Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and embracing AI

For us, it was taking that first step, particularly with Canva and any I think creative tool. There's a real fear of the blank page. So prior to any onboarding thought from us, we had a blank page. We had a few coach marks that said, 'Here's where you do this, here's where you do this.' And then they'd be left on this blank page and people would freak out.

The words that we literally got out of years at testing were, I didn't know I could be a designer. And that was what we managed to do through several rounds of refinement on the onboarding process. It is lowering the barriers to entry and also increasing the amount of delight.

I think one key thing is that we don't know it's very rare. We approach a board meeting just like we do anything, we craft the experience about how we think it should be and how we think it's going to be useful.

It needs to spark, joy, and delight in people and just pure excitement. It can't just be like, 'Oh, yeah, this is a useful tool for me.' It needs to light up their eyes. They need to be like, 'How do I sign up for this thing tomorrow? How do I get it? How do I pay for it?' And they need to want to talk to other people about it.

You can't just SEO the hell out of something that is a terrible experience. So tying that experience at the end of the SEO journey is just as important as the technicalities of SEO itself.

We don't really have managers, but everyone at Canva has a coach. They're constantly working with you to look at your skills, but also when it might be time to move on to the next level.

I have seen product managers at other companies who are very independent of teams and that seems very weird to me. For us, product managers are really connected.