The opportunity for these new atomic concepts to thrive is driven by the new use cases and types of users unearthed during market transitions.

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.

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.

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.

Vectors are more important than raster graphics. The complexity and process of designing these high-value designs also got increasingly more sophisticated.

The need for their tools to have a higher-level understanding of the components and variants became more important.

They just have a very specific thing they want to create, with the least friction possible.

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.

Great atomic concepts are honed and then extended and built upon in more complex compounds that…well for lack of a better word…compound.

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.

Canva’s core atomic concepts are around the different templates and components to help them easily accomplish the job they are doing.

Atomic concepts are fundamentally linked to the core loops of a company.

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.

it is actually the changed atomic concepts that are what make startups a compelling contender against incumbents in the space.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Companies have trouble navigating these questions because customers themselves don’t think precisely about what they really want.

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.

An ecosystem also creates both defensibility and extensibility for Figma.

Going multi-product or becoming a platform is the key to compounding into significantly more meaningful companies.

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.

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.

it’s the clarity of a company’s product and product—and founder—driven distribution that become most key.

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.

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.

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.

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.