Melanie Perkins
Melanie Perkins is CEO and co-founder of Canva, currently valued at over $42 billion, generating over $3 billion in annual revenue, with more than 240 million monthly active users and, incredibly, eight consecutive years of profitability. But the journey was far from smooth. Melanie was rejected by over 100 investors during her first fundraising round, her team spent two years without being able to ship a new feature during a technical rewrite, and the company pivoted early from a yearbook publishing platform to become the design powerhouse it is today. Through it all, she maintained what she calls “column B” thinking: building toward a dream future rather than just using the bricks around you.
AI & Technology Skills
AI should be embedded directly into existing user workflows to reduce friction between an idea and its execution.
"I think being able to integrate it into the product where it actually helps people to get their work done where it genuinely helps them to achieve their goals... AI is just kind of naturally a very cr..."
Use voice-to-text LLM tools to perform 'brain dumps' and summarize complex thoughts while away from the desk.
"Another really fun thing I do is an AI walk and it's when I just put my ear pods in and then I go for a walk and I just say everything on my mind and I use that to then kind of filter out my thoughts..."
Communication Skills
Meeting formats must be radically reinvented as a company scales to prevent them from becoming inefficient marathons.
"In the early days we'd stand up and everyone would present their goals... and then they started to become six hours long because we had so many people and so many teams. And so trying to find that rig..."
Engineering Skills
Major technical rewrites are 'dark tunnels' that can stall product shipping for years but are necessary for long-term scalability.
"We were doing a front-end rewrite and we thought it would take about six months... and then it took two years and it was two years of not shipping any product, two years of a product company not being..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
High-performance cultures need distinct, physical celebrations to mark the achievement of major goals and maintain morale.
"When we have these Crazy Big Goals, we also have couple them with really fun celebrations... we have smashed great plates and released doves and had a La Tomatina festival. All sorts of fun things jus..."
Leadership Skills
Scaling as a leader requires the constant 'giving away of hats' to specialists who can outperform the founder.
"And so you kind of wear a hundred hats and then you have to be able to give away those hats to other people that can then do that way better than yourself."
Product Management Skills
Effective product vision starts with a long-term, idealistic view of the future rather than current constraints.
"I really like to start by just imagining what is the future that you actually want Right now? I have a wall in my house in my office, which is my vision for what I'd like the world to look like in 205..."
Move ideas from 'chaos' to 'clarity' through incremental steps like writing, deck creation, and prototyping.
"So we have this concept of chaos to clarity. Every idea starts in the chaos side, and then you have to work all the way to the other side, which is clarity. That very first step at the far end of chao..."
Break a broad mission into literal pillars to guide long-term product expansion.
"So our mission, empower world design, empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device, and just take those things very literally."
Set 'Crazy Big Goals' that are ambitious enough to feel daunting, ensuring they are important enough to sustain long-term effort.
"The thing that I love about a crazy big goal is that you feel completely inadequate before it. You want to work really hard to will it into existence."
Use investor rejection to identify and visually articulate the specific market gap that competitors are missing.
"And then they'd say, 'You're the same as some of other company.' And I would say, 'Hey, now I've got a new slide in my pitch deck that shows all the players and the huge gap in the market that we beli..."
Focus on unsolved customer pain points rather than reacting to competitor features to find a unique market entry point.
"One of the most important things that we did was we didn't really worry about competitors at all. We actually just saw where is there a gap in the market that we can uniquely fill, and what can we sol..."
A product's value is only understood if the problem it solves is articulated clearly before the solution is presented.
"If people don't understand the problem then they can't understand or care about your solution. And so there was a lot of refinement on the way it was articulated."
'Column B' thinking involves starting with a perfect, improbable future and building the 'ladder' back to the present.
"So column A is the traditional just work from today's world. Column B is work from this dream reality and work backwards from how to achieve that."
Systematize the collection and categorization of high-volume user feedback to drive the product roadmap.
"We get more than a million requests from our community every year and we've got a whole incredible team that then tallies them, breaks them down, and then delivers them to all of our product teams and..."
Small-scale, frequent usability testing with random participants is highly representative of broader user friction.
"It's amazing to me how you can find 10 random people on the internet and they can give such astute feedback that then is so representative for such a large number of people."