Though I wouldn’t recommend working at Canva to anyone, one of the worst positions to be in is a Manager / Senior Manager. You are stuck between inexperienced, sycophantic leaders (namely the Head of Revenue and CMO) and the team you are expected to manage.
You are brought in after years of experience leading teams, likely at other brand name companies, taking a pay cut in exchange for equity that is promised to multiply on top of an already-unprecedented valuation. You do this because you hope (and are told) that you will have the opportunity to shape the future of this large and exciting company.
Instead, once you join, you quickly realise that your job is nothing more than executing imperatives decided on by the founders and passed down to you, regardless of whether or not you agree. Raising any disagreement is tantamount to putting a target on your own back. In this toxic positivity culture, you must get on board, or get out. Though everyone is expected to “consult” their stakeholders on every small thing, with superiors there is no openness to constructive debate. As a manager, this requires parking the critical thinking skills that you have built your career on. This is why, if you look at many of the experienced executives who join Canva, you’ll see that their tenures are brief.
Multiple times at Canva, I created a strategy for my team, was told it was wrong, then was redirected to run a new strategy based on what the founders wanted instead. When I did this and it didn’t work, nobody above me took any responsibility, and instead blamed it on my performance. Six months later, they decided they wanted to go with the strategy I had originally proposed, without any acknowledgement that the ideas had originally been mine. When the strategy worked, others received credit for it. This pattern repeated itself three separate times before I realised how badly I was being gaslighted.
Make no mistake - regardless of its size, this still is a founder-led company through and through. I fear for how Canva will fare with this command-and-control leadership once it IPOs. Cliff is the most vocal founder, and the most present internally. His management philosophy is a series of Sun Tzu quotes, used to justify blunt tactics like spending $1B to acquire an Adobe copycat product, then leaving his sales and product teams to pick up the pieces. Mel, a brilliant product mind, hides in an ivory tower and is barely visible to the company, working instead through a small cadre of trusted advisors. Cam, who seems to be the most grounded, is a “floating founder” and nobody knows exactly what he does.
Most of all, I feel for all of the smart and hard working people in the trenches at Canva. They endure repeated "strategy whiplash”, grueling expectations, and unreasonable deadlines, but are manipulated into not speaking up about any of it, for fear of blowback in their performance reviews. They are constantly told that challenges and issues are their fault, because nobody above them has the maturity to acknowledge the organisation’s shortcomings.
Canva is the worst company I have ever worked for. Don’t let the shiny brand name or the warm and fuzzy marketing fool you - this place will work you like a slave, erode your self esteem, then throw you out when your manager decides you’ve made them look bad.
Don’t believe the hype!
