Adobe MAX 2016: Strategy and Opportunity
Last week was the Adobe MAX conference, one that I’ve been attending for many years, since my days as a Flash and ActionScript developer. Each year, the conference content and focus shifts, from once developer-centric to design-focused, and this year, a more widened view of celebrating creativity itself, in just about any form.
For me, what started out as a conference that I was able to gain new technical insights, has evolved toward helping me achieve focus on team and leadership strategy, while keeping up with new technologies, and getting to meet industry peers all over the country at various companies and organizations. All of this continues to provide a bucket-filling experience that I look forward to each year.
Ok, Ok.
Enough back-story, I want to get to my points. I’m not going to provide a summary of the conference, there are plenty of press-releases and blogs that can get into that. I want to talk about a realization of admiration I have for Adobe.
A few years ago, Adobe started shifting the MAX focus toward general creativity, and with that, a new acknowledgement that the space they wanted to play in is the creator’s workflow. Rather than being focused on apps and features and tools, they took an abstracted view of those things, looking to the reason for why they exist — to improve our workflows. At the time, as a developer, the transition was bumpy. Communities felt ignored, dropped, dumped. But today, reflecting back on it all, Adobe had a big strategy, and they have been diligent to keep their eyes on the ball for many years to see it come to life. So point 1: Have conviction for your strategy, especially in the trenches of execution and in the face of opposition.
Labor Fruits: Adobe XD
There is no better tangible view of what that strategic execution has brought them than the new beta app, Adobe XD. The Experience Design app was built from a place directly aligned with their strategy; a focus on need, on letting the user be unencumbered by interface and enabled by features. The design thinking, iterative development, community-focused creation of this application has shown us that they didn’t just get lucky here. Instead, the process is one to take note of as a scientific and capable approach to innovation and strategically-aligned execution. So point 2: Simon Sinek is right. What you end up with comes from how you do it, and how you do it should all align to a greater reason why.
An Opportunity
Ok, so that’s a bunch of great stuff about Adobe. Congratulations, you’re a company that I admire because of your ability to not only have a strategy, but to commit to it and execute on it in a way that, over a fair amount of time, seems to be paying off. Now I’m gonna get a little out there with the vision I see all of this possibly leading toward.
Adobe XD is a glimpse into the future. It’s being touted as a UX and prototyping app, and indeed, many of the features are baked-in because of this end use-case. But the app itself is more platform-like in that it provides easy function in a lower-level type of way, almost like a programming language and it’s ability to be used to build just about any kind of application. The features of XD walk a fine-line of being specific enough to be easy and useful, but non-specific enough to be utilized well beyond the scope in which they are being presented. If this trend continues, I can imagine a world where “The Adobe” is not just the thing your office admin asks IT to install/update for them (by the way, they meant Acrobat). It could, in fact, be this platform of creative services, expressed through dynamic interfaces, contained in a single application that runs across platforms and delivers content to hundreds, if not thousands, of end-points. I do think somewhere, someone, or hopefully more than a handful of folks at Adobe see this too, and it is something they are working towards. But more importantly, I think it’s impressive that Adobe is revealing themselves in a way that this can be inferred by those who care to piece the puzzle together. So point 3: The opportunity on the table is for this whole deal to not be a crescendo, but actually, a beginning up-tick toward realizing a great potential for a future of creators.
So, my hats off to Adobe. You’ve impressed me beyond your regular bag of tricks and I look forward to the future impact you will have on us. You’ve shown that it’s not just all corporate aspirations, or checking the box on purpose; there is a way to bring this stuff to life and that awareness exists within your walls.
