Building with everyone is just building better: The evolution of product equity at Adobe

A strategic approach to driving innovation, market growth, and customer trust

Illustration by Ellen Porteus

Since our inception, we’ve defined product equity as the state in which every person, regardless of human difference, can access and harness the power of digital products—without harm, bias, or limitation. Product equity is a competitive advantage. It ensures that Adobe remains at the forefront of innovation, expands our market reach, and builds deeper trust with the millions of consumers, and creative and business professionals who rely on our products and services. When we remove barriers, we unlock new possibilities—for users, for businesses, and for the tech industry.

Why this work matters

Adobe is the backbone of digital experiences for millions of people worldwide. With over 130 products, our tools empower everyone from students experimenting with digital design and marketers crafting vibrant brand narratives, to professionals driving complex workflows and families signing important documents. Product equity ensures that everyone can fully utilize our products without limitation.

But product equity work isn’t just about building better products—it’s about building trust and unlocking potential for everyone who uses Adobe tools.

It’s why our Product Equity team has spent the last two and a half years working towards embedding equity and accessibility into the core of our product development process—ensuring our technology doesn’t just work for some, but works better for all. At Adobe, product equity is about:

• Creating unmatched product quality. When we address bias in AI, build accessibly, and design for the margins it leads to innovative, more useful tools.
• Expanding and deepening market reach. When we remove friction, we don’t just improve experiences—we open doors to entirely new audiences and business opportunities.
• Building and expanding customer trust. When people feel seen and considered, they build deeper love of our tools and loyalty to our brand.
• Investing in equal outcomes. When we invest in equity-centered approaches, we make it so every person, regardless of human difference, can access the power of digital products.

When we design products with the full range of users in mind, we create better experiences for everyone.

How the Product Equity team is driving Impact at Adobe

Product equity is product excellence. It’s what ensures that our tools work better, smarter, and more intuitively for every person—and in turn, strengthens our business—and we’re seeing that impact play out in small and large ways:

Diversity Casting Brief: Advancing representation in Adobe Stock

As part of our commitment to equitable representation of people and cultures, we’ve implemented a Casting Brief to ensure that the imagery we create and curate for Adobe Stock reflects the full spectrum of human diversity. This initiative is rooted in the belief that visual narratives should accurately reflect the diversity of customers we serve. Here’s how we’re doing it:

• Representative metadata: Updating keywording practices to reflect respectful, accurate identity labels that prioritize the voices of the individuals depicted. This helps improve discoverability while reducing bias in search results.
• Authenticity: Encouraging Adobe Stock contributors to cast talent who genuinely represent the communities being portrayed. Rather than relying on surface-level or stereotypical depictions of people, we support photographers and artists in creating meaningful, representative imagery.
• Contextual relevance: Ensuring that the images, models, and settings align with real-world cultural and social contexts. This involves consulting with models about how they prefer to be identified and ensuring the accurate portrayal of people and culture, including race, ethnicity, gender identity, disability, and other characteristics.

These updates don’t just improve representation for one community, they make Adobe Stock more relevant, searchable, and valuable for everyone.

Rethinking defaults in 3D design

Many design tools inherit narrow defaults. Adobe Substance 3D originally defaulted to lighter skin tones, requiring extra steps to create darker skin—a legacy issue that many digital tools share. We changed that by:

• Introducing a neutral preview system that allows creators to focus on texture and detail, rather than being locked into a specific starting point.
• Replacing ambiguous labels with clear, descriptive names like “Deep with warm undertones,” to ensure that skin tone is treated as a continuous spectrum.

These updates don’t just serve one community, they make Substance 3D more flexible, more intuitive, and more useful for everyone.

Advancing representation in Adobe Firefly

When we first launched Adobe Firefly, our generative AI tool, we quickly realized that early models reinforced stereotypes. We heard from users that generative results often reinforced narrow defaults—mirroring long-standing gaps in representation across the creative and tech industries. Prompts for roles like “CEO” or “doctor” also frequently surfaced images that reflected a limited set of identities, while other prompts—like “drag queen in outer space”—were inconsistently supported or entirely blocked. We didn’t ignore those challenges, we tackled them head-on by:

• Analyzing over 200,000 images and prompts to pinpoint gaps.
• Improving metadata and AI training sets to reflect real-world diversity.
• Ensuring all users can create with confidence.

As a result, Firefly now delivers more accurate, inclusive, and inspiring creative outputs. And in the process, we’ve strengthened Adobe’s position as a leader in equitable AI development.

Unlocking new market potential with smarter data

One of the most overlooked opportunities in product development is understanding untapped markets. As an example, women make up 20.5% of India’s 63 million small and medium-sized businesses. Yet when we analyzed Adobe Stock’s search results for “Indian women at work,” the images were generic, repetitive, and unrepresentative of India’s workforce. We acted by:

• Partnering with FemLab, a research cooperative led by Indian women, to understand their representation needs.
• Creating new metadata frameworks that reflect the actual makeup of the population including making images of disabled women, older women, and diverse professions more discoverable.
• Ensuring that Adobe’s search algorithms no longer erase the nuance and depth of Global South creators.

The impact of these efforts included more relevant content, better searchability, and new revenue opportunities in previously underinvested markets. Again, this isn’t about aligning with a particular ideology, it’s about expanding the reach and value of our products.

Empowering neurodivergent creators with thoughtful design

Every creator deserves to work in a frictionless, intuitive environment. But for neurodivergent users—those with ADHD, autism, and other cognitive differences—many digital tools introduce unnecessary obstacles. Through Project DOOMbox—an acronym for Didn’t Organize, Only Moved—we worked directly with neurodiverse knowledge workers to:

• Identify where interfaces were overly complex, overwhelming, or frustrating.
• Redesign navigation flows to reduce cognitive overload and enhance usability.
• Develop more customizable workflows, so every creator can work in the way that best suits them.

This didn’t just improve experiences for neurodivergent users—it made our products more user-friendly for everyone.

The future: Scaling product equity for greater impact

As the Product Equity team moves into its third year, we’re not slowing down. We’re scaling product equity across Adobe’s entire product ecosystem, ensuring that every tool we create is more usable, more representative, and more powerful for all customers—current and future. Where we’re focused:

• Measuring and scaling our impact: Tracking how usability, representation, and accessibility drive business success.
• Refining design systems: Leveraging neurodivergence design principles to remove unnecessary complexity and ensure seamless interaction patterns.
• Advancing AI ethics and representation: Ensuring that every person is able to see accurate, respectful representations of themselves and their cultures in our generative AI products.

Product equity work isn’t about dividing people, it’s about bringing more people in, ensuring equal access and outcomes for every person, and building the kind of company and the kind of products that empower every person who uses them. That requires work, nuance, and an understanding of and connection to community. When we invest the time and resources to do that well, we don’t just build for some, we build better for everyone, and that’s what product innovation is all about.