For startups or smaller companies, often all it takes is a strong product team with a strong product‐oriented CEO or product manager. But, in larger companies, it usually takes more than that. It takes strong product leadership, in the very best sense of the word, including providing a compelling product vision and strategy.
One of the absolute hardest assignments in our industry is to try to cause dramatic change in a large and financially successful company. It's easier in many ways if the company is in serious trouble, and it is feeling big pain, because that pain can be used to motivate the change.
Of course, great companies want to disrupt themselves before others disrupt them. The difference between Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the legions of large but slowly dying companies is usually exactly that: product leadership.
In 2011, Lea Hickman led product for Adobe's Creative Suite. Lea had spent several years at Adobe helping them to build a very large and successful business for itself—on the order of $2 billion in annual license revenue—with its desktop‐based Creative Suite.
One of the absolute hardest assignments in our industry is to try to cause dramatic change in a large and financially successful company.
But Lea knew the market was changing, and the company needed to move from the old desktop‐centric, annual‐upgrade model, to a subscription‐based model supporting all the devices designers were now using—including tablets and mobile in all their many form factors.
More generally, Lea knew that the upgrade model was pushing the company to take the product in directions that were not good for Adobe customers and not good in the long term for Adobe. But change of this magnitude—revenue from Creative Suite was roughly half of Adobe's overall $4 billion in annual revenue—is brutally hard.
Realize that every bone and muscle in the corporate body works to protect that revenue, and so a transition of this magnitude means pushing the company far outside it's comfort zone. Finance, legal, marketing, sales, technology—few in the company would be left untouched.
You can start with the typical concerns:
The finance staff was very worried about the revenue consequences of moving from a license model to a subscription model.
The engineering teams were worried about moving from a two‐year release train model to continuous development and deployment, especially while assuring quality. They were also concerned that responsibility for service availability was now going to be much higher.
The sales side expected that this transition would change the way the Creative Suite products were sold. Rather than a large reseller channel, Adobe would now have a direct relationship with their customers. While many people at Adobe generally looked forward to this change, the sales organization knew that this was risky because if things didn't work out well, the channels would probably not be forgiving.
And don't underestimate the emotional changes—to both customers and sales staff—of moving from owning software to renting access to software.
With more than a million customers of the existing Creative Suite, Lea understood the technology adoption curve and that a segment of the customer base would strongly resist a change of this magnitude. Lea understood that it's not just about whether the new Creative Cloud would be better, it would also be different in some meaningful ways. Some people would need more time to digest this change than others.
Realize also that the Creative Suite is, as the name implies, a suite of integration applications—15 major ones and many smaller utilities. So, this meant that not just one product had to transform, but the full suite needed to transform, which dramatically increased the risk and complexity. It is any wonder that few companies are willing to tackle a product transformation of this magnitude?
Lea knew she had a tough job in front of her and her teams. She realized that, for all of these interrelated pieces to be able to move together in parallel, she needed to articulate clearly a compelling vision of the new whole as greater than the sum of the parts.
Lea worked with Adobe's then‐CTO, Kevin Lynch, to put together some compelling prototypes showing the power of this new foundation and used this to rally executives and product teams.
Lea then began a sustained and exhausting campaign to communicate continuously with leaders and stakeholders across the entire company. To Lea, there was no such thing as over‐communication. A continuous stream of prototypes helped keep people excited about what this new future would bring.
Because of the tremendous success of the Creative Cloud—as of this writing, Adobe generated more than $1 billion in recurring revenue faster than anyone else has—Adobe discontinued new releases of the desktop‐based Creative Suite to focus their innovation on the new foundation. Today, more than 9 million creative professionals subscribe to, and depend on, the Creative Cloud. Thanks, in large part to this transition, Adobe has more than tripled the market cap it had before the transition. The company today is worth roughly $60 billion.
It's easy to see how big companies with lots of revenue at risk would hesitate to make the changes they need to not only survive but thrive. Lea tackled these concerns and more head‐on with a clear and compelling vision and strategy and clear and continuous communication to the many stakeholders.
This is one of the most impressive, nearly superhuman examples I know of a product leader driving massive and meaningful change in a large enterprise company. There's no question in my mind that Adobe would not be where it is today without someone like Lea working tirelessly to drive this change through.
And I'm very happy to say that today Lea is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, helping other organizations through the transformation to modern product practices.