Some teams ship features, others make history. The difference is rarely about individual talent: it comes down to how teams are built, how they’re led, and how they operate over time.
At dualoop, we recently sat down with Nicolas Liatti, Senior Director of Product at Adobe, to unpack the principles and practices behind two products that have earned the highest industry honours: an Academy Award and an Engineering Emmy. In his role leading the Substance 3D category, Nicolas has worked across startup and enterprise environments, shaping teams that deliver long-term impact in an industry defined by constant reinvention.
Adobe’s Substance 3D team didn’t follow a playbook to win awards. They focused instead on building the kind of culture and operating system where world-class work becomes possible. Through their journey, we find clear lessons for any product leader serious about raising the bar.
Teams that own, not execute
One of the most consistent patterns in high-performing organisations is the presence of real teams. These aren’t groups of individuals assigned to tasks, they’re deliberately constructed units with shared purpose, long-term commitment, and deep trust.
Nicolas contrasts this with the common approach of “aggregating functions,” where developers, designers, and PMs are added to a project without shared context or ownership. In such setups, teams follow roadmaps, they rarely shape them.
"We focused more on building teams than hiring roles. That made all the difference." — Nicolas Liatti
Substance took a different route: they focused on building true teams, aligned on outcomes and empowered to make decisions. This involved selecting people not only based on their skills, but also on their ability to work together over time. In some cases, they didn’t hire traditional product managers at all. Instead, they coached artists (their end users) into the role, recognising that context and empathy would be more valuable than process expertise.
This choice had downstream effects: it led to faster cycles, stronger decisions, and a culture where everyone felt responsible for quality. The result was a resilient system for delivering excellence.
Customer proximity as a strategic advantage
Customer obsession is easy to talk about, harder to operationalise. Many teams rely on proxies: research reports, feedback tickets, quarterly interviews. Few embed their customers deeply into their product development cycles.
Substance 3D partnered early with a flagship customer, Naughty Dog, a top-tier video game studio, and used that relationship not as validation, but as co-creation.
“It wasn’t just about feedback. It was about building the product with them.” — Nicolas Liatti
Rather than building in isolation, teams worked alongside real users to test assumptions, prioritise decisions, and shape product direction. Support functions were integrated into product squads, ensuring that insights didn’t get filtered or delayed.
This setup allowed them to build a sharper sense of product instinct, what Shreyas Doshi defines as the ability to make good decisions with limited data. Over time, the team didn’t just respond to customer needs, they anticipated them.
For product leaders, the takeaway is clear: customer proximity isn’t just about discovery. It’s a long-term capability to be built, protected, and invested in.
Product sense comes from time in the field
Today, product sense is treated as a superpower. In practice, it’s the result of years of exposure to user needs, product decisions, and market context. Substance’s products illustrate this well.
Before Substance found product-market fit, the team spent nearly a decade in survival mode, but that period of struggle developed the instincts they would later rely on. One key example is the decision to split their texturing tool into two separate products (Designer and Painter), despite the market standard being to offer a single one.
This decision went against conventional wisdom, but it allowed each tool to evolve more clearly toward its user’s core jobs. It helped clarify business models, scale adoption, and earn recognition in distinct categories.
“You don’t learn product sense in theory. You build it, project after project.” — Nicolas Liatti
Product sense also shaped how they approached monetisation: rather than chase large enterprise deals early on, the team built for freelancers first, aligning their pricing and product mechanics accordingly. This created early traction and influence among power users, which paid off later when scaling into studios and global enterprises.
Good product sense isn’t an innate trait, it’s a competence developed through repeated exposure to real-world decisions. Product leaders can foster an environment where this growth occurs by increasing time spent in the field, reducing reliance on abstract frameworks, and encouraging calculated bets.
Bias for business impact
Too often, empowered teams fall into the trap of local optimisation: they work hard on quality or experience, but fail to link their efforts to broader business outcomes. Substance’s approach was different.
From the start, Nicolas and his team embraced a bias for business by understanding which levers would move the business forward each quarter. This included focusing relentlessly on the most strategic features, prioritising scalability over polish when needed, and adapting pricing to open new segments.
Product managers, designers, and engineers operated in trios (a pattern also defined in dualoop’s product execution model) to evaluate trade-offs not only through the lens of feasibility or usability, but also value and viability.
"We asked ourselves every quarter: what actually moves the needle for the business?" — Nicolas Liatti
This maturity enabled the teams to navigate ambiguity and avoid the common trap of building beautiful products that fail to grow. At a time when many organisations still separate product and business, Substance treated them as the same conversation.
Lessons for transformation
Adobe’s Substance 3D team succeeded not because of one genius insight, but because of the way they combined strategic clarity with operational excellence.
Their journey speaks directly to product leaders trying to evolve their organisations from delivery engines to innovation hubs. It takes more than adopting a few rituals or frameworks: it requires a structural shift in how teams are formed, how decisions are made, and how success is defined.
What Substance has shown is that excellence is repeatable, and it doesn’t require being a design company or a Valley-native organisation. It requires commitment to craft, alignment on strategy, and a system that turns intent into reality.
For companies willing to invest in those conditions, legendary outcomes aren’t out of reach. They’re just the byproduct of teams built right.
At dualoop, we help organisations put these principles into action, from building team structures that enable ownership to embedding customer proximity and product maturity into everyday practice. If you're ready to move beyond delivery and build something lasting, we're here to help!
