from a single product to a platform (or multi-product) is another common one that most successful companies experience.
尽管有关于战略的所有讨论，实际运营初创公司往往更多是对战术和执行的考验，而不是战略。对此的少数例外之一是公司在其最核心的循环中进行新添加时。产品市场契合前是这些时刻中最常见的。但从单一产品到平台（或多产品）的过渡是大多数成功公司经历的另一个常见过渡。
Figma and Canva are examples of companies going through this expansion, but they are far from alone. Across the industry you can see a cohort of tech companies at this stage. Companies like Notion, Airtable, and Flexport are all beginning their explorations of the next major expansion of their products and platforms. While not done, they have been successful in building out their core product. As they think about their ambitions for the next decade, they will have to extend their product in fundamental ways.
这样的公司都在开始探索其产品和平台的下一个重大扩展。虽然尚未完成，但他们在构建其核心产品方面取得了成功。当他们思考未来十年的雄心时，他们将不得不以根本的方式扩展其产品。
Final thoughts
Often the smell test of a company is how easily it can be dimensionally reduced. It’s like some variant of Kolmogorov complexity. How few core elements can maximally explain it? People fairly push back that companies are intrinsically messy and cannot be compressed in this way. It is often true that VCs and outsiders simplify their view of companies in ways that are easier to remember but useless in practice. The flaws in this dimensionality reduction aren’t reasons to ignore it—they are the reason it is important.
复杂性的某种变体。多少核心元素可以最大限度地解释它？人们公平地反驳说，公司本质上是混乱的，不能以这种方式压缩。风险投资者和外部人士简化他们对公司的看法，以便更容易记住，但在实践中无用，这通常是事实。这种维度压缩的缺陷不是忽视它的理由——它们是它重要的原因。
As a founder, nobody is going to understand the full nuance of your company like you will. Everyone else does see a simplified, compressed, and sadly imperfect shadow of your company. Founders repeatedly underestimate the degree to which their products are complex and opaque to outsiders, because they have it fully loaded in cache. They have seen every iteration and revision and imagined in painful detail all the alternate lives their product could have lived.
作为创始人，没有人会像你一样理解你公司的全部细微差别。其他人确实看到的是你公司的简化、压缩和遗憾地不完美的影子。创始人反复低估了他们的产品对外部人士来说是多么复杂和不透明，因为他们已经完全加载在缓存中。他们看到了每一次迭代和修订，并在痛苦的细节中想象了他们的产品可能经历的所有替代生活。
Most users never talk to someone at a company. Even if they do, the vast majority of their interactions with a company are with the product. Your users know nothing about how your company operates. They don’t see all the late night whiteboarding sessions and careful deliberations that led to the specifics of each feature they use or the many iterations that were tested and rolled back and refined. They often only understand half of how your product can be used, much less your vision for how it should be used as it matures. And your future potential users don’t even know you exist.
大多数用户从未与公司中的某人交谈过。即使他们这样做了，他们与公司的大多数互动都是通过产品进行的。你的用户对你的公司如何运作一无所知。他们看不到所有深夜的白板会议和仔细的讨论，这些讨论导致了他们使用的每个功能的具体细节，或者许多被测试、回滚和改进的迭代。他们通常只了解你的产品如何使用的一半，更不用说你对它成熟后如何使用的愿景。你的未来潜在用户甚至不知道你存在。
As product becomes the driver of most interactions with a company, external gatekeepers and proselytizers like journalists and bankers become less important. Instead, it’s the clarity of a company’s product and product—and founder—driven distribution that become most key. We’re still early on in companies internalizing this.
随着产品成为公司大多数互动的驱动力，像记者和银行家这样的外部守门人和传教士变得不那么重要。相反，公司产品的清晰度以及由创始人驱动的分销变得最关键。公司在内化这一点上仍处于早期阶段。
This clarity is not just for users. It’s even more important for employees. They are the people who build complex compounds around these atomic concepts, and their misunderstandings are the root of future deviations and issues that arise. Founders get advice to repeat what matters more regularly than they think they need to. Repetition may help employees remember what’s important, but it pales in comparison to the clarity that comes from having strong atomic concepts to begin with. Like memes, simplicity is what makes them so transmissible.
这种清晰度不仅对用户重要。对员工来说甚至更重要。他们是围绕这些原子概念构建复杂化合物的人，他们的误解是未来偏差和问题的根源。创始人得到的建议是比他们认为需要的更定期地重复重要的事情。重复可能有助于员工记住什么是重要的，但与从一开始就拥有强大原子概念所带来的清晰度相比，这显得微不足道。像模因一样，简单性使它们如此易于传播。
One exercise I’ve often found useful for CEOs to do with their co-founders and team is to ask an important question about the company—and see how much everyone’s answers differ. People are always shocked at how much they differ from even their co-founder. It’s natural to have differences and that doesn’t even mean either person is wrong. But these unexpected differences in how to think about the company are the underlying faultlines that make it difficult to synchronize as a company on what matters and to have a common framework by which to discuss and debate important decisions.
我发现对 CEO 和他们的联合创始人及团队有用的一个练习是问一个关于公司的重要问题——看看每个人的答案有多大差异。人们总是对他们与联合创始人之间的差异感到震惊。存在差异是自然的，这并不意味着任何一方是错误的。但这些在如何思考公司方面的意外差异是使公司难以在重要事项上同步并拥有一个共同框架来讨论和辩论重要决策的潜在断层线。
All of this shouldn’t be misinterpreted. Very few companies come out of the womb with crisp atomic concepts. The nature of building a company is messy and complicated. Critics are right to say that many analyses over-simplify and give post hoc explanations of how to think about companies (yours truly included).
所有这些都不应被误解。很少有公司一开始就有清晰的原子概念。建立公司的本质是混乱和复杂的。批评者说许多分析过于简化，并给出事后解释如何思考公司是正确的（包括我自己）。
But the process of examining that complexity and finding the most lossless ways to dimensionality reduce is not the province of armchair analysts. It’s essential for founders and companies themselves to regularly do this refactoring. Just as companies build up technical debt, so too do they build up narrative debt.
但审视这种复杂性并找到最无损的维度压缩方法的过程并不是安乐椅分析师的专利。创始人和公司本身定期进行这种重构是必不可少的。正如公司积累技术债务一样，他们也会积累叙事债务。
Typically fundraising is a natural fitness function for doing this refactoring. For top companies this is increasingly no longer true—but the importance of this clean up has not shrunk. Whether for the sake of their users and employees—or so they can expand into becoming more complex platforms—companies must grapple with who they truly are, before they can go after who they want to be.
通常，筹款是进行这种重构的自然适应函数。对于顶级公司来说，这越来越不再是事实——但这种清理的重要性并没有减少。无论是为了他们的用户和员工，还是为了他们能够扩展成为更复杂的平台，公司必须在追求他们想成为的人之前，先努力弄清他们真正是谁。
Appendix: Figma’s ecosystem and open source
附录：Figma 的生态系统和开源
There is a lot more that can be discussed on the platform ecosystem chart that is out of scope of this essay. This is a highly simplified chart, but it is one that comes to mind often when talking with founders of companies that are beginning to think through sequencing from single product companies to platforms. And are seeking a framework to think about their ecosystems (or analyze others) in a more structured way.
关于平台生态系统图表还有很多可以讨论的内容，这超出了本文的范围。这是一个高度简化的图表，但在与那些开始思考从单一产品公司到平台的公司创始人交谈时，这个图表经常浮现在脑海中。并且正在寻求一个框架，以更有结构的方式思考他们的生态系统（或分析其他生态系统）。
These charts can look very distinct for different companies. And even for the same company it moves over time as their user base shifts and they shape their ecosystem. Companies make intentional choices that have large impacts on what their platforms look like.
这些图表对于不同的公司可能看起来非常不同。即使对于同一家公司，随着用户基础的变化和他们塑造生态系统的方式，这些图表也会随着时间的推移而变化。公司做出的有意选择对他们的平台外观有很大影响。
Figma is a good example of this. Unlike many platforms, Figma’s plugins and community initiatives put a large focus on being accessible to individual designers building out solutions to their own problems, whether just for themselves or to share freely with others. This focus is at odds with many other platforms that are mainly meant to be used by third party companies building products to be sold to users on top of the platform.
Figma 是一个很好的例子。与许多平台不同，Figma 的插件和社区计划非常注重让个人设计师能够访问，构建解决自己问题的解决方案，无论是仅为自己还是自由分享给他人。这种关注与许多其他平台主要用于第三方公司在平台上构建产品以出售给用户的方式相矛盾。
One impact of this is a bet on the importance of the long tail of niche use cases in Figma as seen below. There are many use cases that often are too niche to be supported as products to purchase that never are addressed in most platforms. But by making it easy for individuals or companies to build their own plugins, Figma hopes to see even these be addressed—and then shared out with the community in the way we see it often in the open source developer ecosystem.
这种做法的一个影响是押注于 Figma 中利基用例长尾的重要性，如下所示。有许多用例通常太小众，无法作为产品购买支持，这在大多数平台中从未得到解决。但通过使个人或公司能够轻松构建自己的插件，Figma 希望看到即使是这些用例也能得到解决——然后以我们在开源开发者生态系统中经常看到的方式与社区分享。
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be