How Figma Disrupted Adobe by Building for Collaboration

Quick Answer (TL;DR)

Figma disrupted a market that Adobe had dominated for decades by making a single, defining bet: design should happen in the browser, in real time, with your entire team. While Sketch had already weakened Adobe's grip on UI design by building a lighter, Mac-native alternative, Figma leapfrogged both incumbents by treating collaboration as the core product rather than a feature bolted onto a desktop application. The browser-first architecture enabled multiplayer editing, shareable links, and zero-install access that fundamentally changed who could participate in the design process. Combined with a generous free tier, a thriving plugin and community ecosystem, and a bottom-up adoption motion, Figma grew to over 4 million users and captured enough market momentum that Adobe offered $20 billion to acquire it in 2022.

Company Context: The Design Tool Landscape Before Figma

For nearly three decades, Adobe held an unchallenged monopoly on design tools. Photoshop, Illustrator, and eventually Adobe XD were the industry standard. Designers bought expensive licenses, worked in local files, and shared their work through exported images, PDFs, or screen-sharing sessions.

By the mid-2010s, the landscape had begun to shift:

The critical gap in the market was not about design capabilities. Sketch, Adobe XD, and Figma all converged on similar vector editing features for interface design. The gap was about workflow: how design files were shared, how feedback was collected, how developers accessed design specs, and how teams worked together on the same project.

The Core Insight

Dylan Field, Figma's co-founder, articulated the problem clearly: design was the last creative discipline that still operated on a "file on my hard drive" paradigm. Developers had GitHub. Writers had Google Docs. Musicians had Splice. But designers were still emailing PNGs and versioning files with names like homepage-final-v3-FINAL.sketch.

The insight was not that designers needed better drawing tools. It was that the design process was broken because it excluded everyone who was not a designer. Product managers could not easily see the latest designs. Developers could not inspect spacing and colors without a separate handoff tool. Stakeholders could not leave feedback without scheduling a meeting. Figma set out to make design accessible to the entire product team.

The Strategy: Browser-First, Multiplayer, Community

1. The Browser-First Bet

Figma's most consequential technical decision was building a professional-grade vector editor that ran entirely in the browser using WebGL and WebAssembly. In 2015, this was considered impractical -- professional design tools required desktop-level performance that browsers could not match.

The Figma engineering team spent years solving this technical challenge, building a custom rendering engine in C++ compiled to WebAssembly that achieved performance comparable to native applications. The result was a design tool that:

This architectural decision had compounding strategic effects. Every feature Figma built on top of this foundation -- multiplayer editing, commenting, developer handoff, prototyping -- benefited from being browser-native and instantly shareable.

2. Multiplayer Editing: Collaboration as the Core Product

Figma did not add real-time collaboration as a feature. It built the entire product around the assumption that multiple people would be working in the same file simultaneously. The multiplayer editing experience included:

Live cursors. Every collaborator's cursor was visible in real time, color-coded and labeled with their name. This simple visual affordance transformed design from a solitary activity into a social one. Teams could see who was working on what, point at elements during video calls, and coordinate in real time without verbal explanation.

Real-time synchronization. Changes appeared instantly for all collaborators. There was no "save" button, no merge conflicts, no need to check out files. The source of truth was always the live file.

Observation mode. Non-designers could follow a designer's cursor and viewport, watching the design process unfold in real time. This made design reviews, stakeholder presentations, and pair-designing seamless.

In-context commenting. Anyone with the link could leave comments pinned to specific elements in the design. This replaced the cycle of export-share-collect-feedback-interpret-apply that consumed hours in traditional workflows.

The multiplayer approach had a profound effect on adoption. Traditional design tools were used only by designers. Figma was used by designers, product managers, developers, copywriters, marketers, and executives. By expanding the user base from designers alone to entire product teams, Figma dramatically increased its addressable market and created powerful network effects within organizations.

3. The Freemium PLG Motion

Figma's pricing strategy was designed to accelerate bottom-up adoption:

The free tier was strategically generous in a critical dimension: unlimited collaborators. A designer on the free plan could invite their entire team -- product managers, developers, executives -- to view and comment on designs. This meant the people who experienced Figma's value (the collaborators) far outnumbered the people who needed to pay (the editors).

This created a powerful product-led growth loop:

The viral coefficient was exceptionally high because every design file was a distribution mechanism. Unlike tools where sharing required exporting, every Figma link was an invitation to experience the product.

4. Community and Plugin Ecosystem

Figma invested heavily in building a community ecosystem that extended the product's capabilities and drove organic growth:

Community file sharing. Figma Community launched as a platform where designers could publish and remix design files. UI kits, icon sets, wireframe templates, and design system starters were shared freely, creating a library of resources that made Figma more valuable for every new user.

Plugin API. Figma's plugin system allowed developers to build extensions that automated workflows, integrated with external tools, and added capabilities that Figma's core team could not prioritize. By 2022, the plugin ecosystem had thousands of plugins covering accessibility checking, content population, animation, developer handoff, and more.

Widget API. FigJam (Figma's whiteboarding tool) extended the ecosystem further with interactive widgets that turned the canvas into a collaborative workspace for brainstorming, voting, planning, and retrospectives.

The community strategy served multiple purposes simultaneously: it reduced the blank-canvas problem for new users, it created switching costs for existing users who had invested in plugins and libraries, and it generated a constant stream of organic content and social proof. This mirrors the flywheel effect that the strongest platform companies create -- each new community contribution made the platform more valuable, which attracted more users, who contributed more.

5. Design Systems as the Enterprise Wedge

Figma's path to enterprise revenue ran through design systems. As organizations grew their design practices, they needed shared component libraries, consistent design tokens, and governance around how design assets were created and used.

Figma's shared libraries and organization-level features made it the natural home for design systems. Once a company's design system lived in Figma, switching costs became extremely high -- the design system touched every product surface and every designer's daily workflow.

This enterprise wedge allowed Figma to execute a land-and-expand strategy: a single team would adopt Figma on the free or Professional tier, build a design system, and then the organization would consolidate on Figma's Enterprise plan to manage the system at scale.

6. Competing Through Experience, Not Features

When Adobe launched XD as a direct competitor, Figma did not try to win on feature count. Instead, the team focused on areas where browser-native architecture gave them a structural advantage:

This approach to competitive analysis illustrates an important principle: when a dominant incumbent enters your market, do not compete on their terms. Compete on the dimensions where your architectural choices give you a structural advantage.

Key Decisions and Trade-offs

Decision 1: Browser vs. Native

Building in the browser was a multi-year technical gamble. If WebAssembly performance had not matured, or if browser vendors had not invested in GPU acceleration, Figma would have been permanently handicapped on performance. The bet paid off, but it required extraordinary engineering investment and years of patience.

Decision 2: Free Viewers, Paid Editors

The "free viewers, paid editors" pricing model meant that the vast majority of Figma users never paid. This was intentional -- free viewers were the distribution engine. But it also meant that Figma's revenue per user was lower than traditional per-seat enterprise pricing, requiring massive scale to build a large revenue base.

Decision 3: Building FigJam

Launching FigJam (a whiteboarding tool) in 2021 expanded Figma beyond design into broader team collaboration. This moved Figma into competition with Miro and Mural but also validated the vision that Figma was not a design tool -- it was a collaboration platform. The decision to build an adjacent product rather than adding features to the core editor showed strategic clarity about audience expansion.

Decision 4: Resisting Feature Bloat

Figma consistently resisted adding features that would have pleased power users but complicated the experience for the broader team. The tool remained focused on interface design and prototyping rather than expanding into illustration, photo editing, or motion design. This discipline preserved the approachability that drove adoption.

Results and Impact

By the Numbers

Market Impact

Figma's success fundamentally changed the design tool market:

Lessons for Product Managers

1. Architectural Decisions Are Strategy Decisions

Figma's browser-first architecture was not a technical implementation detail. It was the strategic foundation that enabled every competitive advantage: multiplayer editing, cross-platform access, frictionless sharing, and rapid iteration. When choosing your technical architecture, consider not just what it enables today but what strategic possibilities it opens for the future.

Apply this: Evaluate your core architectural decisions through a strategic lens. Ask: "What does this architecture make possible that would be impossible or impractical with the alternative?" The best architectural choices create compounding advantages over time.

2. Expand Your User Base by Expanding Who Can Use Your Product

Figma's biggest growth lever was not converting more designers. It was making design accessible to non-designers. By lowering the barrier to viewing, commenting, and participating in the design process, Figma turned a tool for specialists into a platform for teams.

Apply this: Look at your product and ask who is adjacent to your core user. Who consumes the output of your product but does not currently use it? How can you bring them into the product experience? Each new participant type expands your addressable market and strengthens network effects.

3. Distribution Through Usage, Not Marketing

Every Figma design file was a distribution mechanism. Every link shared was a product demo. Every comment thread was an onboarding experience for a new user. Figma did not need to explain its value proposition because people experienced it the first time someone shared a link with them.

Apply this: Design your product so that its normal use creates exposure to new potential users. The most powerful growth loops are embedded in the product's core workflow, not in referral programs or marketing campaigns. Study pirate metrics to identify where natural sharing moments occur in your user journey.

4. Community Scales What Your Team Cannot

Figma's community created thousands of plugins, millions of shared files, and countless tutorials and courses. No product team could have produced this volume of ecosystem value internally. By building the right primitives (plugin API, community platform, shared libraries) and empowering creators, Figma multiplied its product surface area exponentially.

Apply this: Identify where your users are already creating value on top of your product and build infrastructure to support and amplify that behavior. The goal is not to control the ecosystem but to enable it.

5. When Disrupting an Incumbent, Change the Dimension of Competition

Figma did not try to build a better Photoshop. It did not compete with Adobe on breadth of creative tools, depth of illustration features, or decades of professional workflow support. Instead, Figma shifted the competitive dimension from "most powerful design tool" to "best team design experience." By changing what the market valued, Figma made Adobe's greatest strengths irrelevant.

Apply this: When facing a dominant incumbent, do not compete on their strongest dimension. Find a dimension they cannot easily match -- one where your structural advantages (architecture, business model, target audience) give you a lasting edge. Use Jobs to Be Done thinking to identify the underserved job that the incumbent's product structure prevents them from addressing.

This case study draws on Dylan Field's public talks at Config and Web Summit, Figma's product announcements and blog posts, the Adobe acquisition filing and subsequent regulatory proceedings, analysis from Bessemer Venture Partners and a16z on cloud-native design tools, and market share data from UX Tools annual surveys.