Building One: How Cameron Adams Built Canva

0:00Tomer 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. Thank you, Alex. It's great to be here. Great to have you, at least briefly, before we queue up your episode.

0:31So I just listened to building one and it's clear that it's a product for product managers and product leaders and anyone building something. So what are you hoping they get out of it? Yeah, it's really 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 got people across the company to come and listen to people who are building products and companies and learn from their experience. And I thought it would be amazing to take it outside. Right. And so just to cue up the interview that you're about to do with Cameron Adams, Cameron used to be on the team that built Google Wave.

1:14And 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. 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. 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 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 it, like a problem for it.

1:56And 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. Yes, myself included. 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 one big example of, you know, you kind of grow as a builder throughout your experience.

2:32And in some cases you build a multi-billion dollar company as a result. 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 harken back to an interesting era 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.

3:11And Cameron calls it a disruptive innovation. So I'm curious if you would agree with that. And how has generative AI changed 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? it's interesting when i think about genitive 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 is what is that for the human?

4:01I 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. 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?

4:37Probably 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. So am I going to be like, write me a LinkedIn post about my vacation plans? And next thing you know, there'll be 300 words written in the perfect LinkedIn format. Is that coming? You don't even have to ask. Like, ahead of you even thinking about it, it'll be written for you.

5:09But the idea is like... Wait, no, for real? 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. Exactly. So wait, you think people are going to fall in love with these things in our lifetime? i think this is going to be one of our biggest um uh supporting function for almost every element of our lives it's already is it's just in the background and it's going to be able to play a much more meaningful role uh in the forefront for us 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 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 is doing here is saying that if you have a podcast show like mine or like tomers a lot of the times you're just talking into a microphone or 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 show.

6:20So that's the idea of 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. Thank you, Alex. I've always been curious, always looking for patterns in society. How people navigate and find their way.

7:00We always need some level of conflict to initiate that dialogue. It's never a straight line. I'm Tom Erkoin, Chief Product Officer of LinkedIn. And this is Building One. 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. 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.

7:50Today, I'm interviewing Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer at Canva. Cameron has a compelling vision for how to build a 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, promoting their business, event invitations, animations, and much more.

8:38The seats 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. 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. In the five years he was there, that knacking compulsion eventually gave way to something else. I actually discovered what I wanted to do, and that was really create things. I had a knack for graphic design. That led to a stint on the college newspaper, followed by paying work as a part-time graphic designer halfway through his degree.

9:19Let's jump into the conversation. 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.

9:59And when I finished university, I just kept going with my graphic design slash web design clients 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 read a couple of books, got a bit of notoriety, started speaking at conferences like South by Southwest.

10:42And all of it ended up with me getting approached in 2007 to work at Google. 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.

11:28You 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? 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.

12:02And 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. And for a whole bunch of reasons, it didn't pick up.

12:41But my time at Google, I think, really started to form 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-Googlers 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 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.

13:34And 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. Would love to learn more about that. I heard you talk about how one of your biggest learnings on 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 voice over 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.

14:15And 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? Pretty similar. And I think that's the really interesting thing about 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 their end customer has shortened.

14:57And 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. 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.

15:38It 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. 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 can have endless debates about the differences between UX and UI but I think the the UX of Google way wasn't given enough thought or priority but the technology and the UI were so it's kind of a missing piece there 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, but also from a whole bunch of other stuff that was happening at the time, such as Google Plus, ill-fated.

16:45And 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. 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.

17:35But 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 managed to see it from the sidelines and it was really impressive to see the shift. 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.

18:20And 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 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 skill set 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?

19:00Oh, it's one of the hardest tasks of my life to describe what I do. 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.

19:45You can pretty much term that as innovation. But particularly for me as a co-founder, 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.

20:23So 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 and really tackle those projects that people either shy away from or they're not aware of and to 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. 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.

21:15When you think about principles for that, it sounds like the focus for you on 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? 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.

22:00That 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 building a product and an organization didn't get enough oxygen. So we really wanted to balance that. And that is as true today at Canberra 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.

22:44if 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 the product and for me it creates really healthy tensions because engineering needs stuff to happen design needs stuff that happened 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.

23:25The 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 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 organization tackles problems a lot through discussion.

24:13And 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 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?

24:48and discussion is furthered through that visual asset. 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 continuously 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? 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.

25:27We'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, or it could be a deck that you're needing to put together to convince some stakeholders. People need to learn those visual skills and then they need to figure out how to communicate those with the rest of the team.

26:15I 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 those constraints and figure out the right levers you're going to pull to actually make something happen. We're going to take a quick break but don't go anywhere.

26:54When we come back we're going to hear about the genesis of Canva and how Cameron leverages tension to build a better product. I think if you don't have conflict in your organization you're probably running a pretty bad organization. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now, imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee. Every swipe at the store or gas pump earns you instant rewards deposited straight to your account.

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28:09The Gemini credit card may not be used to make gambling-related purchases. What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the Global Editorial Director of Wired. And I'm hosting our new podcast series, The Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that. That eats the internet. That turns it all off.