Two rules for designing a winning product

While working on my latest side project, I was thinking deeply about what makes products win. Specifically, what about the design of the product makes it far more successful than other products just like it?

As a designer, I was thinking specifically about Figma and Sketch. Why does it seem like Figma leapfrogged Sketch in the past couple of years? Thinking about this, I came up with two rules.

1. Every product should start with a single primitive (a file, a tweet, an email)
2. Build using existing solutions (common flows, links, text, images, etc.)

I'd argue this is how every winning product works. In Figma's case, their primitive was their document (just like Sketch). But what they did was maintain this primitive and add more existing solutions like sharing and storage. This made it the near-ideal solution (for certain types of designers).

I thought this might be interesting to some folks. If you want to read the full article, it's here.

Happy to discuss, and share more thoughts as well!