Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably

Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva, discusses the company's scale and profitability, its coaching-based culture instead of traditional management, and the 'giving away your Lego' concept for scaling. The conversation also covers early product decisions, onboarding and SEO-driven growth, freemium and subscription strategy, internationalization, and Canva's approach to AI.

01Key learnings

• Cameron says Canva replaces traditional managers with specialty coaches, roughly 800 to 1,000 internal people who help colleagues build skills and recognize when to move up a level.
• Cameron argues that scaling requires 'giving away your Lego': hand off tasks you personally own, like writing every email, so you can focus on higher-leverage growth.
• Cameron advises founders to build something they are truly passionate about, since passion sustains them through the dark stretches that building a company requires.
• Cameron says an early product must spark joy and delight, not just be useful, because early users must be excited enough to spread it through word of mouth.
• Cameron describes using cheap, rapid user testing on early onboarding so people never face a blank page, starting with small wins like searching for a monkey to build confidence.
• Cameron explains that Canva's SEO strategy mapped user jobs to be done end to end, from search query through a template landing page to a satisfying finished design.
• Cameron recommends going international early, since localization and mobile-first experiences opened fast-growing markets like Brazil and Indonesia that changed the product itself.
• Cameron frames AI as a tool for democratizing design, combining in-house models on proprietary data, partnerships with leading AI providers, and a third-party app ecosystem.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.