Figma

Adobe owned design software for decades. When Dylan Field and Evan Wallace founded Figma in 2012, they did not try to out-Photoshop Photoshop. They bet design should work like a Google Doc: browser-based, real-time, multiplayer. At the time, files were saved locally, emailed as attachments, and opened by one person at a time. Figma spread laterally through teams until developers and PMs who were never the target customers lived in it daily, and Adobe eventually moved to buy it for roughly $20 billion.

This case sharpens how a challenger picks its point of attack against an entrenched incumbent. Feature parity is a losing game; the real opening is somewhere else entirely. Open the app to identify the most painful, most collaborative moment in your customer's workflow, and decide whether to own it.