Building One: How Cameron Adams Built Canva

Introducing Building One, a new show from LinkedIn chief product officer Tomer Cohen. Canva co-founder and chief product officer Cameron Adams is the first guest, and in this episode shares his story of how he built his career and eventually Canva. Ahead of this episode, Cohen introduces the show via a brief interview with Alex Kantrowitz. If you like the show, you can subscribe on your podcast app of choice. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Tomer Cohen is the chief product officer at LinkedIn, and he's launching a new podcast called Building One. And we're going to share the debut episode with you here today. But first, I have Tomer here with me to quickly tell you who he is and why he's launching this podcast, which is part of LinkedIn's Podcast Network. Big Technology, as you may know, is part of the network, which features independent shows like mine and in-house shows like Tomer's. And I'm so glad to see it expand. So Tomer, welcome.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Thank you, Alex. It's great to be here.

• 1:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great to have you, at least briefly, before we queue up your episodes. So I was just, I just listened to Building One, and it's clear that, you know, it's a product for, yeah, it's a product for product managers and product leaders and anyone building something. So what are you hoping they get out of it?

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really a product, a product for anybody who has a passion for building. That's kind of how I grew up. I just happened to have this job, which is kind of also my passion. I used to do this internally at LinkedIn, and it gathered people across the company to come and listen to people who are building products and companies and learn from their experience. And, um, and I thought it would be amazing to take it outside.

• 2:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so just to queue up the interview that you're about to do with Cameron Adams. Cameron used to be on the team that built Google Wave. And I think it's kind of interesting to see how failures play into some of the things that people do later in life. And Google Wave was this very public failure.

• 2:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  And clearly, that's not the end of the story for Cameron or the people that worked on it. So can you talk a little bit, I mean, we're going to spoil the episode a little bit, but talk a little bit about what you thought, hearing that from Cameron.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  I thought it was great. It was actually, I had a very similar experience in my past, not something as public as Google Wave, but you could see for his experience working at Google with some, some of the best technologies in the world, where the goal for them was to take a really unique technology and try to find a solution for, like a problem for it. And his way of thinking, his way of operating, and what he learned from the experience there is you start with a profound need, and then you walk backwards into what is it you have to build for that. So in the case of Canva, which is something I learned about probably in 2014, so like two years after they were founded, they really helped non-designers build amazing design.

• 3:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, myself included.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there was like a real need there, and they were able to build something pretty amazing in that experience. So I think that for me was a one big example of, you know, you kind of grow as a builder throughout your experience, and in some cases, you build a multi-billion dollar company as a result.

• 3:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And I mean, Google Wave, for those who don't remember, it was just this mess of a product. It was like this common share space where people could like drop videos and photos and start typing to each other. And it did definitely hearken back to an interesting era in, in the tech world where things like that just came out all the time and obviously didn't do well. We're also in another interesting era right now, right? This is the era of generative AI, and that's one of the things that I like about Canva, where you could just basically type in on their website, like I want to create this type of invitation or flyer, and it will design it for you. And Cameron calls it a disruptive innovation. So I'm curious if you would agree with that, and how has generative AI changed

• 4:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  what people building products can do, or even like the standard way of building products? Does it cause any of that, or of those mechanisms to change from the way that you used to do things?

• 4:37Speaker 01

  It's interesting when I think about generative AI. I was asked recently, is it creative? Is AI creative? Can it have a creative mind? And I think this is where you can go into a philosophical conversation about is this like a, you know, a glorified auto-speller or auto-spelling kind of thing? Or is it something which is truly starts to create new innovation? I think that conversation for me is less important than what is it for the human? I think human beings can be a lot more creative. And I think that's what you're seeing with Canva, with products like Adobe and Designer for Microsoft. Like it could really elevate your creativity level. And that's ultimately what I care most about.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  I think when it comes to AI specifically with products, I think what we're seeing right now is more of the supporting innovation, the kind of the amplifying of your ability throughout it. We really start to see disruptive innovation when you start to think about AI like you think about mobile today. Where if I ask you two decades ago, are you working with your phone? Probably you weren't working with your phone. But now everybody has their phone on them. It's hard to imagine our lives without the phone connected to them. And that's going to be the disruption happening with AI. And that's going to come either very shortly or within a couple of years. And that's going to be the disruptive innovation we're going to see from that.

• 5:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  So am I going to be like, write me a LinkedIn post about my vacation plans? The next thing you know, there'll be 300 words written in the perfect LinkedIn format. Is that coming?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  You don't even have to ask, like ahead of you even thinking about it, it'll be written for you. But the idea is like.

• 6:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, no, for real?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Could be. I don't see a reason why not. Like, I think we can all go back and watch the movie Her and rethink what's possible.

• 6:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. So wait, you think people are going to fall in love with these things in our lifetime?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  I think this is going to be one of our biggest

• 6:36Speaker 01

  supporting function for almost every element of our lives. It already is, it's just in the background and it's going to be able to play a much more meaningful role in the forefront for us.

• 6:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. Well, it was kind of a trick question because people already are falling in love with them with bots like Replica and things like that. So, look, folks, the LinkedIn Podcast Network, as you know, you probably heard some of the promos. It's a great idea. Basically, I think what LinkedIn is doing here is saying that if you have a podcast show like mine or like Tomer's, a lot of the times you're just talking into a microphone, talking to a guest, and there isn't a lot of involvement with the audience. And the idea is that the audience can get involved with me, with Tomer, on our LinkedIn pages, that both strengthens our engagement with you and also helps build the shows. And then LinkedIn also sells the ads on the shows. So that's the idea of

• 7:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  the network. There's no editorial oversight that LinkedIn has for my show, but they also have their shows coming out, shows like Tomer's, shows like Dan Roth's. And I think you're going to like this one. So, Tomer, thanks again for letting us drop it on the feed. Folks, I do think that you might enjoy this show, especially if you're into product. So, let's cue it up and play this interview that Tomer does with Cameron Adams. Again, the show is called Building One. It's coming up right now.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Thank you, Alex.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  I've always been curious. Always looking for patterns in society. How people navigate and find their way. You always need some level of conflict to initiate that dialogue. It's never a straight line.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  I'm Tomer Coyne, Chief Product Officer of LinkedIn, and this is Building One.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  We saw this immensely complex area of design that was not very accessible to people. In fact, it was only accessible to pretty much 1% of the world.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  That's Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva. He's talking with me about how a gap in the market inspired him to start Canva and their quest to make visual design more accessible to everyone. We're going to get into that and so much more, so stay with me.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Today, I'm interviewing Cameron Adams, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva. Cameron has a compelling vision for how to build the product, a vision that is informed by company culture and design accessibility. As you'll hear, his time at Google also influenced how he didn't want to build, and why it is good to foster some healthy conflict within your team. Canva launched in 2013 as an app focusing on graphic design for social media, but then it quickly blossomed into a product democratizing design by putting visual communication within reach for over 170 million people. And beyond social media, professionals and amateurs use it for presentations,

• 9:36Speaker 01

  promoting their business, event invitations, animations, and much more. The seeds for Canva in some way go all the way back to Cameron's college days. Early on, he pursued a degree in law and computer science.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  But that was mostly because I got some decent marks and I kind of felt compelled to study something at university that required those marks.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  In the five years he was there, that nagging compulsion eventually gave way to something else.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  I actually discovered what I wanted to do, and that was really create things. I had a knack for graphic design.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  That led to a stint on the college newspaper, followed by paying work as a part-time graphic designer halfway through his degree.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Let's jump into the conversation.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And that's when I really discovered my love for using design to communicate things and building useful things for other people. So here in Australia, we didn't go through as big of a dot-com boom and crash as you might have in the United States. And just after 2000, the internet really started coming to the fore in Australia. And I kind of coupled it with my graphic design interest. So the computer science aspect of my degree was really useful because that led into coding websites and being able to take static graphic designs and turn them into something that people could access digitally. And when I finished university, I just kept going with my graphic design slash web design clients

• 11:09Speaker 02

  that I'd established over time and that turned into a bit of a design agency down in Melbourne. And I ran that for about six years and it was mostly me. And I also wrote a lot on my blog. So the internet and web design and web coding was pretty formative at that time. Like there was lots of stuff being discovered. You could invent new things in JavaScript every single day. And it was really exciting for me and I tended to write about that. Out of that, I wrote a couple of books, got a bit of notoriety, started speaking at conferences like South by Southwest. And all of it ended up with me getting approached in 2007 to work at Google.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  I'd applied to Google a few times before as just purely a software engineer. I was definitely not good enough at code to actually get any of those jobs. So I don't think I ever got past the first round. But this particular job at Google was a design role. And design at Google back then was still quite formative and immature. So I kind of came in the back door through a recommendation from someone who was already working there, which meant that I skipped all the job interviews and didn't have to go through the first round. And ended up on a project there called Google Wave, which was really secretive at the time.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  You know, for our listeners who do not know much about Google Wave, it was quite a notable moment in Google's history. It was groundbreaking in its attempt to redefine how we work together by allowing for real-time collaboration. It was designed to merge features such as email, instant messaging, and forums, and wikis, and even social networks into one product. So it was really meant to be huge. So I'm really curious, Cameron, what was your experience with it?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  It was run entirely out of Sydney. All the rooms that everyone was working in were blacked out so that people couldn't peer in and see what was going on. And to get on the team, you had to sign NDAs and a whole bunch of stuff. And it was actually a project run by the founders of Google Maps. And they'd always wanted to revolutionize communications. And they had some really intriguing ideas about that. So they started building a prototype, built up momentum for it internally in Google, and managed to get funding. I was one of the first five people to work on that. And the team grew pretty rapidly in the space of a year to about 60 people, mostly engineers, working on this incredibly ambitious product that was technically groundbreaking.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  And for a whole bunch of reasons, it didn't pick up. But by the time at Google, I think, really started to form my ideas around product and product management. Because prior to that, I had thought a lot about it from a design perspective. And I think product management was still very nascent at the time as well. And even the notion of product design was very early stages. And I took that from Google into a startup that I started right after I left, which was called Fluid. And that was with a couple of ex-Googleers as well. And we ran that for about a year. It was an email product. Yet again, collapsed in a heap. And it was through that process that I met my co-founders on my current project, Canva, Melanie and Cliff.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  We decided to join together. And I think all of us have been through lots of learning and evolution over the last 11 years now at Canva, including on the product management side. And I think we've Really strongly identified how to build product at Canva and how to empower the 150 product managers now that we have here.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Would love to learn more about that. I heard you talk about how one of your biggest learnings from Google Wave was not to focus as much on the technology, but to really start from the end user. And I had a similar experience. I actually started my career as an engineer and one of the experiences I had was working at an incredible technology company, building voiceover IP technology. I was focused a lot less on what the customer actually needed. The pride was in the technology itself, but not in the product. And I think that was in retrospect, one of our biggest mistakes. So when I moved to the Valley, it was incredible to hear about that kind of product first mentality. Was that similar for you in Google Wave or was it somewhat different?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Pretty similar. And I think that's the really interesting thing about our product is it's highly contextual. So you can point to a bunch of success stories where technology really did lead the way and where someone didn't necessarily think about the product and they just invented something amazing and managed to roll it out. But I think that that has increasingly become rarer as the interface between organizations and the end customer has shortened. And I think nowadays, the product experience is a huge part of the advantage that you can have in building any successful business. And it's become more of a necessity over the last couple of decades.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  I'm a strong believer that the founders of a company pretty much lay the foundations for what the culture is going to be and how thinking happens and how decisions are made. And each organization that you look at has different founders that come with different backgrounds and different quirks. And those kind of amplify and multiply as the company grows and form what its culture is. So Google's culture was a very strong engineering culture. It still is a very strong engineering culture. And that's what they focused on in Google Wave. It was about what can we build? What can the technology let us do? What are browsers capable of now? Not so much about the design, not so much about the product experience.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So that's what I was grappling with on that project. I was kind of brought in to pretty things up. So like, take this piece of technology and provide a UI that would allow people to interface with that technology, which is valuable, but it doesn't quite go deep enough into how the actual product is experienced. You know, endless debates about the differences between UX and UI. But I think the UX of Google Wave wasn't given enough thought or priority, but the technology and the UI were. So it's kind of a missing piece there. And that was one of the big lessons that I took from it. And I think it was also one of the big lessons that Google learnt, partly from Google Wave,

• 17:41Speaker 02

  but also from a whole bunch of other stuff that was happening at the time, such as Google Plus, ill-fated. And right when I left Google, which was about 2011, they actually kicked off this seminal project called Project Kennedy. And it was one of the first projects that Larry Page kicked off when he became CEO. And he recognized the need for Google to become a design company and empowered a really small team within Google to totally revamp Google's design, like the way the products looked, the way they worked, and then instill that culturally throughout all of Google.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  That then laid the groundwork for Material Design, which is the entire Android design language. And I think today you can see that Google is actually a really strong design company as well as a really strong engineering company. But it was a shift that they really consciously had to make, and it took a lot of work. I wasn't there for that, but I could manage to see it from the sidelines, and it was really impressive to see the shift.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  It's hard to overstate how important it is to have those cultural shifts come top down. I would claim it's impossible to make those shifts really happen in a profound way unless it's coming all the way from the founder, the CEO, the executive team. I clearly remember when we were doing our own shifts at LinkedIn in 2011, 2012, from a desktop-first company into a mobile-first company. And myself, as a relatively junior product person in the organization, was tasked to co-lead that change. And we had a great plan, we had conviction, people were rallying behind it. But you needed to have the CEO and the executive team to really help shift people's roadmaps

• 19:34Speaker 01

  and literally stop the train and focus on mobile. And in that level, you need to get top-down support. And that was one of our biggest takeaways back in those days. Cameron, your background and skillset is quite unique. You have this intersection of both having a strong technological experience as well as design experience, which includes product experience within it. When you think of your role at Canva, how do you describe your current job as the Chief Product Officer for the company?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Oh, it's one of the hardest tasks of my life to describe what I do.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Being Chief Product Officer as a co-founder is probably quite different to being just a cut-and-dried Chief Product Officer. I think generally, as Chief Product Officer, you're obviously responsible for the product. So what the quality of the product is, what features are going, what the roadmap is, what the strategy is, and also how your product organization functions. So obviously, that would be product managers, but it could encompass engineering or design, depending upon the structure of your organization. So my role at Canva is I spend a lot of time thinking about the future and where we should be. You can pretty much term that as innovation. But particularly for me as a co-founder,

• 20:54Speaker 02

  I view it as my job to make things happen that wouldn't otherwise. We've got over 3,500 people working at Canva. There's a lot of product teams who are focusing on different areas and going really deep on things like Print or social media or video or presentations. And they're doing an incredible amount of research and iteration and envisioning of their parts of the product. So they're all running ahead really fast. They have responsibility and ownership for those areas. And often they're not looking outside of those areas. So my role as co-founder and a leader at the company is to look outside what we're doing. Think of the connections that you can make across the company between different parts of the product.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  And really tackle those projects that people either shy away from or they're not aware of. And really make sure that that happens. So at a really meta level, it is responsibility for the company and the strategy and the product. And looking far enough ahead that we can continue to innovate, continue to grow. And continue to survive as more and more products come onto the market.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Looking at the path that Canva has done over the years from graphic design for social media to where you are today. It's pretty remarkable the way you've led that innovation through. When you think about principles for that, it sounds like the focus for you and innovation. Given you led products at several companies at many stages, from the Googles to the startups. What do you think makes building at Canva unique?

• 22:34Speaker 02

  I think there's a couple of things that make Canva unique. The culture of the company and the way that we came together as founders and the principles and intuitive understanding of how we wanted to build an organization and product. Have rippled over the last 11 years and they're inherently unique to Canva. From that, the key principle is a real balance between design, product and technology engineering. That was a very conscious thing on my part, as well as I think on Mel and Cliff's part from Google, where I think the engineering leg of the stool. Held too much dominance, held too much sway and meant that the other aspects of

• 23:19Speaker 02

  building a product and an organisation didn't get enough oxygen. So we really wanted to balance that. And that is as true today at Canva as it was 11 years ago. We have a really strong model of triad leadership where we have a product leader, we have an engineering leader, we have a design leader, and they came together on all product projects to figure out what to build, how to build, how to scope it. If something needs to ship in six months, there's like a negotiation between what's possible, what we actually want our customers to receive, and it's a constant dialogue between those three aspects of building a product. And for

• 24:03Speaker 02

  me, it creates really healthy tensions because engineering needs stuff to happen, design needs stuff to happen, product needs stuff to happen. And to make it really work and to ultimately ship something on time with enough value to our customers, they each need to give up things to achieve what they want. So that is one really strong part of Canva's product building that I think is very unique. The other kind of derives, I think, from our problem domain. So we're working with visual communication. Canva has been all about design and visual communication for all of its life. And I think that affects the way that you think about and approach problems. I have this

• 24:48Speaker 02

  theory that product management and building products at different companies is shaped by the actual product that you're building. I was chatting to a product leader at Spotify, and obviously Spotify is a very auditory company. They're all about music, they're all about how you hear things. And he was saying that their product organisation tackles problems a lot through discussion. And I think that is because people are attracted to Spotify and work there because they're auditory individuals. Here at Canva, we are all about visual communication and those are the types of problems we're tackling. How to communicate through a deck, how to communicate through a t-shirt that you're

• 25:33Speaker 02

  wearing, a business card that you want to make, or a video that you want to create. And naturally, that attracts very visual thinkers. And that is how we communicate internally. So, most product decisions at Canva are made through a visual lens. How does something look? Can we mock this up? Can we build a prototype for it? And discussion is furthered through that visual asset.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  One can hear you and assume that the people you're hiring have that design mindset and all functions, or you teach them this way. So if you're an engineering leader, your goal is to continue to come with demos and demonstrate all the time. If you're a product manager, your goal is to really show your roadmap visually. So then it's basically a mindset that every function has. Is that the way to think about it?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, you've nailed it. Having seen a lot of people come from other companies, they do come with certain modes of operation. So we have had people come from Amazon, we've had people come from Google, we've had people come from Spotify. And they do bring their thinking and their previous ways of working. And sometimes there is a bit of a clash. There is a bit of a learning curve for people who mightn't be used to thinking very visually when they land here to figure that out. And figure out how to firstly create those visuals, whether it's like an actual mock-up or it could be a very, you know, visual Gantt chart for how you're describing the roadmap,

• 27:06Speaker 02

  or it could be a deck that you're needing to put together to convince stakeholders. People need to learn those usual skills and then they need to figure out how to communicate those with the rest of the team. I think any product manager landing anywhere really needs to understand the levers that they're going to pull within that organization with the particular people that they're working with in order to be an effective product leader. It's something you can't escape because product is so contextual to where you are. It is about the culture, it's about the product that you're building, it's about the team that you have around you and you really need to be flexible to work within

• 27:47Speaker 02

  those constraints and figure out the right levers you're going to pull to actually make something happen.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  We're going to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, we're going to hear about the genesis of Canva and how Cameron leverages tension to build a better product.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  I think if you don't have conflict in your organization, you're probably running a pretty bad organization.

• 28:12Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 30:14Speaker 01

  All right, we're back. I'm speaking with Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of Canva, a juggernaut app in the design space. You know, one other area which I thought was really unique around the Canva vision was the idea of democratizing design. As part of the responsibility of building the product, that's really something that everybody should own in the process. And I can tell you, at LinkedIn, we talk a lot about our vision being economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. And we emphasize the every member a lot because you can get lost with really catering to the core audiences you're serving today. So I really appreciated hearing Canva talking about, it's not just about everybody who has like an expensive, fast computer who can use Canva.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Our goal is to make sure that everybody can be empowered with design. I think it's such an important goal. Now, it can be hard to bring it to practice, right? What decisions do you make proactively to make sure they build in that spirit you want, which is so that everybody can use Canva?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the genesis of Canva was in complexity. We saw this immensely complex area of design that was not very accessible to people. In fact, it was only accessible to pretty much 1% of the world. And we knew through our own experiences, so me, through my background in being a professional designer and using those skills to help people, and Mel, through her experience, not as a professional designer, but helping people come to grips with design tools, uh, which were incredibly complicated. She was a tutor and she saw how much people struggled with

• 31:55Speaker 02

  them, but also how much was unlocked when they finally did come to grips with them and become masterful in it. So cutting that complexity of not taking years to learn a tool and not needing to spend thousands of dollars to buy it or learn it, uh, and having access to all the different elements that come together in a design was the goal of Canva. And we truly believe that putting design in the hands of people who haven't been able to access it before is an amazingly empowering act. So given that that is the genesis of Canva, and that has been our mission since day one, bringing the power

• 32:38Speaker 02

  of design to as many people as we can in the world is a constant call to arms within the organization. And that can take many different forms. It can mean that Canva can't just be in English, which is something that we really realized in 2016. We're now in over a hundred different languages. Canva's available in 190 countries, uh, and non-English speaking markets make up over 50% of our customer base. So that's one aspect of empowering the world to design and access. Another is devices. So not every person in the world has a 37-inch MacBook Pro with 15 terabytes of memory. Sometimes they just get a really crappy Android phone because that's all they can afford.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  The vast majority of the world, yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. And often it's those people who can get the most value out of design, like they can use it to start their first business or find that job that they've really been aching for, or get more donations to their nonprofit organization. So thinking about... Every device that you can have, from tiny Android phone to a big desktop computer, and how camera is going to work on that is vitally important. And it's something we have instilled in our culture, in the way that we think about product management constantly over the last 11 years. Sometimes you forget about it, as you mentioned, but we constantly have initiatives that get people to focus on that.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  And Cameron, how do you resolve conflicts when they arise or they don't arise?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  I think if you don't have conflict in your organization, you're probably running a pretty bad organization. You always need some level of conflict to initiate that dialogue and to make sure that everyone is thinking and being proactive and bringing new things to the table. Healthy debate, healthy tension is crucial to producing a great product because you need engineering to be pushing ahead with technology and pushing the boundaries of that. You need design to be thinking about the experience and what the most beautiful experience could possibly be. And you need product to be thinking about business objectives,

• 34:54Speaker 02

  longer term roadmaps and how it's all going to tie together. And if those three aren't pulling in their own direction, you end up in that Google situation where engineering is rolling the roost. And I think fostering an environment where you can have differences of opinion and you figure out a way to resolve those is incredibly healthy. And to me, really the only way of building product. I think the essential part of it is building trust and safety. Because if you're in a team or you're in that triad and each of those leaders doesn't trust one another, then they're not going to bring the best ideas. They're not going to want to have those debates.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  They're not going to share. They're not going to objectively obsess the other person's idea. And when you enter that unsafe, untrusted zone, that's really when it hampers your growth and development in a product sense.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  This resonates tremendously and I really appreciate both the invitation for people to bring that healthy debates in, but at the same time, thinking through the nuances of how to solve it. One thing for us that we've done a couple of years ago, we decided that accessibility would be a core part of how we build. And LinkedIn can sometimes be a complex product. We wanted to make sure everybody can use it. And one thing we've done was to make sure as a principle, you can experiment, you know, in a local area with a local audience with a specific target. And you don't have to experiment with accessibility, but before you launch it, before you basically said, I'm moving on to the next thing, you have to make sure it's accessible.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  That was one way that we brought to fall the idea that every member should participate in the value we create at LinkedIn.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a fantastic initiative. Pushing forward accessibility is a really great way to grow your product as well, because I think working on accessibility also makes your product better for every one of your users, regardless of whether they think of themselves as someone who can benefit from accessibility. So it's an amazing philosophy to have.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. We've seen this so many times. We build for accessibility and yet everybody benefits in a pretty remarkable way.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  I love that. It's hard to talk about the space of Canva without talking about the future, especially in light of the kind of remarkable AI transformations we're seeing right now, both from LLMs all the way to graphics. And when you think about what your role is a lot about thinking about the future, both as a co-founder and CPO, but what do you think will change in the next several years with AI when it comes to Canva space? And, you know, on the same note, what do you think will not change?

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting. I still haven't figured out whether AI is a disruptive innovation or a sustaining innovation. So I don't know whether you've read Innovator's Dilemma and how disruptors work, et cetera.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  I think AI is probably a disruptive innovation to information.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Systems like Google, so how search engines work is probably drastically going to change based off the back of AI. But I think for a lot of industries, it could just be a sustaining innovation where it becomes this underlying technology that that powers everything. And it's a step that pretty much every company is going to take, but not necessarily have a winner out of it from adopting it. For us, artificial intelligence represents a massive opportunity to really shorten the gap from having an idea to actually executing upon it. Design is essentially about a better way of communicating, a better way of making something happen.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  We've seen people use that in Canva as great starts for their designs, for their documents, for their decks. They can use AI to really quickly get eighty percent of the way there and then refine it. Then there's all those different stops along the way when you actually are designing. So a lot of people don't want that one shot. They want to bring their own content, they want to bring their own ideas, they want to work with them and figure them out. And we see a lot of that on our design platform as well. People will bring a photo that they need to put into a social post, and there's so many touchpoints along there where AI can help. They don't have to be these big grand things, they can be very small and hidden things, or just little interactions with an AI assistant.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  So that might be highlighting a block of text and saying, make this shorter. It might be having an image and saying, I need this to be slightly bigger. It could be taking your Instagram post and figuring out the right ratio for when it goes onto LinkedIn. There's so many little touchpoints along that design process where AI can help. And we're really working on both the macro and the micro.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  And I really appreciate the fact that you guys are seeing it as accelerating in a way your vision.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think we'll end up in this place where AI just does everything for you. You still need to think about the product experience that people are going to have, because often people don't know what they want. I'm sure you've tried it. It's actually exceptionally hard to write. A great prompt unless you deeply know what you want.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Extremely hard.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Extremely hard.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  A lot of people don't approach something with that knowledge. So you need to help them through it. You need to guide them to the place where they end up with something useful to them. And that is still an essential part of building a product and a product experience and connecting with the problems that your customers have and helping them solve it. Maybe when they don't even know they have that problem. So I think that will not change. And the presence of AI will not abdicate our responsibility for creating great products.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Cameron, this has been a great conversation. I personally feel like I've learned a lot from you. Looking back, a couple of things stood out to me. One, Google Wave was a good reminder that it's not enough for technology to be great. You really have to think backwards from the user experience. You're probably not going to get user adoption if you just focus on the technology. Second thing is about the importance of top-down guidance when it comes to big cultural shifts within the company. Cameron talked about the design change of Google, and I could not emphasize that more. Next is Cameron had this theory that product management and building products of different companies is shaped by the actual product you're building. For Canva, which is very visually oriented, it's about presentations and decks.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  And for Spotify, which is all about audio, it's really discussion focused. Next, it's really important to look for imbalances in influencing your companies. Sometimes, different parts of your company, whether it's engineering, design, or product management, can have imbalanced influence of what you build. And you'll only catch those shortcomings when it's already too late. And lastly, professional design products have been around for a long time. What made Canva really special, what helped it grow really fast, is that they focused on making design tools accessible to the non-professionals. That was the key behind their success. I'm Tomer Coyne. Thank you for listening. I learned a lot from this conversation, and I hope you did as well.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  If you want to hear more, tune in next week for some fun, rapid-fire questions I did with Cameron.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Building One is a LinkedIn editorial production. Our host is Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer. This episode was produced by Max Miller and Lolita Briggs. It's engineered and mixed by Asaf Gadram. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Coop is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. Special thanks to Alicia Mann, Maya Pope-Chappell, Haley Saltzman, and Jenna Kaplan. If you know of a product leader we could all learn from, send us a line at [email protected]. And tune in next week for our rapid-fire bonus round with Cameron. We'll be back in two weeks with a new interview with Roblox CPO Manuel Bronstein.

• 43:19Speaker 04

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