导读
这篇文章非常有趣,原因是作为一个曾经的设计师,Photoshop,illustrator,CoralDraw,Painter,Maya, Flash,3DMAX,Sketch,Figma 这些工具都完整的经历过,但却没有思考这些工具背后演进的脉络是是什么;而另一方面,作为一个互联网从业人员,却没有看到设计师工作流程的变化和对应时代需求的变化,惭愧 —— 也许这就是旁观者清吧。
费曼曾经说过一句信息量极大的话,可以作为世界灭亡留给后人的关键信息,即「万物由原子构成」。比如这篇文章的载体 Notion,相对于 Evernote 或者 Word 来说,处理的对象就不仅仅是一篇文章,而是一堆 block 的集合;无独有偶,今日我们点外卖关注的也不仅仅是去什么店吃,而是直接想吃什么菜,再看哪家店有这道菜;再比如曾经的 Google 的设计理念,就是去 App 话,只保留信息的 I/O (输入/输出) —— 这个在今天的 iOS 通知中心和 Apple Watch 上也能看到趋势 —— 因为我们最终是对一条信息交互,不是对一个 App,也不是对一个 OS。
所以之所以能原子化,一方面源自于技术的进步,另一方面也源自于用户代际和需求的变化。
回到本文上来,Figma / Canva 吃掉 Adobe 的市场,主要源自于不同级别的抽象对象
Since:1990年2月
- PS:以像素图形为核心,大量的场景是用来处理照片(比如今天的俗语 P 图)、绘画。功能十分强大,迄今为止我也没有完全掌握所有的功能 —— 甚至自 CC 系列以来,根本不知道迭代了什么大功能……
- Illustrator(包括 CoralDraw):以矢量图形为核心,进印刷厂带 PSD 文件会被打死的,必须是.ai 文件才行。(补充个背景,从做排版的角度来说,其实复用性比 UI 来说差的很多,具体可以想下我们曾经看的杂志,恨不得每个页面都是重新设计的)
Since:2010年9月
- Sketch:以数字产品界面设计以及项目为核心(UI/UE),相比 Illustrator 来说功能更加孱弱,但是很好的适应界面设计需求,比如可以抽象为许多组件复用,能很好的画出圆角矩形按钮(别笑)等等,还有丰富的插件。
Since:2016 年 9 月
- Figma:在 Sketch 之上以协作为核心,搭配插件和社区。目前 flomo 的设计便是在 Figma 上完成,也顺道解决了之前 Sketch 在上下游协作上需要依赖 Zeplin 的麻烦。
- Canva:以非设计师用户群的目的为核心,搭配插件、模板和社区。这个案例比较奇怪,是另一种抽象维度,将用户的「设计目的」原子化,反之用大量的模板来满足需求而非简化功能。
为什么会出现这种情况:时代变了,导致客户需求变了
- 新的工作流出现:之前是针对 TV / 印刷,现在是针对互联网/社交媒体
- 特点 1:媒介变化,需求随之变化;对速度要求高于质量、协同性更强(之前印刷不能改,现在社交媒体可以不断 A/B 测试)
- 特点 2:需要上下游协作的工种变多(无法直接交付作品,需要协同,所以像素级别的设计稿不如 Figma 文件交付的方便。)
- 新的人群出现:之前是设计师,现在是想完成设计工作的人(比如新媒体运营)或和设计交互比较多的人(比如程序员)
- 特点:他们更关注任务目标的解决,而非想掌握完备的设计能力,所以人群变得更加广泛,更加「平权」(也意味着门槛要低)
单点突破如何建立壁垒:通过成为一个平台来防御
- Canva 通过模板、布局、字体来创建市场和社区
- Figma 通过插件、资源来创建市场和社区
核心要注意:更加的无缝嵌入能带来更大的效应
- PS 没有官方插件市场
- Sketch 有官方插件市场,但是兼容性极差(影响 Sketch 打开)
- Figma 有插件市场,且会自动更新
别的地方还有机会么?
- 有,但取决于对需求的更细的拆解,找到更核心的原子概念(flomo 把文档抽象为 MEMO)
- 不要被公司内部的不断迭代影响,用户根本不关心这些细节的变化。用户能看到的就是一个新的原子概念(Atom Concept),理解并使用它(比如外卖就将吃这件事从店,聚焦到菜)
- 避免被现有成功(尤其是利润)蒙蔽了双眼,想想百事达被 Netflix 干掉的例子。
想一想,你所在的领域,或者日常在用的工具,是否有「原子化概念」的趋势呢?
正文
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。无论你是在编辑一张照片,制作一张海报,还是设计一个网站,都是在 Photoshop 中完成的。
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.
今天,Adobe 看起来非常强大。他们的股票表现引人注目,这要归功于管理层清醒的头脑,他们大胆地下了赌注,而这些赌注都得到了回报。他们向 SaaS 的转变天衣无缝,因此公开市场给了他们丰厚的回报。他们是历史上并购最好的公司之一;他们的产品线证明了他们有能力获得新的产品线,并将其整合到他们的多产品生态系统中。也许最重要也是最不受重视的是,他们极大地加快了内部产品开发过程和反馈回路的节奏。像微软一样,他们已经成功地从一个按年度 (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,以每周次的速度发布更新。
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.
然而,在一些设计领域,他们不再是市场的领导者。像 Figma、 Sketch 和 Canva 这样的公司就是能够成为顶级产品的例子,尽管 Adobe 在所有东西的设计中无处不在。2019 年,菲格玛首次出现在 Adobe 的年度报告中。他们在 2020 年重新开始,我并不确定他们会继续这样下去。
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型,以及为什么这些年轻的公司能够蓬勃发展,即使面对像 Adobe 这样强大的现有公司?
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.
这些公司拥有与 Adobe 截然不同的原子概念。他们的产品所围绕的基础与 Adobe 的产品线有着根本的不同。正是这些不同的原子概念,使 Adobe 在已有产品和现有用户基础上的优势变成了阻碍他们对抗这些创业公司的弱点。这些新的原子概念蓬勃发展的机会是由市场转型期间发现的新用例和用户类型驱动的。
Understanding the phases of market transition and what drives them is a universal process worth examining.
理解市场转型的各个阶段及其驱动因素是一个值得研究的普遍过程。
新用例: 数字化设计 | New use cases: designing for digital
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.
对于大多数市场而言,作为领头羊定有其优势。随着公司达到客户的偏好前沿,市场趋于一致。这使得新创业公司几乎没有什么潜力可以利用。
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.
靠蛮力进入市场并非不可能,但是很难。非常困难。大多数成功的公司,尤其是初创企业,都找到了利用顺风向前推进的方法。
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.
不断变化的客户需求是市场熵的最大来源。当客户需求迅速变化时,在位者的优势就会减少。相反,遗留下来的公司只剩下所有的开销和一个不再是客户想要的产品。
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.
改变客户需求的原因有很多。通常会有新的、不断增长的、具有不同用例的客户群体。现有的产品可能对他们有用,但并不理想。他们所关心的特性以及他们如何评价这些特性与传统公司所习惯的客户有很大的不同。公司拒绝为每一个新的用例改变他们产品的核心部分,因为它在工作、金钱和注意力上都是昂贵的。但是每隔一段时间,曾经是一个小用例的东西就会发展成一个足够大的用例来支持它自己的公司。
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.
其他时候,市场的规模或动态变化足以使一个产品不再工作,尽管它曾经非常合适。这些情况常常让企业措手不及,因为它们多年来取得成功的业绩突然开始动摇ーー而且它们也不知道为什么。Ebay 就是一个很好的例子。他们的分散式拍卖模式在新兴的互联网经济中是非常好的,当时网上出售的物品很少。一旦电子商务变得司空见惯,价格和速度就成为更为重要的因素,而 Ebay 的分散式模式则处于劣势。在这个后流动性生态系统中,亚马逊更善于建立规模经济。
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.
另一个来源是客户本身的变化。通常工具的功能保持不变,但用户的类型会发生变化。这些新类型的客户往往有不同的事情,他们关心和产生的产品需求。
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.
互联网催生了全新的设计用例。Photoshop 是用来编辑照片和图像的。这是一个在像素级运行的强大工具。然而,许多这些新用途并不是关于图像处理。图像是用户想要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,这就是设计数字作品。软件公司或任何有网站的公司的设计师都希望创建他们工作过的网站和软件产品。这与其说是图像处理,不如说是设计这些数字产品的用户界面和用户体验。矢量比像素图形更重要。设计这些高价值设计的复杂性和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的团队合作。他们的设计是一个更大的产品开发过程的一部分,重要的不仅仅是设计,而是如何改进整个过程,使协作更加容易,更好地交接设计。迭代。
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.
设计的复杂性和产生的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,这一点变得更加重要。对于设计来说,理解与最终产品中的 HTML 和 CSS 相同的概念和抽象层次越来越有用。
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,这是为社交平台、数字广告甚至是婚礼请柬设计内容。这些通常是在 Photoshop 中制作的,但是像素是错误的抽象层。图像不是唯一的组成部分; 它们只是包含图形、文本等更大设计的过去。同样,顾客也有很大的不同。许多人现在所做的本质上是设计工作,他们不认为自己是设计师。他们只是有一个非常具体的东西,他们想创造,以最少的摩擦可能。
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.
互联网极大地扩展了设计新用例的数量和类型。在很多方面,这对 Adobe 是有帮助的。随着 Instagram 这样的平台的出现,编辑照片的人数已经增加了许多数量级。尽管在 Instagram 等平台上进行编辑的人数可能大幅增加,但 Adobe 一直是互联网和向云计算转变的巨大受益者,它们的股价就是一个明证。
[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 注意: 像 Instagram 这样的平台把编辑绑到他们的社交平台上,自下而上地吃掉 Lightroom,这些都是值得讨论的。也许有人会说服迈克 · 克里格为此写一篇决定性的文章
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
软件可能正在吞噬整个世界。但它也在建造新的世界?我需要重温一下安德森 · 霍罗威茨的谈话要点
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,视频作为默认格式的平台也在不断发展,视频制作者的数量级也越来越多。更引人注目的是,许多占主导地位的视频平台 (比如 youtube) 纯粹是以发行为重点。他们甚至没有任何编辑能力。相反,像 Adobe 这样的公司最终成为这种需求的大受益者。
[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 注意: 像 Youtube 这样的平台仍然没有在他们的平台上建立起任何编辑器的外表,这也是值得讨论的。我会说我们永远不会知道什么是可能的,但是当我看着 TikTok,世界一切都很好
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.
但是 Adobe 并没有完全掌握这些技术。而且在许多这些新的紧急用例和客户类型中,Adobe 已经失去了创业的领先优势。
进入正确的抽象层次 | Tapping into the right level of abstraction
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.
最好的产品映射出客户如何看待他们的工作流程。它们与客户的抽象层 / 服务匹配: 不是太高就无法使用,也不是太低就难以轻松使用或以更复杂的方式进行扩展。
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.
这些是构建整个产品的核心概念。它们不仅与客户对工作流程的看法保持一致,而且常常为客户明确他们应该如何做。伟大的原子概念在更复杂的化合物中被磨练、扩展和建立… … 没有更好的词汇… … 化合物。
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.
类似的公司通常有些许不同的原子概念,最终使它们变得有意义的不同。Photoshop 专注于像素和图片。它的重点是编辑图像和图片。它的功能是通过像素级的转换来实现的。
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 与此类似,但它是基于矢量而不是像素的。这是一个更高层次的抽象。两者都不是更好或更坏,它们只是更适合不同的用例。Photoshop 更适合修改图像,而 illustrator 则适合无标度矢量最佳的设计。
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。但是它是为建立数字产品而设计的,这意味着在项目层面上运作。这不是单独的设计,而是手工制作整个产品和用户界面,以及对可重复性和一致性的内在需求。
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,但是也包括了一个更大的关注点,不仅仅是项目,而是作为相关范围的整个协作过程。类似地,它也将更高层次的抽象,比如插件、社区,以及更多同样重要的概念。
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.
类似于 Photoshop 和 Illustrator,但是它的用户并不是那些关心底层工具的设计师。相反,Canva 的核心原子概念围绕着不同的模板和组件,以帮助它们轻松地完成所做的工作。而且他们正在进行的设计并不完全处于制造数字产品的项目水平。它们是包含图片和设计的画布。
There are many more axes, but they don’t fit in this stupid 2D chart
还有更多的坐标轴,但他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.
原子概念从根本上联系到公司的核心循环。扩展或改变这些循环通常需要增加公司的原子概念词汇,或者以更复杂的方式将它们组合在一起。
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.
新出现的用例和新的客户类型导致新的原子概念出现。这些新的工作流程和不同的客户与现有客户有着不同的优先级。他们对问题的思考方式和对可能的解决方案的权重是不同的,即使最终的输出往往有相似之处。当然,精明的读者会发现,这里的因果关系是相反的。新类型的客户是一个很好的代表,可以看出需要注意的地方。但实际上,正是由于原子概念的改变,才使得初创公司在该领域成为与现有公司竞争的有力竞争者。
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。当这些不再与他们正在努力做的工作保持一致时,那么公司的所有扩张就变得有害无益了。这些都是核心基础,对于一家公司来说,在飞行途中改变这些基础要困难得多。一切使一个成熟的公司强大的东西都是建立在这个基础之上的,并且对一些内部的改变进行反击。以 Blockbuster 及其对实体店和滞纳金的依赖为例。人们常常陷入这样一种简单的说法: 在职者在掌舵时已经睡着了。他们愚蠢到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。与流行的看法相反,许多 Blockbuster 的高管不仅看到了 Netflix 带来的威胁,而且也看到了 Blockbuster 有机会取代 Netflix 的地位。他们甚至组建了一个团队与 Netflix 正面交锋。但是,零售商店和滞纳金之所以如此强大和有利可图,也是它们如此难以取代的原因。为百视达的核心业务打造数字化未来的每一步行动都受到了高管们的抵制,他们创造了更多的收入,商店经营者们因为被排挤而暴跳如雷,华尔街的投资者们对于把一个稳定的业务变成一个高风险的企业感到不安。
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?
很少有公司能够改变其核心的原子概念。这就是为什么像亚马逊这样的公司如此令人印象深刻,如此令人畏惧。创业公司通过找到不对称的角度来对付那些他们无法跟上的现有企业。对于一家没有神圣不可侵犯的公司来说,什么是安全的?
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.
理解一个公司的核心抽象层次是很难从远处理解的。这就是为什么寻找具有不同需求的紧急客户类型是一个有用的替代品。
Figma 在协同产品设计上下了赌注 | Figma bet on collaborative product design
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 公司是第一家了解数字产品设计市场机遇的公司。发布于 2010 年,Sketch 完全是为了设计这些产品的用户界面和用户体验。它的原子概念最适合数字产品: 矢量和项目。这些也使得 Adobe 很难与他们已有的产品线竞争。
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.
在一个典型的创新者的困境中,Sketch 对抗 Adobe 的最大优势就是它放弃了所有不适合制作数字产品的东西。这使得它只能专注于为基于矢量的数字设计创造最好的体验。不像 Photoshop,它是基于矢量的。与 Illustrator 不同的是,它是以大型复杂项目为重点,而不是以特定的孤立设计为重点。
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.
现在回想起来,Sketch 只是半途而废。创造数字产品的设计师确实需要基于矢量的设计工具。而且 Sketch 也明白他们正在从事更复杂的项目,而不是那些需要更好的项目优先特性的一次性设计。但这些设计师也经常与团队合作ーー既与其他设计师合作,更重要的是,也与非设计师合作。他们不是孤立地设计,而是作为一个更大过程的一部分。
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.
和之前的 Adobe 一样,Sketch 缺少这方面的知识。从 Sketch 的技术架构和基于桌面的产品到它的定价模型和平台结构都不适合这种合作。对这些功能的需求可以从公司对这个问题的解决方案和许多产品的混乱方式中看出来,这些产品的出现填补了这些漏洞。像 Zeplin,Sympli,和 Invision 这样的公司是从设计师的需求中成长起来的,设计师需要更好的方式来与其他设计师,pm,和工程师合作。和 Adobe 的插件系统一样,Sketch 的插件系统与其说是平台的核心,不如说是固定的。
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 刚开始的时候,它更直接地成为 Photoshop 的竞争对手。不过,在最初的两年里,随着他们与更多的潜在用户交流,他们将重点转向了致力于数字产品的用户界面和用户体验的设计师。对于这些设计师来说,构建产品以实现独特的协作是关键。这样做是非常重要的。这样做的技术挑战是非常困难的,尽管 Figma 由于 Evan Wallace 的技术实力和 WebGL 等新技术的专门知识而得到了很好的安装。为了最大限度地实现合作,Figma 对几乎整个公司进行了重新思考,从而开发出了新的定价模式、分销模式和共享形式要素。
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 的文章的读者,我有一篇文章可以在这里找到,这样可以避免重复许多相同的观察结果。Figma 的成功之处在于,它在越来越多的复杂数字产品的使用案例中不断磨练,这些产品由规模更大的设计师团队和非设计师团队制造,它们也在寻找原子概念,这些概念是新用户所独有的。
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《为什么菲格玛会赢》一书中所讨论的那样,在过去几年中,这一点在他们向大型企业客户的扩张中最为明显。大公司对设计工具的需求如果不是更大的话,也是一样的,这些设计工具是为组织中的协作而构建的,就像小公司或者小团队一样。然而,他们所需要的一系列特性和工具看起来与一个小团队非常不同。当 Figma 刚开始的时候,它发现自己首先适合小型团队,但随着整个大公司开始认真对待它,它需要了解如何思考协作,以及如何构建一个设计工具,而不仅仅是在团队层面,而是在整个公司的规模上。
Canva 寄希望于非设计师的营销设计 | Canva bet on marketing design by non-designers
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,市场营销和广告业务已经越来越多地转向了网络。网络广告与传统广告有很多不同之处。最值得注意的是,它的节奏要快得多,而且往往更有针对性。公司现在在同一个广告活动上做了许多小的变化: 测试哪个版本做得最好,为不同的客户群制作个性化版本,并根据每个广告平台的不同需求形式因素对其进行调整。每年举办几次大型活动的传统过程看起来越来越陈旧。这种节奏是电视和印刷这些主要渠道的功能,因为这些领域的广告费用很高,所以一年只能进行几个大型广告活动。随着渠道的转变,活动、工具和团队会调整以适应新的动态。
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.
渐渐地,营销团队不再需要整个设计团队为每个活动而工作。相反,他们想要的是能让他们轻松调整营销设计的工具,比如能够在 instagram 广告和 Youtube 横幅上同时设置营销设计的格式。这个人的背景也需要改变。公司不再雇佣设计机构,而是将这些工作内部进行,一方面是因为更多的工作可以由非设计师完成,另一方面是因为迭代的速度使得与外部机构的合作过于缓慢。
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.
营销人员和人们在 Instagram 上发布的帖子并不是以像素来考虑他们想要做的设计工作。这是错误的抽象层。他们并没有试图直接编辑照片。这些照片只是他们心目中具体目标的一个方面。他们从美学和设计目的的角度来看待它ーー不仅仅是图像,还有文字和图形等等。
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 可以做任何他们想做的事情,但是它太低级了。Photoshop 的原子概念是图像和像素。在像素级编辑是完美的照片和图像处理。Canva 在一个更高的抽象层次上运作ーー它的用户所关心的层次。Canva 的设计始于他们的目的,无论是设计一个展示平台,一个 Instagram 帖子,还是一个婚礼邀请函。为了这个特定的目的,Canva 提供了模板和布局,同时也方便用户添加他们自己的创意,无论是通过放入他们自己的照片,还是使用社区制作的任何图形和组件。
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.
这种需求在中小型企业和团队中更为明显,因为他们不可能在每个项目上都有一个完整的设计团队。Canva 轻量级的编辑功能和简单的模板,以及为不同社交平台进行格式化等许多小改动的过程,使它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.
这也使得 Canva 可以将其平台扩展到这些分子水平。的发行在很大程度上是由搜索引擎优化带动的。不出所料,人们使用 Canva 的同样的用例正是那些寻找设计工具的人们想要做的事情,也是他们想要搜索 Google 的原因。有了围绕这些用例构建的产品和模板,Canva 可以很容易地向外部公开这些内容,并拥有大量的模板和示例,可供希望进行特定设计的潜在新用户使用。关于他们的用户获取和入职的一切都是围绕人们拥有的特定用例和 Canva 的原子概念构建的。它们是围绕人们的功能性工作流而构建的,无论是制作 Twitter 背景照片、婚礼邀请,还是主题演讲。而 Canva 致力于让这一切变得尽可能简单。
通过成为一个平台建立防御 | Defensibility through becoming a platform
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.
随着他们的成长,Canva 通过围绕模板、布局、字体等创建市场和社区,扩展了他们的生态系统。大多数用户不想从头开始构建。有了 Canva 的市场,他们可以使用预建组件的整个生态系统,包括免费和付费组件。
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.
拥有这个强大的附加组件生态系统是非常强大的。附加功能使 Canva 能够满足其所有客户的庞大规模和多样化需求,这远远超出了一家公司单靠自己的力量所能做到的。这使得每个客户都能够以一种个性化的方式使用 Canva,这种方式完全符合他们所关心的用例和美学。
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一直是大多数设计工具的主要功能。然而,它们并没有紧密地集成到产品中,给用户增加了摩擦。相比之下,Canva 将附加组件无缝地直接嵌入到产品中,使用户更容易直接访问它们,从而带来更高的使用率。将这些市场视为第一方还有许多额外的好处。除了增加产品的价值,它还巩固了 Canva 的平台网络效应。越来越多的创作者通过向 Canva 出售附加组件来赚钱,这加强了 Canva 作为使用最强大的生态系统的工具的地位。
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保卫他们的滩头阵地的一个例子。没有比平台的跨网络效应更强的防御性来源了。这使得任何新的竞争对手都难以获得牵引力。如果没有足够大的用户基础,一个新的平台就无法吸引开发人员在其基础上进行开发。因此,新的竞争对手也缺乏生态系统的附加组件,以满足所有的需求和吸引用户。这就是平台如此持久的原因。他们允许公司扩大他们所能满足的需求,而不仅仅局限于一个公司,他们也为任何希望效仿的竞争者制造了先有鸡还是先有蛋的问题。
将这个剧本扩展到其他领域 | Extending this playbook to other spaces
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.
设计在各个领域并不是独一无二的。在大多数领域,特别是在所有形式的数字内容中,所有这些推动新的和大型用例需求的相同因素都会同样到来。我们将不可避免地看到许多类似的变化发生在视频设计和摄影中,尽管出现的具体用例和需求看起来不同。
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.
显然,目前市场转型最活跃的领域是更广阔的生产空间。在过去的几年里,许多这些新公司 (Airtable、 Notion、 Coda、 Roam、 Retool、 Webflow 和 Loom,举几个例子) 已经取得了显著的早期发展。但是,也很难描述什么是生产力和协作的确切空间,以及哪些公司聚集在哪个水桶里。许多公司都有很多产品路线图重叠,因为它们都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来说,许多公司还没有清晰地定义他们所押注的原子概念,并据此对自己进行定位。哪些是竞争对手?谁是他们的客户,哪些用例将是最重要的工作流?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.
公司很难解决这些问题,因为消费者自己并不清楚他们真正想要的是什么。这些公司有机会改变客户对自己工作流程的看法。最好的公司引入更好的原子概念,帮助推动他们的客户前进。无论公司是否积极管理,足够强大的产品都会有一个生态系统围绕着他们。最好的公司不仅仅从这些生态系统中受益,他们还建立自己的平台,使这些生态系统能够运行和指导,从而增强他们的客户的能力。
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.
Figma 正开始通过插件和社区这样的新举措来扩大它的范围。这些并不是我期待我们看到的唯一一个 (有一个我特别兴奋地看到他们如何处理) ,但它们是核心的。正如《为什么 Figma 会赢》一文中更多讨论的那样,如果这些工作有助于拓展 Figma 周围的生态系统,使具有新能力和方式的用户能够互相交流。生态系统还为 Figma 创建了可防御性和可扩展性。
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.
除了设计和生产力,今天许多公司正处于这些决策的关键时刻。让一个产品的核心循环工作是一个巨大的努力和非常罕见的。对于那些知道的人来说,他们接下来要面对的问题是什么。
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.
这些公司的核心产品估值可以 (也已经) 轻松达到数十亿美元。如果他们想上市或者被收购,他们可以这么做。但是他们也正处在这样一个时刻: 他们可以喘口气,退后一步,想想他们未来十年的发展轨迹是什么样子的,如果他们雄心勃勃的话,他们的发展路线图下一步会是什么样子。对于他们中的大多数人来说,这将涉及到他们原子概念的基本扩展。多产品化或成为一个平台,是复合成更有意义的公司的关键。
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.
对于所有关于战略的讨论来说,经营一家真正的创业公司通常更多的是对策略和执行力的考验,而不是战略。少数几个例外情况之一是,公司正在对其大多数核心循环进行新的扩展。前产品市场契合是最常见的这些时刻。但是,从单一产品到平台 (或多产品) 的转变是大多数成功公司都经历过的另一种常见的转变。
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.
Figma 和 Canva 是经历这种扩张的公司的例子,但它们并不孤单。在整个行业中,你可以看到一群科技公司正处于这个阶段。像 Notion、 Airtable 和 Flexport 这样的公司都开始探索他们产品和平台的下一个主要扩张。虽然还没有完成,但他们已经成功地构建了自己的核心产品。在他们考虑未来十年的雄心壮志时,他们将不得不从根本上扩展他们的产品。
最后的想法 | 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.
通常,公司的气味测试是对其进行量纲化的容易程度。这就像是柯氏复杂性的变体。有多少核心元素可以最大限度地解释它?人们相当反驳说,公司本质上是混乱的,不能用这种方式压缩。通常的情况是,风险投资家和外部人士以一种更容易记住但在实践中毫无用处的方式简化了他们对公司的看法。这个降维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.
作为一个创始人,没有人能像你一样理解你的公司的细微差别。每个人都看到了你公司简单、压缩、可悲的不完美的影子。创始人一再低估他们的产品对外界来说是复杂和不透明的程度,因为他们把产品完全装载在缓存中。他们已经看到了每一次迭代和修改,并在痛苦的细节中想象他们的产品可能过的所有其他生活。
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.
大多数用户从不和公司里的人说话。即使他们这样做了,他们与公司的绝大多数互动都是与产品有关的。你的用户对你的公司是如何运作的一无所知。他们没有看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特性的细节,或者许多经过测试、回滚和精炼的迭代。他们通常只知道你的产品如何使用,更不用说你对产品成熟后应该如何使用的看法了。而你未来的潜在用户甚至不知道你的存在。
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.
随着产品成为与公司大多数互动的驱动力,外部看门人和传教者,如记者和银行家,变得不那么重要了。相反,最关键的是公司产品和产品的清晰度,以及创始人推动的分销。我们还处于内部化这一概念的早期阶段。
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.
这种清晰不仅仅是为了用户。这对员工来说更为重要。他们是围绕这些原子概念构建复杂化合物的人,他们的误解是未来出现偏差和问题的根源。创始人得到的建议是,经常重复那些比他们认为需要的更重要的事情。重复可能会帮助员工记住重要的事情,但是与一开始就有强烈的原子概念所带来的清晰度相比,重复就显得微不足道了。就像文化基因一样,简单使得它们如此可传播。
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,首席执行官们与其联合创始人和团队一起做的一个有用的练习是,问一个关于公司的重要问题ーー看看每个人的答案有多大差异。人们总是惊讶于自己与创始人之间的巨大差异。有分歧是很自然的,但这并不意味着任何一个人都是错的。但是,在如何看待公司方面,这些意想不到的差异正是潜在的断层,它们使得公司很难在什么是重要的问题上保持一致,也很难有一个共同的框架来讨论和辩论重要的决策。
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).
所有这些都不应该被误解。很少有公司带着清晰的原子概念从娘胎里出来。建立一个公司的本质是混乱和复杂的。批评人士说,许多分析过于简单化,对如何看待公司给出了事后解释 (包括本人在内) ,这种说法是正确的。
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.
但是,研究这种复杂性并找到最无损的降维方法的过程,并不是纸上谈兵的分析师的专长。对于创始人和公司本身来说,定期进行这种重构是至关重要的。正如企业积累了技术债务一样,它们也积累了叙事债务。
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.
通常情况下,筹款是进行这种重构的一种自然的适应功能。对于顶级公司而言,这种情况越来越不正确了ーー但这种清理工作的重要性并没有降低。无论是为了他们的用户和员工,还是为了他们能够扩张成为更复杂的平台,公司都必须在追求自己想成为的人之前,先弄清楚自己到底是谁。
附录: Figma 的生态系统和开源 | Appendix: Figma’s ecosystem and open source
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.
在平台生态系统图上还有很多可以讨论的东西,这超出了本文的范围。这是一个高度简化的图表,但是当与那些开始考虑从单一产品公司到平台的顺序的公司的创始人交谈时,这个图表经常出现在我的脑海中。他们正在寻找一个框架,以一种更加结构化的方式来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.
对于不同的公司,这些图表看起来非常不同。甚至对于同一家公司来说,随着用户基数的变化,它也会随着时间的推移而变化,而这些用户正在塑造他们的生态系统。公司做出的有意识的选择对他们的平台的外观有很大的影响。
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 就是一个很好的例子。与许多平台不同的是,Figma 的插件和社区倡议将重点放在为个人设计师构建自己问题的解决方案,无论是为自己还是与他人自由分享。这种关注与许多其他平台是不一致的,这些平台主要是为第三方公司开发的产品,销售给平台之上的用户。
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.
这带来的一个影响是,人们押注于 Figma 利基用例的长尾效应的重要性,如下所示。有许多用例通常太小众,不能作为产品来支持,而在大多数平台中从未涉及到这些产品。但是,通过让个人或公司更容易地构建自己的插件,Figma 希望看到这些插件得到解决,然后以开源开发者生态系统中常见的方式与社区分享。
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be 完美的平衡,就像所有的事情都应该是这样的
Acknowledgements
鸣谢
Many thanks to Keila Fong and Eugene Wei for the many discussions about this topic and help with this piece.
非常感谢 Keila Fong 和 Eugene Wei 关于这个话题的许多讨论并帮助完成这篇文章。
Additionally, thanks to Casey Winters for the many discussions about Figma and Canva. And our discussions for many years on these very topics.
另外,感谢 Casey Winters 对 Figma 和 Canva 的许多讨论。我们就这些话题进行了多年的讨论。
Thanks also to Fareed Mosavat and Brian Balfour at Reforge. The Advanced Growth Strategy course was the origin of many conversations about Figma’s loops. And I still teach the Figma case study every semester. If interested in many of the areas in this piece, Reforge is the best place to learn them but also from people who’ve spent far more time actually putting them to practice in companies than me.
感谢 Reforge 的 Fareed Mosavat 和 Brian Balfour。高级成长战略课程是许多关于菲格玛循环的讨论的起源。我仍然每学期教菲格玛案例研究。如果你对这篇文章中的许多领域感兴趣,Reforge 是学习这些知识的最佳地点,也是从那些比我花更多时间在公司实践这些知识的人那里学习的。
All graphics in this piece were created with Procreate and Figma. Procreate is a fantastic drawing app for iPad. If you have made it all the way through this essay and don’t know what Figma is then I don’t know what to tell you. Once again will put out into the world how much I want an integration between these two. What is the point of Figma’s platform solving for long tail niche use cases, if not to solve primarily for my long tail niche use cases.
所有的图形在这一块创建与 Procreate 和 Figma。是一款非常棒的 iPad 绘图应用。如果你已经完成了这篇文章,却不知道菲格玛是什么,那么我不知道该告诉你什么。再一次向世界展示了我多么希望这两者之间的结合。如果不是为了主要解决我的长尾利基用例,那么 Figma 的平台解决长尾利基用例的意义何在。 https://kwokchain.com/2021/02/05/atomic-concepts/