The Ecosystem Growth Playbook That Works for Canva

How does this multiplier effect specifically manifest when nurturing and growing a platform ecosystem? How should strategic product marketing work with partners and developers instead of just highlighting product features?

Absolutely. I love that question because it really goes to the heart of what a great ecosystem can do for a company. At Canva, one of the things that we did early when I joined was come up with our own messaging framework for what the ecosystem could do, both internally for Canva as well as externally for our business. We started internally because — and I've seen this before at Salesforce and even at Box — where the platform play was not the main thing, even though you could argue now that it totally is. How do you make that solution more extensible and integrated with everything else a company or team may use in their organization? Before, CRM was a monolith, content management was a monolith, but now all these solutions need to work in concert and work together.

With ecosystem, our opportunity was to really think about what the messaging would be internally. And the first word that really came to mind after doing a couple of workshops with our team was that ecosystem is a multiplier. Because it's a multiplier for the business — it helps engender brand new innovations from third party innovators like developers and technology partners. It's also a multiplier for the business once our users see more value coming out of the myriad of apps we have in the ecosystem. I think we're probably clocking close to 700 apps now, from zero about almost two years ago.

The innovation coming out of the ecosystem is just insane. Canva may have a platform to showcase that functionality, but it's not something we had on our roadmap or had this spark of an idea for — like what a marketer really needs is easy access to logos. As a product marketer, you need company logos. Instead of going to Google and doing an image search and doing a five-step process to get an SVG version of a logo of a random company, what if you just had an app for that within Canva? That's an app called BrandFetch, which is maybe not the sexiest app we have, but so damn useful as a marketer.

Incredible. I mean I don't know how many times we'll sit there and we'll be like, we won this new client, let's get its logo up there, and we can't find it on the webpage. I do a search and I try to find the transparent version. So now I could just take it and say, you know, I'm sure there's some agent — somebody will create an agent that literally says grab logo, put it in SVG, drop it here, make it transparent. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm smiling because I can't talk about that yet, but that's certainly something we've been thinking about. But you're absolutely right, Rajiv. I think if we just think about looking externally, where we've seen so much success in working with partners and developers is that we're in the age of agentic AI — where all this innovation is coming so fast and so hard. As an innovator, as a developer, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? How do you pierce the signal through noise ratio? To be front and center in front of the users that you want.

And I think where we've seen a lot of success, thankfully, as Canva — with this apps marketplace — we're bar none one of the best distribution mechanisms for these innovators to get discovered. We have close to 700 apps now and your app is just a search term away from being found by 240 million active users. We've seen a lot of great success stories — we have this guy, Kai, who lives in Singapore, a serial Canva app builder, probably working on his fifth or sixth app now. He has an app called Image Upscaler, which just overnight shot up and became one of the most used apps we have.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin had this analogy at the early days of Google being like you have a great product when it's a "toothbrush product" — something that you use at least twice a day. The American Dental Association recommends that for sure. But for Image Upscaler, think about the use case: you may have a low res image that you're trying to add to a design, and what Image Upscaler does is use AI to fill in the gaps and upscale that image.

How do you segment and collect actionable, qualitative consumer insights that inform your ecosystem strategy? How do you ensure that the voice of the developer or partner for a niche, complex use case doesn't get lost amid broader, high volume user feedback? How do you foster and grow that community?

If I start with the image upscaler example — that's the power of having an open ecosystem. There was this guy, Kim Lane, who wrote one of the first early books on APIs. He's a famous evangelist in the API field, and one of his axioms was that done right, APIs is like self-serve business development. Everything we put out there as a company — and I've seen this at Box and MuleSoft — if you do it right, your APIs should be accessible enough where it's easy enough for anybody, by dint of great documentation and tutorials, to get started with them.

And then it just unlocks the creativity of people for things that you haven't even thought about. If you build things as APIs.

Yeah, that's the first leg of it. Let's make our tools easy enough to enable developers, to enable our users to design. And I think we've seen some success stories from the grassroots level. The other piece is — Canva does a lot of research around what we call "closing customer loops." You might've seen Canva Create back in April. You know the whole theme of that conference — it's kind of like our own Dreamforce. For those who know enterprise software and Salesforce's annual hoopla, Canva Create is like our annual customer conference, and the theme we had this year was really around saying: we are so grateful for all our customers. Here are some of the wishes that you had. And obviously they were anchored in some key things we were building, but we're saying like, hey, the reason we really wanted to build this was for you. We're listening to what you want.

A lot of research done around what are the customer loops we can close. When I first came on board, it was very clear that out of all those customer loops we wanted to close, there's only so many that Canva can build. So we try to share with our partners — especially the ones we keep close, the ones we tap to use new frameworks early — we'll give them a sense of what we're looking for people to build, the jobs to be done that Canva by itself is not going to be able to do.

So one of the things you do to make sure you don't compete with the folks in your ecosystem is give them — Nvidia is known for this, where they said this is our space and this is not our space. We'll build the chip, we'll build CUDA, and then you can build the rest.

Yeah, as much as we can, we try to carve out that white space for developers and give them that guidance. Now there are inevitably sometimes where something is so core that we have to bake it into our product because it's almost table stakes. But we still believe that a solution that's of value and integrated with us — if a customer is already a customer of that solution — who are we to get in the way of that? If the ISV, if the partner has built an integration and the customer's already a paid customer of that thing, we just want to meet our customers where they are. And I think that's at the core of what you're seeing in enterprise software for the last ten years — as much as you believe you have this moat and are the best in class, all these systems need to talk to each other now.

Going back to that first principle: let's make sure we can meet our customers where they are, and also provide the value that — all we care about is for you to go from point A to point B in terms of what you want to design and put out into the world. And we recognize there might be some features we don't have ourselves that are augmented by what our partners do. One of our biggest plays right now is to bring data from third-party services into Canva. It could be competitive intelligence, it could be sales data, marketing product metrics — but the reason people come to us is because we're that presentation layer, that visual communication layer at the heart of every business team and organization.

When we announced Canva Sheets, for example, you could basically use a spreadsheet form factor to inform and collect data from third-party sources and then create content as easily as almost copying a cell and dragging it over. My first career was in management consulting and I spent so much time in spreadsheets. When I saw that happen — the fact that you could generate content just based on columns of parameters and Canva would do the rest — my mind was blown. This gives the mental model of a spreadsheet into design workflows. That's such a great opportunity because spreadsheets can be very intimidating, and we're still working toward making Sheets a more actionable and friendly user interface. But the metadata around the content you have to create — here's my customer list, here are the formats and channels, here are the templates — in the old days you had to do all that manually.

For these upcoming frameworks, the whole commercial side of things — you've got to be very judicious in terms of reaching out to partners, and you can't have an ego there. It's not because you're bigger than this partner that they're going to build for you. Sometimes we spend time on small partners that we're making big bets on. And then sometimes we also knock at the doors of the Salesforces and HubSpots of the world, but typically they want to talk to us as well.

To me, a good platform rests on three pillars. One is the technology — you have to have the right technology that people want to build on. The second is you've got to help these developers and partners be successful, and that comes with usage and growth, but also with having a strong community where if you tap them on the shoulder and say "hey, I'd love for you to talk to me about the experiences you had building with Canva," they will drop everything and say "100%, tell me when and where."

Because you don't want to be in a spot where you get someone to do something, you reach out to them, they do all this work and then they get nothing. It has to feel like a win-win. What you're talking about is actually really hard. I've seen so many conversations with folks where everybody wants to partner, they have really great folks that enable the partnership, but then they get you trained up, you do a bunch of work and then they don't follow through. They don't enable you to be commercially successful with it.

Yeah, and it's very hard to figure out at first, what's the alchemy that's going to help you accomplish those goals. We tried so many things at Salesforce. We tried baskets of tchotchkes and candy to the sales floor, being like hey you know — I had this colleague who put a lot of time and effort into creating high calorie snacks with partner logos in them. A great idea, super sweet, the intent was there. But salespeople in general are pretty conscious of appearances and they're like, I don't want to have this calorie bomb before I go work out.

It goes back to what's in it for me. What's the value for me as a salesperson to even pay attention to this partner? How do we let people know that this is happening? And then how do we get people more invested — the minute you have a rock star AE who's well-respected by their peers saying "hey, this partner stuff works, you need to really think about it," how do we do that at scale?

I did this roadshow with our executive at the time, Ron Huddleston, who came from Oracle, just visionary. We called him "boy genius" internally because he looked really young. He came in with a very strong view that it had to be about the money — the incentives. And unfortunately he's passed away, but one of the things that he really helped set the course for was to really say: how do we meter and measure and showcase the value of this ecosystem by the numbers?

This is going to date us, but if you remember when Salesforce Chatter launched — social media within your CRM — circa 2010, 2011. Chatter was a thing internally. And we're like, hey, what do people follow on Chatter? They're not just following people, they're following accounts and opportunities. What if we could use Chatter as a mechanism to communicate that when a partner landed a deal in an AE's account — whether the AE was involved or not — if that deal landed, that AE would get compensated on it?

So that was the model I helped create with Ron — what that percentage compensation plan was. But the way we communicated it was something I worked on with our marketing ops team: twice a week we had a list of all the deals that came in through partners, and then I manually went in and tagged that AE and said, "Hey, Cha-Ching!" — because it was like Chatter, right. And then I came up with a logo — I have this designer, Steven Geraldo, who created this very Salesforce-esque logo with Cha-Ching written on it. You got the visual. Then a really pithy sentence: "Hey, because Job Science sold 40 seats, you just got paid." Then click here for more details. And I created a two-slide deck that could be previewed in the Salesforce Chatter format. This is early social media marketing for an internal social media platform.

It's kind of the original emoji.

Yeah, it kind of was. And then what I did is at the very early days I tagged Ron and then I tagged our other executive, Mike Rosenbaum, who was our head of platform at the time. And I kid you not, within a week and a half, they both asked me — Benioff, within five days, Mark Benioff, our CEO, was like "What is this? Who did this? Is this real? Are people really getting paid?"

Because once a respected AE — someone being followed by all the people who look up to them — saw that they could make money with partners, what I love about the story is that we turned a reporting requirement into a viral effect company-wide. Within a week and a half, everybody knew they could make money with partners. Our partners were ecstatic because all of a sudden this AE that they'd never talked to was calling them being like "How do I get my Cha-Ching?"

Cha-Ching actually became a verb at Salesforce. Overnight, we had this marketing ops guy, Shea Casey — very taciturn, typical marketing ops person — who would just crank through the numbers and give me the data I'd put in the Cha-Ching feed. But overnight, people would buy him drinks and send him stuff, being like "Shay, give me the Cha-Ching."

It's still early days on the monetization front at Canva. But where we're already seeing traction — and without going into too much detail — is the fact that a lot of our larger enterprise deals now are coming in because APIs are a fundamental selling point. The fact that we can integrate with either a built-in solution or a set of integrations that the customer wants — helping them build a custom application using APIs that takes a five-step workflow and turns it into a button they can disseminate to their teams.

One big use case, and we've documented this publicly, is real estate. Think about any use case where there's a high frequency, high velocity need for content assets. In real estate it's a flyer — you have a property, you have a listing.

Yeah, it comes right out of your Matterport.

Exactly, and that's honestly something I would have loved to have at Matterport and WeWork. But what I'm going with is that we've knocked out and gotten deals at some of the biggest commercial real estate companies out there, because they're saying: with this integration, we know we work in a very specific way, but Canva is interoperable enough to talk to the systems we use, so we can create these workflows and help our team self-serve to generate assets. The creation of hyper-personalized content at scale is where it can enable any real estate agent at, like, Engel and Völkers to say, "I have these five AAA properties and I want to start marketing them" — before, they had to work with an internal marketing department.

They have all this on-brand stuff, because we have the ability for companies to generate templates with brand kits that are always going to be on brand. But then it's only the information that changes — the pictures of the property, the price, the location, the little headshot of the real estate agent that you pop in on the bottom right. Those are all things where you can now do that at the touch of a button. That's when we know we're punching above our weight in terms of contributing to the success of sales. In the last three months, there's been a non-negotiable amount of sales-wide Slack posts of wins — it's almost like Cha-Ching, because it's not quite as guerrilla marketing as Cha-Ching was, but now you could imagine there are going to be regular references to what partners and the ecosystem are bringing to the table.

Over time, I've learned not to take things personally. Business is business. And especially as I've grown into the shoes of a leader, it's all about enabling the team. Your job as a leader in Hinduism is to lead your teams with clarity — give them the right direction, the clear direction on what the goals are, the stakes of everything that needs to be done. But then try to remove obstacles, because if you've done your job right as a leader, you either are surrounded by great people or you've recruited those people yourself. You want them to be successful. You've brought them in for a reason. And as my kids would say, let people cook.

The struggle is real in terms of advocating for resources, getting setting the tone, setting clarity. And I think sometimes you don't get that clarity because maybe that clarity does not exist — in terms of what our goals are, what our priorities are. How do you put your best foot forward to try and fight for that clarity or at least deal with ambiguity? What I've learned over time is: ambiguity is okay. Indecision is not. Your job as a leader is to help your team navigate that ambiguity, give them alternatives or ask them for alternatives, and with your knowledge of where the business is going, try to help arrive at a decision. But indecision is just fraught with peril. Indecision is the cancer. Your job as a leader is to help your team make a decision. You may not have all the right information, but if your team — no matter how experienced they are — sees that you're not making up your mind, or you're going back and forth and having endless meetings about meetings about a decision that needs to be made, you're going to lose trust.

I had this great executive at Google called Carol Carpenter, who was our head of product marketing at the time, and she rightfully brought this model: as a cross-functional leader — which product marketing is — you have to do your best to make sure that you're operating at a level where you can, because of the vantage points, enable trust. Create trust builders and minimize trust busters. Indecision is the ultimate trust buster. No matter how smart you are or how big your team is, if anybody starts getting an inkling that you do not know what you're doing — that's an automatic trust buster. How do you make sure that people are informed in real time of decisions that need to be made, the obstacles that might be in the way? Sometimes it may not be in your purview or ability to set that clarity, but at the very least advocate for it.

So Zen leader doesn't have to make all the decisions, but creates an environment to enable decision-making. And you've talked about the notion of psychological safety — how do you innovate unless you create that notion of psychological safety where you open yourself up to radical candor or constructive dissent?

I can think of many examples, but one in particular is from my time at WeWork. Things happened very quickly at WeWork — both the good things and the bad things. The talent density at that company was insane. When I left Google to go to WeWork, there was a form leaving Google where I had to pick a drop list of companies I was going to. At the very bottom, WeWork had actually made that list because at the time WeWork was hiring great talent left and right.

I joined into technical product marketing and then very quickly the leadership team determined that we needed to build out global product marketing — not just for technology but also for our physical properties and everything we did there. Overnight I ended up inheriting a bunch of folks who were product marketers in name but really brand managers for WeWork. There was this really talented woman, Julia, who had been at WeWork for a couple of years but was struggling because she just saw indecision everywhere. She had big ideas. She was not junior, she was experienced and motivated and I saw that in her. But some people said she might've been hard to work with, was not empowered to do things.

I had my first meeting with her. She was one of my directs and she told me what her desires were. She said, "Honestly, I want to do things because I want to have an impact and I want to get promoted." I was like, that's interesting. We just met, so that's not a conversation we can have today. But what we ended up doing, at what was called "AAA property marketing" — these were the big skyscrapers in New York where WeWork had all of a sudden eight, ten, twelve floors. They were super desirable but needed to move fast, and they were a big whale in our inventory. She availed herself of that because she had the right relationships. She made myself and our CMO look great because she just sunk her teeth into it and did not relent.

Within four or five months, our CMO did a marketing all-hands and recognized her in front of everybody, actually brought her up on stage and said: "This is the type of determination and great ideas. Great ideas can come from anywhere. Let's make sure that you all feel empowered to do the best work of your lives."

It was an early lesson in how do you help people get to the highest point of contribution. I would say it's on employees — and even myself, I report to someone — to tell somebody if you don't feel you're working towards your highest point of contribution. It's also your job and your manager's job to tell you, "These are the things I want to do, I believe I can do, and where you'll get the most bang out of your buck from me." But I do think it's a manager's responsibility to know when somebody is clearly punching below their weight — the lowest point of contribution. Especially younger employees might just do that because they're asked to and they're like, this is not a great job environment, I'll just do what I'm doing. But it sucks for both parties. I call it the highest vs. lowest point of contribution framework. And as a leader, the best thing you can do is figure out how to make sure more people are at the highest point of contribution more of the time.