Both Design Twitter and Wall Street have reeled at Adobe’s $20bn acquisition of Figma. When I first heard the news, I couldn’t help but laugh. Seeing these two names together seemed a shocking betrayal to designers and gross financial negligence to investors. To me, however, it was like finding out on Facebook that your two high school nemeses were getting married… to each other.
Why the sardonic reaction? Because while I might wear Stripe blurple now, for almost three years, I painted the world InVision pink.
InVision — remember us? Our straightforward prototyping tool, iconic emails from our CEO Clark from InVision, stellar educational content from titans of industry, and lavish Design Leadership Forum gatherings made us the darling of design tools for several years. Supported by an adoring, though somewhat fickle, design community, InVision’s brand (and valuation) rose to great heights, only to tumble as we seemed to make one misstep after another.
To this day, my time at InVision remains the most cherished chapter of my career. I joined InVision on the “Spark” team in May 2017 to help our Chief Revenue Officer incubate and scale growth strategies. I used to joke that “Spark” was actually an acronym for “Special Projects Accelerating Revenue and Knowledge,” but we were effectively an internal consultancy trying to figure out how to sell bigger deals, faster.
In that role, I drew from my former life at Citi to help our sales teams tackle the financial services industry with design thinking workshops and consultations. To help designers better justify our Enterprise price point, I built our first clumsy attempts at an ROI model. As we prepared to launch our new Design Systems Manager product, I project-managed our sales go-to-market.
Then in summer 2018, I got the opportunity of a lifetime. While on a personal “eat pray love” trip through Asia, I offered to meet some of InVision’s APAC-based clients to show them some TLC.
This experience completely altered my career trajectory. With the trust and support of our Head of International Sales, I pivoted from sales strategy into front-line sales. I’d never sold before, but I was young, single, hungry for growth, and eager for adventure. In August 2018, I became the market development lead for all APAC countries outside of Australia/New Zealand.
On paper, I was a quota-carrying enterprise account executive. I had a very aggressive revenue target that determined 50% of my compensation. In reality, I was field marketing, user research, business development, sales, customer success, investor relations, even design education all in one trailblazing, swag-toting, 5'2" pink package.
For the first six months, I managed the role and my APAC clients remotely. I onboarded onto our International Sales team in our London WeWork and took client calls in the early mornings UK time.
When back home in NYC, I’d meet with my Australia-based counterparts and take client calls from our SoHo WeWork from 7PM-1AM. I’d go home only to sleep. I’d then wake up for 9AM pipeline reviews with my UK-based manager. I’d use my mornings to update Salesforce, plan entire market and account strategies, and brainstorm with US-based InVisioners on what we could do to better localize for APAC needs. At 3PM, I’d take a nap on the couch in the WeWork common area under an (aptly) pink Snuggie. I’d leave the office for a 5PM work-out, grab dinner to go, and then return to the WeWork by 7PM to rinse and repeat.
In November 2018, I took a six-week trip through APAC, meeting InVision’s existing clients, prospects, and Heads of Design across Singapore, Jakarta, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong.
My first #paintAPACpink tour culminated in InVision’s first in-person event in APAC — Design+ Singapore, co-sponsored with IBM.
I spent my 28th birthday in Singapore hosting the first APAC gathering of InVision’s Design Leadership Forum. Leaders flew in from Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Jakarta. Special guest Dave Malouf, a legend of DesignOps, shared his thoughts on design leadership, hiring (and firing), and design systems.
After six months of globe-trotting, late night calls, unpacking and repacking my (aptly) pink suitcase, I finally made a cross-continent move to Singapore in March 2019. I was on a mission to elevate design across the region and, if possible, hit a sales target in the process. I built wonderful relationships with local design leaders who were passionate about their craft and our shared vision for transforming business through human-centric design.
Though rewarding, electrifying, exhilarating, it was also an incredibly lonely experience. Since I’d joined, InVision had grown from 250 to 850 employees, but as employee #1 in Southeast Asia, I was the only pink dot in my timezone. My closest co-workers sat in Sydney and Melbourne, both of which were an 8-hour flight away.
I was literally on an island. I went into every client meeting by myself, trying to defend a software that was considered a frivolous expense by cost-conscious Asian businesses. My deal champions were always the most senior design leaders in their companies, but their functions were deplorably low on the overall corporate totem pole. They were overpowered by business leaders who claimed they knew design. They were disrespected by engineers who thought designers were artsy-fartsy prima donnas, sporting rare Mac computers in a world of Lenovo PCs.
Thus, when it came to my actual job of selling software, my closest champions, designers, were rarely the true economic buyer or decision-maker. They rarely controlled their own budget for tooling. Though they would complain to me about Adobe XD being absolutely unusable, their management would push them to standardize on Adobe Cloud. After all, the 300-pound gorilla had already gone through all the required due diligence. Procurement, IT, and InfoSec had already approved Adobe, and the costs of licenses could be shared with Marketing and other Creative departments. Why introduce and pay for another tool?
It didn’t help that InVision was getting just as expensive as Adobe and quickly adopting its reputation for being clunky, hard to use, and slow to innovate. We’d made our own fair share of product missteps and were quickly losing trust and relevance with the design community.
When we launched Studio, designers were quick to tell us that it was basically a glorified-Sketch replacement with some basic motion animation. When we launched DSM, designers balked at the pricing structure. Even our developer-friendly Inspect tool required devs to have their own Enterprise license at the same price point as a designer’s. This got us laughed out of countless customer meetings and made unlocking Engineering budget a pipe dream.
I was never on the Product side during my years at InVision. Thus, I can’t speak to why our products so sorely missed the mark when the entire ethos of our company was user-centric design. It’s possible that our Product and Engineering orgs were just stretched too thin. It’s also possible that our remote-first hiring (in place long before the pandemic) exacerbated organizational silos and hindered delivery. We were also in the throes of a massive multi-year re-platforming. We’d told our largest customers that V7 was coming, and with it, significant improvements to the Enterprise experience. But my CSM and I would bristle and steel ourselves for ensuing customer disappointment when, quarter after quarter, their V7 migration was delayed.
In the meantime, Figma’s name was popping up in more and more of my client meetings. I’d joke with my clients that Figma was the new F word for me, but could I blame them for loving this new kid on the block? In 2019, Figma was at a price point that reflected the growth strategy of a younger company: user acquisition at all costs. Designers paid for licenses while the rest of the party (devs, product managers, business, marketing) ate free.
Figma was also undeniably a superior product. It was as if they had seen all the mistakes we’d made, leveraged Design Twitter’s scathing feedback as free user research, and shipped a better product from day 1. They didn’t need to bother with cumbersome refactoring and iterations. By being cloud-first, Figma had done for design collaboration what Google Workspace did for business communication. It might’ve easily taken us another 18–24 months to get Studio to Figma feature parity, and by then it would be too late. Designers, a fickle bunch, wait for noone.
By the end of 2019, I had run out of steam. By the next official Design Leadership Forum dinner, which we hosted in Hong Kong in December 2019, I had already announced that I’d be getting off the pink rocketship. The same day I left, several of the sales leaders who’d hired me for my various roles also hung up their hats, including our Chief Revenue Officer, Head of International Sales, and Head of Customer Success.
It was the first of several mass departures I’ve witnessed since then. Each year, I’ve seen a flurry of posts about former InVisioners looking for new adventures. Every one of these folks were passionate about design, believed in our vision, and put in hard work to help us succeed. Yet the InVision name these days feels more like a nostalgic blast from the past.
Despite my affection for InVision and nostalgia for yesteryear, I feel no envy toward Figma’s $20bn valuation (over 10x what we ever reached). Nor do I delight in Reddit’s declaration of Figma’s time of death.
I’ve followed the trending tweets these days and know many have condemned Figma for “the ultimate betrayal.” Some declare that, in taking a fat payout of 50X its reported 2022 revenue, Figma leadership and investors are turning their backs on the very folks who cobbled together that $400M ARR.
I’d like to suggest a more nuanced and, shall we say, macro-optimistic outlook. My experience trying (unsuccessfully) to paint the world InVision pink has shaped the following strong opinions, loosely held:
- Figma’s decision reflects not a betrayal of user trust but the strategic stewardship of it
- Adobe is more attractive to me today than I ever dreamt it could be (so much so that I’d even consider putting money on it)
- Designers might not have pulled the trigger in Figma’s “death” by acquisition, but they likely pointed the gun
- The design community’s knee-jerk reaction to abandon Figma for the next design tool runs the risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy
Having watched InVision receive similar community love years back, only to have its Twitter account be reduced to Tech Support, I believe this acquisition was the best option for Figma to achieve its true potential. It might even have been the only way Figma could hope to keep up with the design community’s ever-growing expectations. Far from being a nail in its coffin, this acquisition has the power to take Figma’s mission to new heights and uplift the design community along the way. But to achieve this, Figma, Adobe, AND the design community at large all share an equal responsibility to actively prevent the long-term value erosion that doomsaying designers and investors predict.
Perhaps in a past life, I might have wished for Adobe’s obsolescence and Figma’s demise. But as the tables turn and the world moves forward, I find myself rooting for the success of this acquisition. I find myself hoping for a brighter future for the whole design community.
After all, if I spent the best years of my career painting the world pink, can you blame me for wanting to see it through rose-colored glasses?
This is my second post on Medium and I’d love your feedback. Musings are entirely my own.
