Innovation a constant with Adobe, speeding it up is its new mantra

If innovation is a constant with Adobe, speeding it up is its new mantra. This, the company hopes, will lead to a shorter product life cycle and faster go-to-market timelines. Earlier, if innovations would take 12 to 18 months, now the company is seeing them happen on a frequent basis. Last year, Adobe witnessed 200 new releases—major product launches, new features and updates for offerings such as Experience Cloud, Creative Cloud and Document Cloud. India is the second largest location for Adobe globally in terms of people with over 5,500 employees. The company has two research and development (R&D) centres in the country. Over a third of the company’s R&D is carried out in its Noida and Bengaluru labs.

Shanmugh Natarajan, managing director, and vice-president, products, Adobe India, says, “Today, with the advent of mobile devices all the business interactions are measured as experiences. The content velocity has changed and personalisation has set in. With so many changes kicking in, innovation cannot wait to happen in 24 months.”

Today, every brick-and-mortar company and industry—be it hospitality, banking or airline—is connecting with the end costumer through multiple platforms and looking to deliver superlative experiences. Taking the changing industry landscape into consideration, Adobe was quick to move away from the so-called “big-bang” innovation approach. Like other industry players such as Microsoft and Apple, the company too would roll out an update or provide additional features for its key products like Photoshop or Illustrator once in two years. This was a time when its user base was fragmented and piracy was rampant. However, with the ascent of mobile and dominance of social media platforms Adobe saw merit in coming up with more frequent and timely product updates. Such an approach has seen the company raking in revenues of $7.3 billion in FY17 from $4.4 billion in 2012.

Natarajan credits Adobe’s accelerated innovation approach to the online web services industry. “They were more agile and were doing product release on an almost daily basis. We were able to piggyback on a lot of learnings from them and adapt a few things to suit our innovation strategy.”

With delivery of right experiences to consumers being a top priority for clients, Adobe’s innovation strategy keeps the designer at the centre of all its product launches and updates. This is to ensure professionals who use Adobe’s media tools such as Sensei, Photoshop, Adobe, InDesign and Acrobat benefit from improved productivity and reduced man-hours in accomplishing a particular task.

With an eye on shorter product lifecycle, the company transitioned to a payroll and subscription-based model. Initially, Adobe began by adopting a quarterly release cycle and quickly moved on to a more aggressive launch cycle depending upon the nature of the product update.

According to Natarajan, designing a shorter product cycles is a matter of planning and an outcome of adopting an agile methodology. It is like following a train model. There is always a train departing every month or quarter from the station, which in this case is Adobe labs. There are multiple product managers who work on various innovations and look forward to catching a train with a particular deadline. In case they miss the first train, they refocus and revise their product release timelines to catch the second or third train. All the individual innovation projects are pre-aligned with the company’s go-to-market strategy.

The train model ensures a continuous stream of innovations from Adobe. Customers benefit from continuous innovation as they do not have to wait for 24 months for an update. The employees are on a constant lookout for improving its existing products. For example, one of the focus areas for the company is to keep improving the reading experience of a PDF and Word document on different mobile devices. Its engineers are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to see that networks and devices adapt the optimal format, making it easier for a user to read the same document when she is moving from a 24-inch desktop screen to a 5-inch mobile phone screen. The basic objective is to help networks format documents for devices that are not identical.

Natarajan says the challenge while fast-tracking innovation lies in striking the right balance between pragmatic realism and an aggressive need to bring the greatest innovations to consumers, especially when working in real time.

Rajiv Gupta, who leads the technology advantage practice for BCG India, says technology companies dealing in cloud, AI and ML can derive benefits from shorter product cycles, such as faster revenue cycles, higher returns on investment on R&D spends and sustained market leadership. They can also tap opportunities to incorporate customer feedback faster as well as new technology capabilities into product/service offerings.

Challenges also are faced across the key components of technology, process, people and data. “Communicating tech differentiators/benefits of the new product/features to the existing and new customers clearly is a challenge. Also, technology is changing too fast, so it is important to make tech/infra investments with a business case lens,” he says.

When it comes to process, project prioritisation in case of business units competing for funds can hamper timely product release. Identification of the most optimal GTM model for success with the new offerings is important, he adds.