In 2010, Photoshop was commonly used for everything design from editing a photo, making a poster or designing a website. Today, Adobe still seems very strong, they have great stock performance and their transitions to SaaS has been seamless. Yet, they are no longer the market leader in a few segments of design. Companies like Figma, Sketch, and Canva are examples of products that have become top products in the market.

Figma and Canva are taking on Adobe

Companies like Figma and Canva are able to thrive against a strong incumbent like Adobe because they have a distinct atomic concept. Their products are built around a different strategy than Adobe's product lineup.  These different fundamental atomic concepts turn Adobe's advantage of an established product and existing userbase into a weakness that handicaps them to compete against these startups. It is worth understanding the phases of market transition that drives these companies.

Why young companies are able to thrive

Startups can take advantage of market entropy. Changing customer needs are the biggest source of entropy in markets. When the customer needs change quickly, legacy companies are left with all the overhead and product that no longer serves the market. There are many causes of changing customer needs.<ul><li>There are new and growing segments of customers with different use cases. However, companies may resist changing the core parts of their product.</li><li>The scale or dynamics of a market shift enough to make a product obsolete.</li><li>The type of user change. These new types of customers care about different things.</li></ul>

New use cases: designing for digital

The best products map to how customers think about their workflow. They choose the right atomic concepts around which the entire product is built. They align with how customers think of their workflow and crystalise how they ought to. Great atomic concepts are refined and built upon in more complex compounds. When similar companies have slightly different atomic concepts, they become meaningfully distinct. A company can rarely change its core atomic concepts. Startups thrive because they can find asymmetric angles on incumbents.

Tapping into the right level of abstraction

When Figma started, it was a direct Photoshop competitor. But, over the next two years, they shifted their focus to designers working on the UI and UX of digital products. The key for designers was a product that enabled collaboration. Building for collaboration led Figma to rethink almost everything about the company, leading to new pricing models, distribution models, and sharing form factors.

Figma bet on collaborative product design

Photoshop can do many things, but it is too low level. Photoshop's atomic concepts are images and pixels. But Canva operates at a higher abstraction level and one that users care about. Canva designs start with their purposes in mind, such as designing a pitch deck, an Instagram post, or a wedding invitation. Canva has templates and layouts for that purpose and makes it easy for users to add their own creativity, such as adding their own photos or using graphics and components made by the community.

Canva bet on marketing design by non-designers

As Canva grew, it expanded its ecosystem by creating marketplaces and communities around templates, layouts, fonts, and more. Users prefer not to build from scratch, and instead support free and paid Canva marketplaces of pre-built components. The add-ons are very powerful. They allow Canva to address the huge scale and varied needs of all its customers, enabling each customer to use Canva in a personalised way.

Defensibility through becoming a platform

Design is not unique. The same factors that drive demand for new and large use cases are arriving in most fields, especially in all forms of digital content. The most active area undergoing this market transition now is the broader productivity space. Companies like Airtable, Notion, Coda, Roam, Retool, Webflow, and Loom have seen huge early traction, but it's tricky to describe the exact spaces within productivity and collaboration. Many companies have lots of product roadmap overlap. They still need to define the atomic concepts they're betting on before they can position themselves.

Extending this playbook to other spaces

Companies with early success have yet to define what atomic concepts they focus on. Who are their competitors? Who are their customers, and which use cases should they build their workflows around? Companies have difficulty navigating these questions because customers don't know what they really want. These companies have the opportunity to change how customers think. Strong enough products will have ecosystems around them. The best companies build the platforms to enable and direct these ecosystems to empower the customer more.

Opportunity knocks

Stashed ideas

How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time - kwokchain

Getting up and drawing a Venn diagram is a great way to appear smart. It doesn’t matter if your Venn diagram is wildly inaccurate, in fact, the more inaccurate the better. Even before you’ve put that marker down, your colleagues will begin fighting about what exactly the labels should be and how big the circles should be, etc. At this point, you can slink back to your chair and go back to playing Candy Crush on your phone.

Draw a Venn diagram

If someone says “About 25% of all users click on this button,” quickly chime in with, “So about 1 in 4,” and make a note of it. Everyone will nod their head in agreement, secretly impressed and envious of your quick math skills.

Translate percentage metrics into fractions

There comes a point in most meetings where everyone is chiming in, except you. Opinions and data and milestones are being thrown around and you don’t know your CTA from your OTA. This is a great point to go, “Guys, guys, guys, can we take a step back here?” Everyone will turn their heads toward you, amazed at your ability to silence the fray. Follow it up with a quick, “What problem are we really trying to solve?” and, boom! You’ve bought yourself another hour of looking smart.

Encourage everyone to “take a step back”

Always bring a notepad with you. Your rejection of technology will be revered. Take notes by simply writing down one word from every sentence that you hear. Nod continuously while doing so. If someone asks you if you’re taking notes, quickly say that these are your own personal notes and that someone else should really be keeping a record of the meeting. Bravo compadre. You’ve saved your ass, and you’ve gotten out of doing any extra work. Or any work at all, if you’re truly succeeding.

Nod continuously while pretending to take notes

Make a mental note of the engineer in the room. Remember his name. He’ll be quiet throughout most of the meeting, but when his moment comes everything out of his mouth will spring from a place of unknowable brilliance. After he utters these divine words, chime in with, “Let me just repeat that,” and repeat exactly what he just said, but very, very slowly. Now, his brilliance has been transferred to you. People will look back on the meeting and mistakenly attribute the intelligent statement to you.

Repeat the last thing the engineer said, but very very slowly

It’s important to find out if things will scale no matter what it is you’re discussing. No one even really knows what that means, but it’s a good catch-all question that generally applies and drives engineers nuts.

Ask “Will this scale?” no matter what it is

Whenever someone gets up from the table and walks around, don’t you immediately respect them? I know I do. It takes a lot of guts but once you do it, you immediately appear smart. Fold your arms. Walk around. Go to the corner and lean against the wall. Take a deep, contemplative sigh. Trust me, everyone will be shitting their pants wondering what you’re thinking. If only they knew (bacon).

Pace around the room

“Sorry, could you go back a slide?” They’re the seven words no presenter wants to hear. It doesn’t matter where in the presentation you shout this out, it’ll immediately make you look like you’re paying closer attention than everyone else is because clearly, they missed the thing that you’re about to brilliantly point out. Don’t have anything to point out? Just say something like, “I’m not sure what these numbers mean,” and sit back. You’ve bought yourself almost an entire meeting of appearing smart.

Ask the presenter to go back a slide

You’re probably afraid to step out of the room because you fear people will think you aren’t making the meeting a priority. Interestingly, however, if you step out of a meeting for an “important” phone call, they’ll all realize just how busy and important you are. They’ll say, “Wow, this meeting is important, so if he has something even more important than this, well, we better not bother him.”

Step out for a phone call

If someone asks what you think, and you honestly didn’t hear a single word anyone said for the last hour, just say, “I honestly didn’t hear a single word anyone said for the last hour.” People love self-deprecating humor. Say things like, “Maybe we can just use the lawyers from my divorce,” or “God I wish I was dead.” They’ll laugh, value your honesty, consider contacting H.R., but most importantly, think you’re the smartest looking person in the room.

Make fun of yourself

Like everyone, appearing smart during meetings is my top priority. Sometimes this can be difficult if you start daydreaming about your next vacation, your next nap, or bacon. When this happens, it’s…

10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings

Do not forget to ask the participant if you could record the session (for research purpose only).

Record the Session (if Possible)

It's quite helpful if you observe an interesting point you want to jump back into it again after the session.

Note Timestamps during The Session

You can add tags to before your point to make the note-taking simpler.

Capture your Observations During The Session

Even a simple thing could impact the way the user performs in a usability test.

Make A Note Of Everything

Always write down your note with objectivity, do not make assumptions about their behavior or feeling unless you want to talk about it with them after the test.

Stay True To The Fact

Always opt for one note taking perspective, style, format and timestamps. Differenciate quotes from observations, it will help you to jump into your notes after the session.

Be Consistent With Your Format

Make sure your notes are clear and do not write it down word by word (you'll loose your time if you're recording) but do not infer what you believe is happening.

Carefully Paraphrase

With the records after the session.

Highlight Missed Or Incomplete Parts

Take time as soon as possible to review the session with the previous ideas.

Recap After Your Session

Qualitative user research is just as important a part of rounding out your user research as quantitative. But unlike quantitative research, the data insights can only be as good as the note-taking…

Career

9 tips to improve your note-taking skills

Everyone in a critique has a role they must play. The three roles we rely on are presenter, audience, and facilitator.<ul><li>The presenter is the individual sharing work, their role is to: Succinctly describe the problem being solved (or ideas being explored) and present design or content solutions they have come up with</li><li>The audience's role is to: Understand the problem statement and context and ask a lot of questions</li><li>The facilitator’s job is to: Create a schedule for each critique in advance, ensure that everyone in the group stays on the agenda, take notes during critique to help those presenting.</li></ul>

 Establish clear roles

It’s immensely helpful to reiterate the problem being solved before showing any work in a critique.Vocalizing the problem and context for the work—and why it’s a problem or idea worth tackling in the first place—helps establish a foundation from which productive feedback can be given

Ensure everyone understands (and agrees on) the problem

It’s important to know the difference between helpful feedback and unhelpful criticism.If the goal of critique is to help move solutions forward and empower the team, feedback should primarily be presented in the form of exploratory and guiding questions, with an intent of building up and improving the work, and with the mindset of working together as opposed to criticizing the presenter.

Focus on feedback, not criticism

The point of a critique is to explore problems, nurture ideas, and grow the team, primarily through listening and asking questions. You can’t accomplish this goal if you’re constantly checking your phone or working on your computer (or checking Facebook).

4. Laptops (and phones) stay closed

Critique is an important part of any design process, whether you work within a diverse team or independently. The feedback you get through a formal critique can help get you outside your own head in…

Four Things Working at Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique

This is what happens when you hit that Play button:<ul><li>Hundreds of microservices, or tiny independent programs, work together to make one large Netflix service.</li><li>Content legally acquired or licensed is converted into a size that fits your screen, and protected from being copied.</li><li>Servers across the world make a copy of it and store it so that the closest one to you delivers it at max quality and speed.</li><li>When you select a show, your Netflix app cherry picks which of these servers will it load the video from.</li><li>Your lifespan decreases as your binge watching turns you into a couch potato.</li></ul>

In a nutshell: How Netflix works

Netflix estimates that it uses around 700 microservices to control each of the many parts of what makes up the entire Netflix service: one microservice stores what all shows you watched, one deducts the monthly fee from your credit card, one provides your device with the correct video files that it can play, one takes a look at your watching history and uses algorithms to guess a list of movies that you will like, and one will provide the names and images of these movies to be shown in a list on the main menu. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Hundreds of microservices, one giant service

Not long ago, House of Cards came back for the fifth season, finally ending a long wait for binge watchers across the world who are interested in an American politician’s ruthless ascendance to…

How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time - kwokchain

10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings

9 tips to improve your note-taking skills

Four Things Working at Facebook Has Taught Me About Design Critique

How Netflix works: the (hugely simplified) complex stuff that happens every time you hit Play

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