Design a phased migration plan for Stock without hurting users

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Adobe is a creative, document, and marketing software company; its products include Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Adobe Express, Firefly, and Experience Cloud.

Adobe Stock is planning a migration of a core Stock experience and supporting platform without disrupting creators who rely on it for daily production work. The migration may affect user-facing workflows such as searching for assets, previewing watermarked comps, licensing images/video/templates/3D assets, downloading files, saving to Creative Cloud Libraries, and using Stock assets inside Adobe apps or enterprise marketing workflows.

Your task is to describe how you would execute this migration in phases while protecting user trust, revenue continuity, contributor obligations, and enterprise reliability. The plan should account for different user segments, including individual creators, teams, enterprise customers, API/integration users, and contributors whose assets, metadata, attribution, licensing, or payout flows may be affected.

This is an execution-focused question: focus on how you would plan, sequence, launch, monitor, and de-risk the migration rather than proposing a new product strategy or redesigning Adobe Stock from scratch.

The experience should consider:

- Critical user journeys that must not break, including search, preview, licensing, downloads, Creative Cloud Library sync, billing/credits, and enterprise entitlements.

- Migration phases, owners, dependencies, and sequencing across product, engineering, design, data, legal, support, trust/safety, and go-to-market teams.

- Go/no-go criteria for each phase, including data integrity, latency, availability, search quality, conversion, download success, and customer support volume.

- Cohorts and rollout controls, such as internal testing, beta users, low-risk segments, geographic or account-based rollout, and enterprise allowlists.

- Rollback and fallback plans if licensing, payments, search relevance, asset availability, or integrations degrade.

- Communication plans for customers, contributors, admins, sales, support, and internal stakeholders.

- Launch risks specific to Stock, including rights management, metadata mismatches, duplicate assets, broken license history, AI-generated content labeling, and trust/compliance issues.

- Post-launch monitoring, incident response, and prevention mechanisms to ensure the migration does not create recurring operational risk.

The goal is to present a clear operating plan that shows how you would migrate Adobe Stock responsibly while preserving creator productivity, enterprise confidence, licensing accuracy, and business continuity.