Product Design Hub Shifts to Figma
Matthew Moore, Head of Design at Lime, on Figma vs. Adobe
Adobe lost this category because design teams picked the tool that made shared work fastest, not the tool IT had already paid for. Across multiple companies, teams kept Creative Cloud for Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects, but still standardized on Figma for product design because it lived in the browser, kept files in one shared place, and let designers, PMs, and engineers work in the same document instead of passing giant files around.
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This was not just one team at Lime. Another design leader reported 10 Figma users, 14 Adobe Creative Cloud users, and zero XD users. The pattern was paying for Adobe anyway, then adding Figma because XD did not become the day to day system for collaborative product design.
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Figma won on workflow, not on bundle price. Designers described the old world as local files, version confusion, and exports into slides or docs. Figma turned the design file into the source of truth where PMs comment, engineers inspect, and non designers sometimes edit directly.
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The strategic damage for Adobe was narrow but real. Figma did not replace Photoshop or Premiere, so companies often bought both. But XD was the one Adobe product that should have defended product design, and by 2023 Adobe had moved XD into support for existing customers while the Figma deal itself was later terminated.
Going forward, the center of gravity stays with tools that turn design from a specialist craft into a shared company workflow. That favors products like Figma that start with designers, then spread outward to PMs, engineers, and adjacent teams. Adobe remains strong in creative production, but the product design hub has already shifted.