The executive who ran Photoshop just left Adobe with no successor and no reason

Nine weeks out, the product chief is gone

David Wadhwani's last day as president of Adobe's Creativity & Productivity business was 27 September. The filing that carries the news↗ is spare: he notified the board on 2 September, he stays on as a senior adviser for a transition period, and nothing else. No successor, no reason, no end date ¹.

He arrived with the Macromedia acquisition in 2005, ran the Digital Media business twice, and spent 2026 as the public face of Firefly, Acrobat and the Creative Agent pitch ². The Inference traced that give-away strategy on 28 September in "Adobe gives Photoshop away inside its rivals' chatbots, and shareholders pay the rent." He had been reported as a strong contender for the top job after steering the Figma bid that died on regulatory grounds in 2023; the seat went to Anil Chakravarthy, chief executive from 1 December↗ ³¹.

A $4.65 billion quarter with no owner

The portfolio he vacated is Adobe's center of gravity. Creative & Marketing Professionals subscriptions brought in $4.65 billion last quarter↗, up 13 percent; Business Professionals & Consumers, which holds Acrobat and Express, added $1.91 billion, up 16 percent ⁴. Shareholders holding that franchise are down 32 percent this year at $239.29↗, the worst of the big software names while the S&P 500 gained 14 percent ⁵.

Record numbers, a repriced stock

The quarter he leaves behind was the best in Adobe's history: revenue of $6.76 billion, up 13 percent, non-GAAP EPS of $6.13, raised full-year targets, a billion monthly active users, and AI-first ARR past $650 million, up more than 150 percent ⁴⁶. Underneath, net new ARR fell 36 to 37 percent on the freemium pivot, and RPO growth slowed to 8 percent↗, the first single-digit print since early fiscal 2023 ⁶. The market is pricing the second set of numbers and ignoring the first.

Who benefits if that pricing is right is the camp built to pull creative work off Adobe's desktop: Canva with more than 260 million users, Figma with an estimated 13 million, and OpenAI's generative models, the names analysts reach for when they explain the selloff ⁷. Nothing in the filings shows share actually moving yet. The one provable beneficiary today is whoever hires Wadhwani next.

The board's case, and the empty seat

The board's version is continuity: Shantanu Narayen stays on as executive chair and says he has "confidence that Anil will build on this momentum" ⁴. Adobe bought back 9.5 million shares in the quarter and left $24.55 billion of authorization standing, a bet that reads as management seeing value in its own stock ⁴⁶⁸. None of it fills the seat: the executive who carried both the products and the AI narrative walked out mid-handoff, and the document names nobody to replace him ¹.

What 1 December settles

Wadhwani wrote on LinkedIn that "this is the right moment for me to start a new chapter," with company ideas he plans to "explore and pressure-test" ³. Everything past the filing is inference. Chakravarthy takes over on 1 December ¹. Watch who inherits the portfolio, whether it is split, and where the man who built it twice lands next.